Can Humor Conquer Willful Ignorance?
One of the most potent tactics in any war of words and wills is to make your opponent and/or his position laughable. The tactic is little used these days, in part because everybody takes himself so damned seriously, and few are willing to take the half-step down from seriousness themselves in order to drop the other guy all the way into the dunk tank. The tactic has made its way into the Intelligent Design wars in a couple of truly spectacular ways. First there was the estimable Onion piece on Intelligent Falling. Gravity is just a theory, say the IF proponents, and should be taught alongside the IF theory that things don’t “just fall.” A higher intelligence grabs things and forces them down to the ground. As the IF crowd puts it: “Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.'” I
