The Pope, Pretending to Know

I'd like to take a moment to illustrate exactly how much pretense can be packed into suprisingly little theological utterance. I'll use a single sentence tweeted by Pope Francis earlier today.

"The Eucharist is essential for us: it is Christ who wishes to enter our lives and fill us with his grace."

Francis's statement is unquestionably a claim to knowledge--knowledge that must be based upon faith. As Peter Boghossian has pointed out, it is typically apt to replace "faith" when used in the religious context with "pretending to know what you don't know." Here's a list of some of what Pope Francis pretends to know (but doesn't) and leads other people to pretend to know just in this sentence alone.

1. The Eucharist is essential for us. It is in no way clear that a ceremony to commemorate the alleged Last Supper is essential for anyone. Francis pretends to know otherwise.
2. The Eucharist is Christ. It is in no way clear that the "transubsantiation" in the Eucharist is Christ. Francis pretends to know otherwise.
3. Consecration does something. It is in no way clear that consecrating bread or wine--or anything else--does anything at all. It is even more dubious that the result of ceremonial consecration "transubstantiates" food and wine into human flesh and blood, and the matter is only made worse by saying it is the flesh and blood of God. Francis pretends to know otherwise about all of these matters.
4. Christ wishes to enter our lives. This is not known. Indeed, it is not even clear what this means (and may not mean anything). Francis pretends to know otherwise.
5. Christ can enter our lives. In order to act upon the stated wish, this action has to be possible. It is in no way clear that this is possible or, again, meaningful beyond the metaphorical. Francis pretends to know otherwise.
6. Christ wishes to (and can) fill us with his grace. This is not known, and it is not even clear what this means. Note that this is really two claims to pretended knowledge. Francis pretends to know otherwise to both.
7. Christ's grace is important. If the Eucharist is Christ wishing to enter our lives to fill us with his grace, and the Eucharist is essential for us, then clearly we can assume that Christ's grace, instead of being meaningless or metaphorical, is essential for us. It is in no way clear that this is the case. Francis pretends to know otherwise.
8. And, of course, Christianity is true (or at least Catholicism), with a wide variety of other claims to knowledge in tow, e.g. about the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible. It isn't just unclear that this is the case; it's rather clear that it is not the case. Francis pretends to know otherwise.

As we know, though, Francis, along with many others, pretends to be informed by the light of pretending to know what he doesn't know. See this video for another example.

On religion, partial inoculation, and treatment-resistance disease.

It was the mid-1960s, and the NASA programs that would put a handful of human beings on the moon for the first time within the decade were in full swing. Following Kennedy's famous pronouncement, this fact was a major element of the era's decidedly scientific zeitgeist. The Second Great War was behind us, and partially because of it, the economy was booming. Money, though, didn't all go to the top, even if lots of it did. Economic inequality in the United States in the 1960s was low and still steadily cruising toward its eventual nadir. In other huge news, widespread application of antibiotics had changed the face of disease seemingly overnight just a couple of decades earlier. And vaccines had just entered the scene, dropping the incidence and death rates of many serious diseases, again seemingly overnight. Life was good, and on April 8, 1966, TIME magazine's cover asked, "Is God dead?"

Not quite. God was not dead, though he was knocking at death's door. Though the 1960s were far from idyllic, all of the necessary conditions were in place to inoculate modern citizens from what, in later years, some call "the faith virus." Science was big and in the public eye, satisfying our innate needs to understand the world and to feel like our unpredictable circumstances can be controlled. A fair degree of economic equality gave enough opportunity to enough people to feel hopeful and secure without God. At the same time, we were crushing disease, which has been traditionally believed to be the wrath of God enacted upon us lowly sinners. In the 1960s, it wasn't only scientists who agreed with Laplace's famous observation that there was no need for "that hypothesis"--God--in the model. It was popular sentiment.

But we didn't know an awful lot about these things in the 1960s, and I'd dare to suggest that we know better now, largely because of that failure, and hopefully it's not too late. We have a burden upon us, though, not to repeat the mistakes of our past.

Medicine

Antibiotics and vaccines did what Jesus could not. They formed the nearest thing we can probably imagine to a miracle. Even if we accept them on their ridiculous face, Jesus' miracles cured only tens. Antibiotics and vaccines took common serious illnesses dropped their mortality rates almost to zero, and they did it blindingly fast. Where Jesus is said to have cured tens with his miraculous powers, antibiotics and vaccines cured tens of millions, in far less time and without a shred of doubt. Scourges of mankind like smallpox, many a theologian's delight for the fear it commanded, were effectively eradicated from the planet in a time comparable to the whole of Jesus' purported ministry.

But we didn't realize our danger. Evolution works quickly in extreme circumstances, allowing lifeforms to cling to existence beyond any hope. In rapidly reproducing bacteria and viruses, in which whole generations can be measured in minutes or hours instead of decades, the opportunity to evolve resistance to antibiotics and vaccines is stunning--and one of our greatest contemporary perils. Many disease-causing bacteria are evolving in response to our crusade against them, and in some cases they have evolved antibiotic-resistant strains (that's the R in the flesh-eating MRSA). Likewise, there is a serious threat that some of our vaccines may be obsolete within a few decades as new strains emerge beyond our protection. It is hard to imagine a worse situation than the resurgence of horrendous illnesses that are both unpreventable and untreatable.

There's a certain trick about evolution, though. Extinct species do not evolve. Unless it is somehow released from one of the handful of laboratories in which it still resides, smallpox isn't likely to be making a comeback. Indeed, even within local populations, say a particular host of a particular disease, at least some individuals must survive the onslaught that besets them to have a chance to adapt to the stress. The ones that survive, of course, are the ones hardiest to the adversity, which is one reason that antibacterial soaps that promise to kill 99.9% of germs are a little frightening. The hardiest 0.1% are the survivors that go on to reproduce, and the proportion of their offspring resistant to would-be toxic chemistry goes down.

With antibiotics it is less their application than their bad application that has led to horror stories like treatment-resistant tuberculosis arising in India. One must apply the right drugs and then see them completely through so that between the drug and the sick person's own immune system, there aren't enough survivors to be concerned with. This does not always happen for a variety of reasons, most of them bad or downright heinous (as with the state of medical treatment for Indian "Untouchables" for the worst of all possible reasons--religious ones). What happens reliably instead is that antibiotic resistant strains of diseases evolve, and dimly remembered horrors threaten to reawaken in our future.

With vaccines, the matter is similar. The reason smallpox was all-but eradicated, rather like polio was as well, is that the vaccines for these illnesses were spread globally via concerted efforts to stamp out the diseases. Nearly everyone was vaccinated, so the disease could not get almost any toehold, and where it did, it could not spread. The application was complete. This, though, is not always possible. Diseases that we've vaccinated nearly out of existence often cannot have hosts other than humans, but others can be carried by other animals in addition to us. To these, we must continually immunize ourselves and our newborn babies.

That issue was simple: it became standard praxis to provide a series of vaccinations to children starting almost from the hour of their birth. It worked wonderfully, but because of unscientific yammering, this situation has been reversed. Many parents refuse to vaccinate their children for very bad reasons. Predictably, these diseases--mumps, measles, rubella, pertussis, and so on--are making a roaring comeback. And the prediction is dire. Within a few decades, it seems, our vaccines may be mostly useless.

Incomplete application of an inoculation leaves open a dangerous door. The pathogens evolve, and the forms that survive are often more dangerous and considerably less treatable. Our God-is-dead hope of the 1960s teeters on this balance, because when the specter of deadly infectious disease comes back onto the scene, so will a desperate belief in God (and a manipulative one about his wrath).

Economics

Since the 1960s, we have learned that pushing for socioeconomic equality causes certain vectors of the inequality virus to work overtime to wheedle out ways in which they can exercise their sociopathic privilege to the ruin of many. The New Deal and ensuing Great Society spawned a cult of individual sovereignty that served as the perfect cover for the societal sickness known as plutocracy to creep back on us, and the date can be traced to roughly 1971 for the start of the full-force effort.

Somehow, American culture, enjoying the fruits of the Great Society, were not put in a position to understanding clearly that it is the society that makes great societies work, nor did they properly understand the role that wealth and income inequality play in it. Particularly, as those forms of inequality increase, the society becomes sick in profound ways. For the individual, the trend is not at all clear--more money means more opportunity means good things are on the track. For the society, though, now that we've looked, the fact stands out like a sore thumb. Wealth and income inequality are societal diseases, and many of the social ills we now bear witness to are symptoms. One of those is a return to distrustful individualism--a rejection of society--and thus the symptom exacerbates the cause.

Like with disease, the inoculation against this sickness was not complete in the US, and the reforms from the Roosevelt through Eisenhower eras served as the basis for plutocratic greed to evolve. Evolve it did, and by embracing the anti-New-Deal reactionary "value" of individual sovereignty, it brought itself back from the edge of death in a way with more popular appeal than ever. In 1980, with Ronald Reagan as its figurehead, government--which is to say society--became "the problem," and the cult of the rugged individual rocketed into the mainstream. American society at large was reinfected with the plutocracy virus that now threatens to tear it apart, and the virus is spreading abroad. European and Australian plutocrats, among others, are picking up the thought processes that have divided America, starting in the 1970s, and now their own Great Societies are being torn apart. The inoculation of progressive liberalism was not fully administered, largely because it poisoned itself with the ridiculous, postmodern relativism.

We know better now, of course, but in the 1960s we did not realize fully enough that wealth and income inequalities are such pathogenic socioeconomic forces. Again, the God-is-dead hope of the 1960s is threatened by this because desperate economic situations, which leave people feeling less autonomous however intensely they pretend to be ruggedly individually sovereign, lead to a resurgence of desperate beliefs in God (and again, a ripe opportunity for religious leaders to capitalize on the problem).

God

God wasn't dead in 1966, but a great deal of what went by that name was. In isolated corners of American culture, a new and decidedly fundamentalist, evangelical variant on Protestant Christianity was initiating a Great Revival. Others, notably the nearly immutable Roman Catholic Church, plodded along as ever. For typical Americans, belief in God might have been largely irrelevant, perhaps even quaint, but the inoculation against the faith virus was not made complete, and the surviving religious cells were positioning themselves to go big-time.

And they did. And they still are. A variety of forces contributed to this effect, social, political, economic, and even theological, but for the last few decades of the last millennium, America underwent a huge religious revival, turning back from the attitudes that characterized the middle of the twentieth century. The problem was that the faith virus was not treated fully. God became irrelevant before faith was exposed as a contagious cognitive flaw, and so susceptible minds were taken in a boomerang effect the revival came to full force. Some of this revival is accounted for by what appears to be a natural boomerang effect with regard to religious attitudes, but for that to have happened requires an incomplete inoculation against the faith virus in the first place.

New Atheism

"New Atheism," as it is called, is an enough-is-enough response to this revival, which took place not only within American Christianity but also in other faiths throughout the world, most notably Islam. The landmark event, of course, took place on September 11, 2001, which could be taken to be the first exclamation point in the story of the world's reinfection with an intense, recalcitrant strain of the faith virus after a brief remission toward enlightenment. Since the World Trade Center came down in flame, smoke, ash, and death, the religious story has been told more and more fervently, often in capslock, and we are left wondering how grim the situation is. A very hard to treat, profoundly virulent strain of the faith virus has taken root, and the medicine of "New Atheism" is bitter. "New Atheism" is unwavering rejection of religious authority, and a certain amount of steeled nerve to the cries of butt-hurt offense that flow from it.

Here, then, we see a difference between the God-is-dead from a half-century past and the "New Atheism" of today. "New Atheists" are profoundly less likely to ever be taken by the faith virus again because they understand both that God is irrelevant and that faith is a cognitive flaw loaded with pretense. "New Atheists" have been properly inoculated. The mental infrastructure that keeps the demon out is robust, solid, and clear, and it is held for clearly articulated reasons.

We need to take our medicine,...

...but not everyone wants to.

A growing movement of accommodationist atheists, faitheists, in the phrasing of Chris D. Stedman, author of a book called Faitheist, seem to prefer a kinder, gentler, less rebellious attitude from atheists toward faith. They, like NYU professor and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, are "not anti-religion," and they beg "New Atheists" to see--and honor--what we have to learn from the faithful instead of making a hard-nosed stand against the faith virus. To see what I mean, consider this recent piece from Steadman (dubbed a "must read for ALL atheists" by one of Steadman's fans on Twitter)--or read his book--and this one from Haidt.

Steadman and Haidt, and their growing group of followers (particularly among the Progressive Left), prefer the shortsighted obvious. Taking antibiotics often makes one feel ill and is a hassle, and the feeling of being sick often subsides days or weeks before the full course of the prescription is run. Vaccines require getting an injection that is sometimes painful, can cause mild symptoms, and can also be a hassle--even without the ignorant unscientific fear that they cause autism--and who on earth really gets whooping cough? (N.B.: A friend of mine just did thanks to some unvaccinated kids at the playground where his (vaccinated) kids play.) Standing up in a hard-line fashion to religious authority and privilege hurts people's feelings and is mentally and emotionally draining. Steadman's position asks, can't we all just get along instead?

Sure, we can. And, if we prefer to, we can partially inoculate against the faith problem--one that possesses a potent opportunity to lead to calamity (take evangelical Christianity's near-universal religiously "justified" denialism of climate change, of all not-religious things, for example). What we cannot do, though, is delude ourselves into believing that it will serve to solve the unique problem that religious faith presents in our world. And we should recognize that if faith survives its brush with "New Atheism" so far, it will be stronger than ever for the encounter and at least as much of a problem.

"New Atheism" has shaken the world of faith like a cultural antibiotic, and in its wake it provides a potent vaccine. The disease isn't going easily, though, as is sometimes the case (the reader is encouraged to investigate the full treatment experience for hepatitis or tuberculosis, not to mention chemotherapy for cancer). There is a desire for harmony and peace that calls some to a mission to abandon the "New Atheist" treatment protocol in favor of the kind of deference that feeds religion forever. I understand that and wish for it as well, and I am quite sure it is wrong.

Ameliorative measures

There are ways to polish the rough edges of "New Atheism" to make the medicine a little easier to swallow. Up until now, it has admittedly at times been quite a blunt instrument, but as it matures, it is being refined. One of the best and most obvious suggestions has been brought to light by hard-liner Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists. Boghossian calls above all for authenticity and honesty. Be real. Be honest. Be willing to change your mind when the reasons are good. But do not mistake authenticity and honesty for deference to delusion. These achieve all of the goals of the anti-"New Atheist" crowd without their main failures. Authenticity of this kind does not condescend to the faithful by assuming that they need their faith to get through the day, and it does not give unwarranted deference to religious privilege. Authenticity and honesty are not merely palliative measures but are clear refinements of the "New Atheist" medicine, a course of treatment that we need to see through. Failure will preserve the disease in a state more resistant to future treatment.

Here's how to do it. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself, even if you do not have the nerve to do it with other people. By applying relentless honesty to one's own positions, neither faith nor deference to it is possible, and the anti-"New Atheism" confusion is revealed as a way to walk away from the cure before it is effected while nourishing the disease. People deserve dignity, and this obviously includes religious people, but ideas do not. Honesty and authenticity, even if unappreciated, are the best ways to dignify a person regardless of the quality of their ideas. It does nothing like offering dignity to a person to coddle their bad ideas, and so we shouldn't. And there is "New Atheism" in a sentence. So ask yourself, what are people who are against "New Atheism" really against?

A hard truth from Arizona SB1062

Arizona's governor, Jan Brewer, has to decide whether she should sign SB1062, a controversial bill that will allow Arizona business owners to discriminate on the basis of any religiously held conviction. Many of the law's opponents note that one such particularly transparent reason for the bill is the widespread belief among conservative Christians that reviles homosexuality and and the looming reality of marriages for same-sex couples. Proponents of the bill argue that the bill is about protecting religious freedom, of course, in the usual sense where religious freedom and religious privilege get conflated.

Paresh Dave did a write-up about SB1062 for the LA Times, and in it he covered some of the arguments of those who support the bill. One of these, forwarded by attorney Jon LaRue, who helped write the legislation, almost appears to be a good argument for the law. LaRue said,

There is a law that bans discrimination at public accommodations based on religion in Arizona. Let’s pretend that I’m a bakery and that in my town here in Arizona, Westboro Baptist Church comes to picket a funeral of a soldier, and they tell me to bake a cake. They want it to say, "God hates ..." and that terrible word they use.

It would offend my dignity. I don’t want to give voice to that horrible message. Right now, they could sue me for discriminating based on their religious beliefs. If the Arizona courts went the way of the New Mexico courts, I would lose and if they targeted me,  I could lose my business because of the damages I’d have to pay out. I would never be able to assert my Religious Freedom Restoration Act defense because it’s available only if the government is prosecuting me.

I'll admit that when I first read this statement, I was taken by it. And then I remembered the First Amendment, a two-edged blade that many conservative Christians absolutely love when it cuts in their favor, though they seem to hate it the rest of the time. LaRue's argument appeals to our dignity and our better moral sense, but that doesn't matter. Our dignity and our better moral sense aren't the law (and if they were, conservative Christianity would likely rue the result). That's freedom, and to quote LaRue again, "Freedom is too important to leave to chance."

I do not like the idea of being required by law to write "God hates fags!" or any other obscene and hateful thing on a cake ordered from my bakery (if I owned one). And that's too bad for me and the worse for my luck that they chose my establishment. As much as I am repulsed and outraged by the message of the Westboro Baptist Church, if I found myself in that situation, I would face a choice. LaRue pointed it out for us: discriminate or do not discriminate. If the price of discrimination is losing one's business, however apparently noble the reason, then that's the price of religious freedom. It does not come for free.

Here's the thing, though. Let's take a moment to explore the singular reason that such a disagreeable thing as this is the price of religious freedom. If we refuse to lie to ourselves, it is because religion is uniquely poised to be utterly vile for indefensible reasons, a trait we have decided it is paramount to defend above any insult to our dignity.

Jon LaRue is appalled by the notion that he should have to promote the hateful message of the Westboro Baptist Church, which it is their religious freedom to hold and promote. The only reason he doesn't see it this way is that LaRue gives special prioirity to his own beliefs, which he holds on the same justifications given by the Westboro Baptists: a particular reading of the Bible and faith. His bill, obviously, isn't about religious freedom. It's about using religion to protect the privilege of a group of sufficiently mainline, sufficiently conservative to act like their beliefs are really the only ones that matter.

LaRue must envision an America where religion means only those beliefs he agrees with or is willing to tolerate--whatever intolerance those rain upon the people that his religion vilifies as sinners, degenerates, and infidels. The only reason he has that opportunity is because every American citizen is precluded from acting upon the same idea. I find Christianity disturbing and repugnant, for example, and LaRue's only protection from my opinion is the same one forcing him to pipe "God hates fags!" out of a confectioner's bag at the risk of his livelihood if confronted with the request from a sufficiently sincere believer in the Westboro mold.

And let's be honest. Jon LaRue, and those like him, dislike the message of the Westboro Baptist Church because they believe that the Westboro Baptists pretend to know something they don't know about the Creator of the Universe, namely that He hates fags. But Jon LaRue, and those like him, along with all other religious believers, pretend to know but don't know everything they claim to know about God. For many of the people who desire this bill to pass into law, of course, this pretense includes the proposition that "God hates fags"--but just enough to protect their "right" to act upon it by denying wedding arrangements to same-sex couples, even if not quite so much as to put it in all caps on a hideous placard protesting a military funeral.

On the Pleasure of Changing My Mind, perhaps too soon

I am a big fan of Sam Harris. The primary reason is that he routinely impresses the hell out of me with his keen insights and carefully parsed out reasoning. Even in the instances when I disagree with his opinions, which turn out to be surprisingly rare, I'm consistently impressed with his ability to lay out arguments in a beautifully reasoned way that reflects a sharp understanding of the underlying facts. And this is why I was surprised by his most recent blog post, "The Pleasure of Changing My Mind." I'm left feeling distinctly like Fangorn, bemused about a folk more hasty than his own.

I have to be clear mostly about what this essay is not. Thus, the first thing I want to say about my surprise is that I think Harris has drawn the right conclusion about his willingness to change his mind and for very good reasons. He also presented it extremely well, one of his better rebuttals to a detractor (which is saying something). I just think he has chosen a strange example to do it--though also for a very good reason if I might venture a guess at it.

I should add that there is back story involving primarily Harris and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose allegations form the subject of Harris's blog post, and it is my assumption that readers are familiar with it. If not, it may be worth correcting that for context and, perhaps, for some appreciation of the ironic. There is also back story with characters related to Harris's example, though he covers those sufficiently in his piece.

In his blog post, Harris indicates that he can have his mind changed even by people who are his "enemies," making a fool Jonathan Haidt's recent charges against him. "Enter Jeremy Scahill," Harris writes, the emphasis his, going on to elaborate,

This is just to say that, while I don’t usually think of myself as having enemies, if I were going to pick someone to prove me wrong on an important topic, it probably wouldn’t be Jeremy Scahill. I am, in Haidt’s terms, highly motivated to reason in a “lawyerly” way so as not to give him the pleasure of changing my mind. But change it he has.

The manner in which Scahill has changed Harris's mind is via Scahill's recent documentary, Dirty Wars. To quote Harris about it directly,

However, last night I watched Scahill’s Oscar-nominated documentary Dirty Wars—twice. The film isn’t perfect. Despite the gravity of its subject matter, there is something slight about it, and its narrow focus on Scahill seems strangely self-regarding. At moments, I was left wondering whether important facts were being left out. But my primary experience in watching this film was of having my settled views about U.S. foreign policy suddenly and uncomfortably shifted. As a result, I no longer think about the prospects of our fighting an ongoing war on terror in quite the same way.

So now a second thing I want to say: I don't know if Scahill is right, and for the present discussion I don't care. (More generally, I do care rather seriously.) My surprise with Harris came about for the choice of this example, though now I can state why I think he chose it: it's (almost) perfect. It's an example of a recent mind-changing incident in Harris's life that was brought about by someone he has reasons to be motivated to distrust. A better example to refute Haidt's point against Harris might have had to have been made up, and Harris applied it admirably for that purpose.

I've got one more aside before I can get to my point, but it transitions there. After watching a documentary about nearly anything, I typically feel like Harris reported feeling after watching Dirty Wars. "The film isn't perfect." "There's something slight about it." It is "strangely self-regarding." "I was left wondering whether important facts were being left out." I feel this way so strongly after watching almost any documentary that I almost never watch them anymore.

I've referred to this feeling privately as the "documentary effect," and it is comparable to the result of watching a polished, less-annoying infomercial. Documentaries on grave subjects, like infomercials for junk one does not need, are expensive efforts made specifically to be strongly persuasive. I don't trust documentaries about highly motivated topics, not least because I know they have tremendous power to change my mind in a way I will later have to reverse. That it was a documentary on a political topic fails to spark my surprise, and it's not that I disagree with Scahill (I do not know if I do or not) or Harris (I do not disagree with him on the topic he was writing about, Jonathan Haidt's analysis, and am in a similar quandary regarding US foreign policy).

So now the point. My surprise with Harris stems from the fact that Harris reported having his mind changed--perhaps rightly--by an event that is so fresh. Leaving aside the point that he couldn't not have had his mind changed by the film, as he knows, this is still something that he is very likely to understand better than in terms of the operation of the human mind.

When my mind changes, particularly when I had pretty strong reasons for believing what I believed, I almost always experience a subsequent oscillation in my attitudes on the topic. My thoughts churn between the previous position and the new one as I work to ease the cognitive tension between them. Sometimes my mind changes, and I accept the new view. Sometimes, I realize some, but not all, details of my prior beliefs are in error, and I end up somewhere between the two positions. At other times, I'm able to work out what lies of omission and spin played a role in creating the "documentary effect," and my mind is little changed in the end. This process usually takes days at best, sometimes weeks or months while the new ideas roll around with the old and with those I find in follow-up research, so I find it a matter of curiosity that he chose such a fresh example. (Note: Perhaps I'm alone in this, or it doesn't apply to Harris, but out of necessity, I am assuming it's a relatively general phenomenon.)


I will not speculate upon whether Harris's choice of this example was "motivated" by his desire to refute Haidt's ridiculous analysis. Besides being conjectural, it would be immaterial to do so. For one thing, Haidt's analysis was handily revealed to be ridiculous even without the Scahill example. For another more important one, there is very little doubt Harris has had his mind changed many times. It is tremendously unlikely that anyone who gets so much right could do so by any other means than getting a great deal wrong over his life and being both honest and fastidious enough to work to correct those mistakes. It is also equally clear that he is wide open to modifying his views again in the future when the reasons are good. Indeed, I expect it will be interesting to watch his thoughts on US foreign policy develop now.

Rather like the experience of a tannic red wine, there is pleasure in changing one's mind once the route to its appreciation is understood. In this case, a necessary component is holding high esteem for being less wrong. Harris clearly has acquired this taste, whatever Haidt and others want to say about him. To speak of wine, though, it feels like Harris has uncorked a bottle of Dirty Wars, vintage 2013, and served it hastily and straight from the bottle. It will be interesting to see how his mind continues to change now that this young cab has a chance to breathe.

Ignatheism

Is atheism a lack of belief or a belief of its own sort? Do we all have beliefs about the existence of some being, entity, or force called “God”? Must a denial of belief in God's existence entail a belief that God does not exist?

These questions seem to be rising to the surface of many debates, and one answer that is gaining some traction is the affirmative. It is being identified as the (rationally justified) positive atheism position, and among its other attitudes, it holds that so-called “agnostic atheism” is both a misnomer and an untenable position. Belief, in some degree, must tip to one side or the other.

While a clarification like what is being proposed by the positive atheists is needed and interesting in its own right, it is not clear that they have closed the door on the matter. There is at least one position that stands apart from the three usual ones, theism, atheism, and agnosticism, and it is called ignosticism. Where they say, “yes,” “no,” and “not sure,” respectively, ignosticism says, “can't say.”

Ignosticism

Ignosticism says that the statement “God exists” is too poorly defined to contain meaning. The reason ignostics take this stance is that the term “God” is itself too poorly defined to make sense of, unless it is defined in a way (abstractly) in which the term “exists” instead is not clear enough.

Ignosticism is distinct from theism, atheism, and agnosticism. The central point of difference is that these three positions all interpret the phrase “God exists” as being an inherently meaningful one, and ignosticism does not. Theism asserts that “God exists” is meaningful and true; atheism asserts that it is meaningful and false; and agnosticism asserts that it is meaningful with an unknown truth value. Of course, agnosticism takes a wide variety of possible manifestations that tip one way or the other, and Richard Dawkins's Spectrum of Theistic Possibility covers the gamut. Note that Dawkins's Spectrum assumes that “God exists” is a meaningful statement. (Dawkins, and many who hold his arguments in esteem, hold that they are a 6 or a 6.9 on his 7-point scale, indicating strong but not absolute atheism.)

By contrast, ignosticism takes the tack that the statement “God exists” is inherently meaningless or otherwise insufficiently clear to be assigned a truth value at all, even a fuzzy agnostic one. In contrast to the total agnostic point on the Spectrum of Theistic Possibility, given a score of 4, the ignostic position does not appear on the Spectrum at all. For the ignostic, every value on the scale is wrong because the question for which those values give some answer, “how sure are you that God exists?” is invalid. Particularly, then, ignostics do not necessarily hold a belief about the truth value of the statement “God exists.”

Ignosticism and Ewoks

Ignosticism may be the position that we already hold regarding many fictional creations. Take the Ewoks of George Lucas's Star Wars, for example. The films and books in that fictional series offer a great deal of depiction of Ewoks, enough to where they are a believable construct in the context of the Star Wars universe. In fact, they are a believable construct in the real universe in that it seems possible that we could one day venture throughout the galaxy, and upon finding a forest-covered moon populated with tribal teddiursoid creatures, we could conclude, with much surprise, that we had, indeed, discovered Ewoks. But would we have really?

The answer seems to be no. However much the extraterrestrial species we met resembled Lucas's Ewoks, it would not really be the creature that Lucas was describing. Whether the Ewoks were invented whole-cloth for the Star Wars series (notably, Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi) or imported from some other set of ideas, it is certain that any species, however Ewok-like, that we might find anywhere in the wider galaxy was not the inspiration for those in Star Wars. We may call such persons Ewoks, should we find them, but even if identical in every discernible detail to the Lucasian descriptions, they are distinct from Ewoks.

It seems that the preceding makes a case for holding a position analogous to atheism regarding the existence of Ewoks because we know them to be a fictional creation. I don't think this is valid, though, because if we did find such beings, particularly in the correct circumstances, we would almost certainly agree that we had found Ewoks. In fact, the argument that we would not have actually found them, that being impossible even in principle, would probably ring quite hollow.

Remote as the possibility probably is, it is possible that an Ewok-like species of extraterrestrials exists, with as much minutiae as desired. Finding them would be more than enough to conclude that we had found “Ewoks.” In that regard, the proper position about the question of the existence of Ewoks is the one that parallels ignosticism: what we mean by “Ewok” is not sufficiently clear to make a meaningful statement about their existence. Admittedly, Ewoks feel disanologous to “God,” but the reason is that the situation is worse when it comes to “God.”

At least Ewoks make sense

The ignostic problem is actually multiplied for the notion that “God exists.” While Ewoks are conceivable as a real type of extraterrestrial life, the analogous statement about “God” appears not to be true.

If we found immensely capable “god-like” extraterrestrials, or even something like the gods described in ancient polytheistic mythology, say Zeus or his relations, it is not clear that these would be categorized as being “God.” In fact, it seems downright unlikely, given the proclivity among theistic believers to defending their religious beliefs as they are.

And they would have a case because the notion of a solitary Supreme Being that is unrivaled by any other is not parallel to notions like Zeus and Thor. The concept called “God” belongs in a different category altogether, and that category possesses no salient description. Indeed, it seems to be a haphazard combination of several abstract notions, some of which have more meaning than others (a Creator, for instance, seems more meaningful as an entity than do the objective sources of all purpose, moral values, and the capacity to think).

Lacking any salient description for “God,” when faced with the question of its existence, we are left in a position in which we are unable to make any salient assessment. This position is called ignosticism, and I believe it is more commonly held amongst self-identifying atheists than is atheism (the belief that no gods exist, including “God”).

Sam Harris, et al., and ignosticism

Though I will not attempt to speak for him, I suspect, in fact, that Sam Harris is ignostic more than he is atheistic (though I leave open the caveat that he, like many of us, are probably best described by the term proposed in this piece, “ignatheist,” if we must have a term given to us). Consider the opening portion of his December 2005 “Atheist Manifesto,” published originally on TruthDig.

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious.  Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

Though the term ignostic predates Harris's piece by 45 years, his writing here and in other places seems to fit the ignostic perspective better than it does the atheist one (since we're rather pedantically splitting hairs). Indeed, his piece would perhaps be better titled “The Ignostic's Manifesto,” if it weren't for two facts. First, no one really knows or cares what ignostic means, and second, it's still not quite right. Harris's piece reads most accurately as a case for what I am calling ignatheism, a term suggested by a generous and witty friend. Further, I would contend that most of the other self-identifying atheists who are both intellectually honest and who haven't adopted positive atheism are also ignatheists. This includes Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Peter Boghossian, and any other atheist who says, and accepts, things like, “there is (very) probably no God” and "there isn't enough evidence to believe in God, so I don't."

Ignatheism

The fatal issue with ignosticism is that it requires an untenable stretch of intellectual honesty to accept that the phrase “God exists” is so meaningless that we must render it beyond assessment. Most people, though they could be wrong about this matter, strongly feel like this phrase means something quite specific, even if clarity still wants for all the specificity. I would argue that when any person uses the word “God,” except to say that it is meaningless, she has a sense of what she means by that term. I do not mean to imply that what anyone thinks she means by it matches what it really might mean.

To make matters worse, when all but the most strict ignatheists so much as hear the word “God,” they also have at least one sense of what is meant by that word. Often, the hearer has two or more, what he thinks the word means and what he thinks the speaker might have meant by it, plus potentially many other possibilities drawn from broader cultural interpretations. In other words—and this is one of the most significant problems humanity has ever faced and still faces—the term “God” is unclear to the point of meaninglessness in general but is laden with meaning in specific.

Ignatheism in both contexts

Enter ignatheism, the intellectual turf I would argue that most self-identifying atheists actually occupy. The ignatheist is simultaneously part ignostic and part atheistic. She identifies as an atheist and feels like she shouldn't have to. She denies that it is reasonable or good for theistic believers to hold the beliefs they do—and may be quite anti-religious and anti-theistic as a result—and she views her lack of belief as a lack of belief. She lacks belief in God, but she may not believe that there is no God.

That second, more specific position feels like the logical consequence of the first, but it is not. Believing there is no God requires a sense that there is meaning in the term “God” in general, and that the ignatheist denies. An ignatheist is as Harris described, the "atheist" for whom his manifesto stands. Ignatheists are simply refusing to deny the obvious.

When taken in generality, the term “God” is insufficiently meaningful to judge, and so the ignatheist doesn't concern himself with it. When examined in specific, though, the term “God” is always given a meaning to which either disbelief (atheism) or skeptical agnosticism are the proper assessments. The ignatheist is skeptically agnostic about the deistic absent creator, atheistic to any of the Gods of the world's religions, and believes that the general matter of God's existence is owed no consideration because it doesn't mean anything.

Ignatheism, then, is the position that holds that the matter of God's existence, in general, cannot be evaluated, and, in specific, nothing that has been proposed to go by the name “God” exists as a part of reality. A stronger variant on ignatheism would contend that while “God exists” is too meaningless to work with, it is very unlikely (though not impossible) that anything exists that would merit applying the term “God.” Ignatheists, then, live their lives as though no God exists without committing to a general belief that says so. Belief that God does or doesn't exist is immaterial because it is nonsense. To quote Harris again, ignatheism really is “nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.”

Conclusion

I don't know that the world needs more labels for people or even for intellectual turf, especially when those labels are silly-sounding hybrids of technical words whose meanings aren't completely agreed upon. I do think, though, that for the purposes of making matters a bit more clear, at least having considered this term may be helpful.

Ignatheism is effectively atheism under the proviso that we realize that even it concedes more than it has to on claims about God's existence. Atheism takes the matter seriously, and it is not at all clear that the subject in question deserves it.

On miraculous healing

I've heard a lot recently about miraculous healings serving as evidence for God and Christianity. Obviously, I have major reservations about these claims, and I could go a lot of ways with what I'm about to say. I'll give some of the points a quick superficial treatment, and then I'll get to a little mathematics to reveal what looks like a paradoxical result that works against these weird occurrences as proof of miracles, Christianity, or God.

Odds and ends

1. Every religion makes these claims, as do some supernaturalists who do not believe in God, so while they could conceivably be taken as evidence for the supernatural, it's less likely that they could be considered evidence for God and even less likely that they constitute evidence for any particular religion. The Christian has to be able to explain Islamic, Mormon, Hindu, Shamanic, and all sorts of other miraculous healing claims--seeing as those would not be in accordance with the Christian faith--to be able to claim that such claims constitute evidence for Christianity or even for God generally.
2. If the (epistemic) probability of the supernatural is effectively zero or otherwise utterly negligible, then even if such events can be taken as evidence for the supernatural, God, or some religion, they don't get us very far at all. In fact, they get us effectively nowhere.
3. As was pointed out to a believer in such miracles on Twitter, the problem with all "evidence" of this kind is that it is anecdotal, which means that we are completely ignorant of which details are left out of the anecdote and thus cannot use them to draw many, if any, conclusions.
4. As pointed out on this blog by a commenter the other day, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy accounts for much of the observation of such "evidence." In short, we have lots of data of people who heal via whatever means, some of them had religious circumstances around them, and then the believer circles all of those examples together and "paints a bulls-eye" around them (it's a form of cherry picking).

That's all the addressing I'm doing of those points, at least for now. On to math.

Nuts and bolts

Really, this is a mathematical analysis on the fourth point above, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I will be using a very simple Bayesian-style analysis to show numerically just how fallacious the Texas sharpshooter fallacy can be.

Consider the following circumstances.

1. Let's suppose, generously, that if a religiously influenced medical miracle occurs, we have a 100% chance of healing, which is to say that when religious circumstances effect a miracle, it has a 100% cure rate of whatever disease or problem is presented.
2. Let's also suppose, in many cases generously to the believer again, that there's a baseline 5% natural recovery rate, be that spontaneous remission or any other modicum of healing that operates on purely natural causes. (Even many aggressive cancers have better survival rates than this.)
3. Now, since miracles are rare occurrences, we will also assume, yet again quite generously to the believer, that religious interventions effect a miracle in only one out of every one thousand (0.1%) of cases in which they are called for. This may feel ungenerous, but if miracle healings were happening more frequently for this, a very easy case could be made that this discussion wouldn't even be happening. Miracles are rare. (Note: at 1/1000 chances, if one opportunity arose per day on most days, the average person should expect to run into one "miracle" just by chance roughly every two years--in the context of a church of hundreds of people each of whom know hundreds more, such events should occur routinely just by chance, but I digress.)

Now, suppose that given these generous assumptions, we witness what appears to be a genuine medical miracle. There was some medical problem; there was a sincere religious intervention on the patient; there was an apparently spontaneous healing; and the doctors were left flummoxed as to how it happened. To all appearances, a miracle occurred, but did it?

We can apply Bayes's theorem to get an estimate of how confident we can be in concluding a miracle occurred in these circumstances. The theorem looks like this (mostly just to show you that I'm not making things up).

                                  P(H|M)P(M)

P(Miracle|Healing) =  -------------------------------------------------------------------

                                    P(H|M)P(M) + P(H|no M)P(no M)

I hope it is clear that H is shorthand for "Healing" and M is for "Miracle," and "no M" means "no miracle occurred."

To further disambiguate, P means "probability," specifically the probability of the event symbolically described inside the parentheses immediately following the P. The vertical bar is read "given" and means that the event represented by the stuff before the bar is conditioned upon the occurrence of what comes after the bar. Specifically, P(H|M) is read "the probability of a healing given a miracle," and it means the probability that healing occurred if we are assuming that a miracle did, in fact, occur.

In words, what we're calculating is the probability--the confidence with which we can assert--that a miracle occurred given that we saw a healing. That's the P(Miracle|Healing) on the left side of the equals sign. The right-hand side of the equals sign evaluates this possibility via Bayes's theorem.

In the light of our assumptions, we know that P(Healing|Miracle), the probability that we have healing given that a miracle occurred, is 100%, or 1.00. The probability that a miracle occurred at all, P(M), is 0.1%, or 0.001. Also, P(Healing|no miracle), the probability that healing occurred without a miracle and just by matters of usual circumstance (to which the religious intervention is irrelevant), is 5%, or 0.05. Finally, by symmetry, the probability that no miracle occurred, P(no M), is 99.9%, or 0.999.

I will not drag us through the calculation but will simply report the result.

P(Miracle|Healing) = 0.01963

In plain language, what this number means is that given the assumption that miracles are always effective at healing, but that they are 1-in-1000 rare events, with spontaneous natural recovery happening at a rate of 5%, if we witness a healing that appears miraculous, there's only a 1.96% chance that we're right to believe it is actually a miracle. In other words, on these assumptions, if a churchgoer believes he has witnessed a miracle, even under these generous assumptions, we can conclude that there's more than a 98% chance that he is simply wrong about it.

To put this number in context, if we wanted to have a 50% confidence in concluding that miracles of this kind do occur, we would have to have at least 43 independent reports come in. For 95% confidence, we'd need 186 independent reports, and for 99.99% confidence, 572 of them. These seem like low bars to clear, but I have never heard of a church clearing them. Indeed, they only seem like low bars to clear because so many people are so susceptible to this 98% likely error (on these very generous assumptions).

Tightening the bolts

We've done some studies on medical miracles, and we've detected no statistically significant difference between religious interventions and a lack thereof. Therefore, it seems too generous to offer a 1/1000 chance that religiously induced medical miracles occur, if we haven't ruled them out completely.

I don't know how likely medical miracles might be, which is to say that I don't know what a fair estimate for them is. I think it's a good bet that one-in-a-thousand is too likely, given that the studies we've done haven't detected them, so let's tighten the bolts in light of this fact. For now, let's assume that medical miracles are one-in-a-million shots.

On the assumption that miracles only occur in one out of every one million cases, with the rest of our assumptions remaining as generous as before, the confidence that we can put in an apparent medical miracle--an unexplained healing that occurred in or following a religious intervention--is a staggeringly low 0.002%, one chance in fifty thousand.

Pause for context here. If miracles are completely effective, but one-in-a-million chance rare events, and we have a 5% natural recovery rate, and we witness an apparent miracle, we'd be wrong to conclude that a miracle occurred 49,999 times out of 50,000, 99.998% of the time.

In this case, we would need 34,657 independent cases, all of which have been admitted by a thorough medical analysis to be unexplainable by any known natural means, just to have a coin-toss's chance, 50%, of being right in saying that medical miracles happen. To be 99% sure, we'd need 149,785 confirmed cases. This kind of thing would stand out.

Tightening the context

Just reflect for a minute on our assumptions now that we've seen these numbers. One of them is that we were paying attention only to medical circumstances with a 5% survival/remission/healing rate by natural means. To be sure, there are many illnesses with such grim circumstances, but heart attacks have a 4.7% death rate, or a 95.3% survival rate (according to the University of Michigan). 

Obviously, the higher the chances of survival, remission, or healing, the higher the likelihood that believers would attribute false positives (for miraculous intervention) to their beliefs. Indeed, if miracles are only one-in-a-million events, surviving a heart attack would only be miraculous in one out of 953,000 cases. In reference to this actual data, we'd need more than 660,000 independent and confirmed (otherwise unexplained) cases for a 50% chance of miraculous intervention and more than 2.5 million for 95% certainty.

In this light, we have no good reasons whatsoever to accept from anyone any anecdotal claims that miraculous religious healings occurred. Even being ridiculously generous to the possibility of a miraculous healing claim results in more than a 98% chance that the claimant is wrong, and by being a bit more honest, almost a 99.9999% chance.

Philosophism

Even if I come up with some that I think are clever from time to time (supertruth and talisman meme, e.g.), I'm not so big a fan of coining new terms. Still, I feel I should suggest another one, philosophism.

This term is not entirely new, but the meaning I'm offering is new-ish (I doubt I am the first to use it this way, but it isn't common). I do so largely in response to the hot-button term of "scientism." Scientism has been getting a lot of play, most notably in the popular press following the 2010 publication of Sam Harris's 2010 bestselling The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

Much of the blowback to Harris's book reveals varying degrees of command of term "scientism." To wit, most of it, of course, has arisen from religious apologists. Still, a surprising amount (mostly of more careful use) has arisen within two communities of self-identifying atheists: the academic left and philosophers, particularly moral philosophers. Since leftism already has a name, I'm focusing here on the character of some of the objections made by some philosophers.

Philosophism is kind of already a word

In doing a cursory search for the term "philosophism," I've found that most define philosophism as "spurious philosophy; the love or practice of sophistry," rather tracing the word to Webster's dictionary, 1913.

There's only a little bit wrong with this definition from my perspective. One thing is that sophistry already covers the topic, and another is that it doesn't possess resonance with the intended meanings, both denotative and connotative, of scientism, which does not mean practicing pseudoscience (although the humorous term "scientifical" has been suggested for that meaning). Indeed, pseudoscientists are among the most vociferous in denouncing scientism, which they consider a major problem for the obvious reason.

I feel a parallel usage is also apropos in some contexts and regretfully may be needed, and so I'm suggesting one.

Philosophism, noun

Specifically, I suggest that the term philosophism can be taken to mean something that parallels the meaning of the term scientism, as science certainly is not the only field of thought that can overstep its bounds.

Philosophism: 2. A tendency to overassert the relevance of philosophy in other fields (that it necessarily underwrites), often including a tendency to overassert the importance for professionals in those other fields, or the public, to engage more seriously with philosophy or show it greater respect (than they do and/or than it deserves).
(3. Projection of intellectual superiority by philosophers or regarding philosophy, especially when intentional.)

There are three topics contained in these definitions that need to be addressed, and after something that shouldn't be necessary but is, I will spend the rest of this essay developing them. First, philosophy can overassert its relevance. Second, not everyone working in various fields needs to be an expert in philosophy, nor should they be. And third, intellectual superiority happens among philosophers too, and it isn't helping anyone.

The disclaimer that won't prevent the knee-jerk but should

This piece is not an attack on philosophy, nor does it encourage attacking philosophy. It is also not a promotion of scientism or of science. Particularly, it is not a tu quoque fallacious defense of scientism. Further, it is not an accusation of all philosophers. Importantly, it does recognize the importance of philosophy in practice and in underwriting other fields (including science). It does not claim that the field of philosophy does not deserve respect by professionals in other fields or the public. Lastly, it doesn't intend to fuel a turf war between philosophers and scientists, who should be working together and not bemoaning when members of either field wade into what may be the other's ponds in ways that prove substantive.

The goal of this piece is to point out that philosophers can overassert just as easily and at least as obnoxiously as can anyone else. Doing so is every bit as anti-intellectual, since this word gets dragged in, as scientism is considered to be.

(Please, of course, feel free to leave comments denouncing me as a scientismist or anti-philosophy-ist, or whatever else you want to be wrong about, but you will have missed the point--not that this has stopped you before.)

1. Philosophy can overassert

I cannot speak in absolutes that cover all people, nor do I care to. Likewise, I do not care too much about this example or that, however notable, of people who overassert for science (or some other field). See the disclaimer. What I can speak to is the fact that a great many people, probably the very wide majority of them, who are relevant to this discussion already accept that philosophy underwrites nearly every intellectual field, science in particular.

Thanks for the reminder, but...

One of the primary ways that philosophy does overassert, in fact, is by unnecessarily pointing out that philosophy underwrites this field or that. The statement that science cannot verify itself--showing strict straw scientism to be self-refuting--is a great example of this, herring-flavored canard though it is.

Of course, pointing out this fact is not really philosophistic on its own, but it is easy to stumble into the problem by going on to assert that there is an onus upon the non-philosophical expert to be extraordinarily philosophically cautious or even philosophically savvy because of it. We will return to this point shortly, as it is the second main one to develop.

It smells like a turf war

Despite my desire to avoid getting specific, a good deal of philosophistic overassertion arises in fields related to ethics and mind. These fields, of course, are the traditional and lingering province of philosophy--as was naturalism only a few hundred years ago. Of course, as we get to know more and more about the brain and its function, the dominion of science to bear upon these topics will become increasingly relevant. This doesn't eliminate the role of philosophy to serve as intellectual infrastructure for these budding sciences, but it will bind philosophers and their views in these fields to that science.

Philosophism in this regard appears to contend that a future science of morality and a future science of mind are impossible, or at least that they are utterly neutered without heavy intervention by the relevant philosophy. Further, instead being seen in the role of underwriter to those potential scientific disciplines, philosophism maintains that philosophy is the primary (at times, only) legitimate way to probe these intriguing domains. (Science can merely act as an informer for them.) These philosophistic assertions come with a variety of justifications, many of which smack surprisingly of something very like dualism.

On dualism

Speaking of dualism, another more insidious form of philosophism arises, one that is tied tightly to the extant definition of the word. Some philosophically inclined people feel that it is very important to entertain theological (or other dualistic or supernatural) arguments with tremendous seriousness, provided that they are sufficiently philosophically slick. A certain enchantment with slick arguments seems to characterize this aspect of philosophistic overassertion.

(Of course, it is important to offer sound rebuttals to as much of this specious nonsense as those interested have time and passion for, but these kinds of arguments, in my opinion, deserve far less serious consideration than many individuals give them. Also, it's worth noting that theologians appear loath, if not completely resistant, to abandoning a refuted theological/philosophical religious argument, so rebutting them should be done for a broader audience.)

I'll take a moment to illustrate why we do not need to take sophistry of this sort seriously, however slick. The attitude that theology, dualism, and supernaturalism deserve is no more than acknowledging a very remote possibility. The attendant posterior plausibility for theology, dualism, and supernaturalism, which is very low, is enough to justify not taking these kinds of arguments with much seriousness, at least not on the popular level. (What professional philosophers want to wrestle with is their professional business until a large enough contingent of them agree upon something to garner popular attention.)

This section is long enough as it is, though, and I will leave it here to say that philosophers can and do overassert the relevance and importance of philosophy. When they do so, they are engaging in a problem that deserves to be branded philosophism, with all the negative connotation they would assign to the term scientism.

2. Other professionals don't need to engage in much philosophy

Perhaps the real issue here is simply one of acknowledgement, but I don't think so. It strikes me that philosophism often crops up by arguing that non-philosophical professionals, especially scientists, should take greater care with the philosophy related to their fields, even to being savvy with it. I disagree.

Who has time?

First, an economic argument: the law of comparative advantage disagrees. It is possible that being more philosophically savvy would lead scientists, etc., to be better scientists, but the time demands on doing science (even at a modest level) are already substantial--even without having to acknowledge that many research scientists spend at least a fifth of their working year attempting to convince someone to give them enough money to still have a job next year. Philosophers have time to do good philosophy because they are philosophers, which is usually not true of working scientists because they just don't have time or the inclination that often comes with such leisure.

While it may be possible that some scientists, historians, etc., would do better to become philosophically savvy in the philosophy that underwrites their fields, it's easy to make the case that they would do better still to get better at the techniques directly related to doing their science (with the philosophy underwriting it left implicit). Philosophy is hard and takes a lot of time, particularly to do well, and scientists get the same twenty-four hours as everyone else to carve away at their increasingly specialized, technical, and challenging niches of human knowledge.

We have philosophers for a reason

Second, I don't think they should care. Philosophy is important to philosophers. Science is important to scientists. History is important to historians. Mathematics is important to mathematicians. Sometimes these fields cross each other's paths, perhaps more and more frequently as the research pushes forward and what to do with the frontiers becomes less clear. That does not imply, however, that a person in field X has to feel that field Y is all that important for them. (NB: possibly--that depends upon the field, e.g. theology.) It is sometimes in particular situations but not generally. (Some, but not all, mathematical probability theorists have, for example, a real need to understand the various (philosophical) interpretations of probability to do their work in certain circumstances.)

There is something of a double-standard here, and it is justified. Scientists have philosophy underwriting their field, to be sure, but most of them can do their day-to-day work without paying it much heed. (Compare this situation with their relationship with the field of mathematics.) Most scientists do the majority of their work very well without more philosophy than a vague nod to empiricism and utilitarianism are typically enough. Scientists need philosophy largely to clarify interpretations and some of the boundaries of their methodologies at the weird frontiers (quantum mechanical interpretations and string theory are a clear example of this). Beyond that, and for most day-to-day work in those fields, philosophy is kind of irrelevant--in the, "yeah, it's there implicitly" way. Philosophy, on the other hand, is bound by science now.

Philosophy bound

When I say philosophy is bound by science, what I mean is that while philosophers are more than welcome to do philosophy in ignorance of science, it will usually be bad philosophy--or will become so very quickly. Science is what tethers philosophy to reality more than anything else. Without science, philosophy can very quickly get a bit meta and end up effectively on acid somewhere in the stratosphere--to its major discredit. Good philosophy is bound by science now that we have it, and what's left over is the older definition of philosophism, something of a turf war within philosophy that science and other fields don't need to be dragged into.

(Mathematicians, incidentally, aren't really bound by reality and don't really care--if their axioms end up being nonphysical, I'd think most would be likely to shrug it off with a, "So what? Who ever said they were physical?" That honesty about living abstractly protects them from this criticism, not that they'd care anyway.)

Asserting that scientists need to be savvy about philosophy is only relevant when those scientists are working at the raw edges of the most forward-pushing, abstract fields in which we aren't yet sure of what is going on. Our average solar astronomer, for example, does not need to be the least bit philosophically savvy to have an effective working sense of what constitutes a good model in her field or how to interpret the solar wind data that are being collected to test those models. It would be philosophism, and a waste of her precious, underpaid time, to argue otherwise, even if she said that the only way to gather reliable knowledge about the sun is through science.

3. Intellectual superiority

Philosophy is hard. It is far easier to go wrong than it is to go right with philosophy (also true of science, but science is grounded by evidence and so the wrongness may often be more readily apparent). Therefore, it isn't surprising to find that those capable of doing good philosophy (and good science) often have a bit of an intellectual chip on their shoulders regarding other fields. Often, in fact, there are interdepartmental jokes in universities, especially the colleges of arts and sciences, poking fun about the others' clear "inferiority."

(My favorite such joke, for what it's worth, reads that the second-cheapest department in any university is the mathematics department, as all its faculty need to do their work is paper, pencils, and waste baskets. The cheapest is the philosophy department because they don't need the waste baskets.)

I would argue that the "harder" a field is, the more its members tend to feel they can dig on the others. Overcoming high intellectual barriers to entry can have this effect on our psychology, particularly in people who have couched much of their self-esteem in their intellects. This is bad enough when it discredits fields outside the imaginary circle, but it's often downright nasty when happening between them.

The hard sciences, those requiring heavy-duty mathematics, often pride themselves on being more concerned with reality than, say, the philosophy and mathematics departments, and for good reasons. In contrast, the mathematics and philosophy departments often pride themselves on being more savvy with the abstract--and here's the problem: hence more intelligent--than those in the hard sciences. Sometimes it's vocalized; sometimes it's not, but the attitudes are common nonetheless. Everyone cherishes his own field, and none more than those whose fields are hard. (What that means is "mathematical" or "formally logical," not difficult, an unfair term--I don't think I can write a novel, and so writing one would be terribly hard, but few, if any, "hard" science/math folks see literature as a "hard" field).

Thus, I don't think it's surprising that philosophers can come off as smug and intellectually self-aggrandizing. Worse, because of the way philosophy operates, it comes off that way naturally to almost everyone else, creating a challenging problem for those who would popularize philosophy.

"There's a category for that, and let me tell you how that makes you wrong."

For instance, philosophers categorize everything, often with very precise, very abstruse terms that are very difficult to get a firm grasp on. Philosophers become adept at navigating these categories, understanding their ins, their outs, their strengths, their weaknesses, there genera, and their specifics. And then, when someone talks to a philosopher about philosophical-type ideas, the philosopher immediately categorizes those ideas and can do things with the classification, often sowing doubt and leaving the person they're talking with feeling quite stupid, typically very unfairly.

Here's a tip for philosophers that would popularize philosophy: people hate that. Hate it. Work as hard as you can not do it, ever. (NB: Many of those I would suggest play at being philosophismists have great disdain for Peter Boghossian, whose main message is the kind of authenticity that gets broken by philosophical categorizing and the ensuing assumptions.)

Philosophers argue as much as lawyers

Philosophers are also trained to try and get everything right, which they seek to achieve by learning to look for holes in arguments that they then tear apart. By implication, this leaves the person holding the torn-apart argument feeling wrong, which is often sufficient justification for the philosopher to tear apart the argument in the first place. Philosophers are also trained to defend their ideas and tear down opposing ones with pitiless mental tooth and claw. So philosophers are trained to find holes in arguments, tear them apart, and they do it like second nature.

Here's a tip for philosophers that would popularize philosophy: people hate that. Hate it. Work as hard as you can to do this with extreme care. This, again, falls on the crap side of authenticity. [Indeed, a humorous one-word sentence summarizing a thesis in philosophy (presented on humor site lolmythesis.com) captures something of the problem: "Philosophers will almost always lie to you to prove their point" (Link).]

Incidentally, in the sciences, despite some scientists who are jerks, evidence is always the final arbiter whenever it is available. This is not the case in philosophy or mathematics. Additionally, in mathematics, at least in the mainstream, the axioms are usually far less contentious than in philosophy, and so the proof is just the proof (most Ph.D. dissertation defenses in mathematics are just a talk about the main results of the thesis since with proofs, there's no need to argue to defend one's position). This leaves philosophy heavily dependent upon arguments, which easily become motivated ones, to defend itself, and the trait shows. Notice, philosophers who would popularize philosophy, how nearly all jokes about lawyers go.

The dark side

Sometimes the dark side comes out, though. Philosophers, particularly those enamored with their own ideas or the importance of their own fields, will at times summon an air of intellectual superiority as a subtle ad hominem against the opponents' positions. Doing so seeks to undermine confidence in the opposing argument by showing everyone how much dumber (or less savvy) its presenters are than the philosopher. This has been running rampant lately with all the references--even from Daniel Dennett!--to what undergraduates in philosophy should and shouldn't understand (but so-and-so, apparently doesn't). This is philosophism.

So here is a clear issue with philosophism and a critical part of its connotation: it is condescending. This is hurtful to any productive dialogue and the reputation of philosophy (which is already far weaker than the reputation of science and thus may suffer the insult far more grievously). Like other forms of condescension, we should endeavor to keep them to a minimum.

Bonus: Sophisticated Theologians

I will not make this section long. Sophisticated Theologians(TM) (meaning theologians or apologists who categorize themselves as philosophers or philosophically savvy) have nothing* but philosophical or philosophistic arguments (sophistry) for their God, so they are usually quite quick to play the role of the philosophist. The reason is plain: they wish to keep the relevance of philosophy in all fields overasserted so they can keep misusing it to steal opportunities to talk about theism like it is a position that deserves our intellectual respect.

*They also have their "inner witness" and "divine sense" claims not to need arguments, and they can keep it and the Great Pumpkin. Atheist philosophers insisting upon some philosophical respectability to these beliefs is a clear instantiation of philosophism.

Conclusion

If scientism is a legitimate word that voices a legitimate criticism, philosophism is as well and for the same reasons. It is as anti-intellectual as anything that deserves to be called scientism, and it is as bad for philosophy--and everyone--as scientism is said to be for science. Indeed, it may be worse, because whereas scientism is science overstepping, philosophism is philosophy strangling itself. Science isn't going away, however scientistic it gets, but philosophy gone philosophistic will be beaten into the margins at great cost to us all.