JohnStuartMill wrote:"I don't know" is actually very common in my experience. "I don't know why God segregated His own Church." "I don't know why Native American DNA looks Asiatic, but I believe that Native Americans are Near Eastern in origin anyway."
I think it's pretty difficult for them to say "I don't know". It's a last resort, if used at all. Just look at the pages and pages of justification they come up with in defense of these issues. Rather than saying they don't know why god segregated his church, they say it wasn't a dark skin/light skin issue, but one of lineage, as if that makes it better. They claim that the "time was right" for the change, not based on social pressures, but on god's timeline. They know why Native American DNA doesn't show a Near Eastern origin...they came up with the LGT and "others in the Book of Mormon" to reconcile it. They say these things with a type of scholarly authority. They use logic in defense of the illogical.
My original post, like the James song, was Born of Frustration.
silentkid wrote:I think it's pretty difficult for them to say "I don't know". It's a last resort, if used at all.
I have to agree with SK here. When ignorance is used as a defense, the apologist is likely to slip into the first person plural pronoun "we," which emphasizes the fact that the burden of ignorance is shared by all, not the result of a lapse on the part of the particular apologist being asked.
"We wish we knew..."
"We don't really have enough evidence..."
"No one really knows..."
And how do I know this? As a professor, I have found myself doing much the same thing. You see professors, like apologists, are expected to be the answers people.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”