I shall now attempt something in which I fully expect to fail. My pessimism is not unfounded. I’ve been trying to put across this case for 30 years, without ever seeing in my hearers’ eyes that glint of recognition that signals the successful communication of an idea.
Failure to convey an argument that I’m sure is important and right has been frustrating. But this is the fate of advocates of theories that challenge the very terms of a debate. The same difficulty is encountered by advocates for atheism; may well be encountered if the Hadron Collider in Geneva fails to verify the existence of the Higgs-Boson sub-atomic particle; and was among the reasons the miasma theory of the transmission of diseases lingered so stubbornly in the face of counterfactual evidence.
Advocacy struggles when central to its logic is the submission that something we take for granted, and around which a great web of related reasoning has been built, simply doesn’t exist.
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