I'm quite taken with this phrase I thought up a few days ago. It really captures a certain set of tactics I see everywhere on the Internet.
I would define Intellectual McCarthyism (IM) as the attempt by a speaker or writer to announce or imply that they have "won" a debate or argument by referencing arguments that have never been presented, and citing them as being as authoritative as if they had been. I'm not comparing the politics of the people who do this to Joe McCarthy, of course, just to his tactics and personality. He was a bully. And one of his most famous bully tactics was to wave a blank piece of paper and say, "I have in my hand a list of the 57 known communists working in the State Department (or White House or movie industry or whatever his target was that week)." There is a great deal of persuasion in such a statement, and a veritable shitload of assumption. The statement *assumes*, for example, that there ARE communists in the State Department. All that's worth quibbling about is how many of them there are. The persuasion is the attempt to get the respondent to argue about the number rather than the assumption itself. Add to this the fact that these lists never existed in the first place, and you've got a real whopper of a mind-control technique. So how is this different from pointing to a supposedly authoritative set of opinions about classical theism, citing them as the strongest argument for theism, and then refusing to even synopsize those opinions? IMO the attempt to do so is again a distraction, an attempt to get the respondent to react to the supposedly important difference in how one imagines God -- as a being or as "Being" -- as if *that* is the thing that must be argued, not the assumption that there is a God in the first place. It's not how you choose to describe God that is important. It's that you believe there is one. It's like trying to lure someone into a debate about whether licking a unicorn's horn tastes more like honey or cherry-vanilla. Arguments about what it tastes like are moot if there are no unicorns.
