I was watching an episode of the TV series JAG last night. I used to enjoy it, and still find some episodes that are warmly and engagingly human; but last night’s episode was one in which a General’s remarks about Islam attracted the attention of the media, and sent the General to a general court martial to answer charges of “religionism”. If racism is an attitude that adjudges the value or disvalue of people according to their race (whatever that is supposed to be), religionism may be considered judging religions by their supposed truth or falsity — when, of course, they are without exception, groundless, whether as ritual practice or as truth. Worshipping a god, after all, is pretending that there is one to worship; just as obeying a god is pretending that there are commands reliably attributed to a divine source.

Anyway, to get to the point: the JAG episode that I watched (entitled “Fighting Words”) included the whitewashing of the Islamic idea of “jihad” or “holy struggle” as a purely spiritual practice, which, whether there is a side to jihad which is indeed a purely spiritual practice or not, and whether or not, as the Colonel MacKenzie character alleges, it referred to killing unbelievers who were killing Muslims in Islam’s early years, has also been traditionally interpreted as warfare against infidels wherever they may be found. And the point is this. It is often remarked that religions have been playing catch-up with science. As science more and more brought religious beliefs into question, religions have sought areas of compatibility between science and religion, and have downplayed areas of conflict. In fact, some “historians”, like James Hannam, even go so far as to suggest that science itself is the product of Christianity. But this is not the only area in which the religious try to play catch-up. They regularly do it with regard to morality as well. As people have become more humane (a process chronicled in Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature), so religion claims to find the source of this greater sensitivity in the pages of its holy books — at least insofar as they feel they can do such moral somersaults. Human rights, we will be told, are present in the words of Jesus, and in a more developed sense in medieval theology, just waiting for the opportunity to express themselves in the social revolutions of the last two or three hundred years, such as the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women (in places, at least), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other such moral advances.

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I’ve been busy all day trying to fix the electric starter on my snowblower, but so far without result, so I take refuge in my blog. First, I scout the usual suspects — Butterflies and Wheels, Why Evolution is True, Metamagician, RD.net, Pharygula, usw. — and then I gravitate back to the one that simply begged to be debugged: a little piece in the Toronto Review of Books by one Nora Parker on “The Future of Religion in a Secular Age.” (h/t Ophelia Benson) Well, you’ve got to hand it to her: it’s a real gripper of a title. And even more scintillating reading! But what follows here is a real cri de coeur, an expression of rage and frustration (and not only at snowblowers)!

Take the closing remark, intended to sum up with one of the religious profundities uttered by the erudite religious believers for people “with a penchant for the numinous”:

… one sensed that this wasn’t the night to confront the New Atheists. It was, instead, a night to be buoyed by Rabbi Sacks’s declaration that “Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility,” whatever that possibility may be.

I know only two things about Rabbi Sacks, neither of them favourable. First, he found his father’s dying in misery a growing experience. He didn’t really explain what his father got out of it. Second, I began reading his book The Dignity of Difference, and gave it up at the point where he dismisses polytheists — the dignity of not too much difference, it seems.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein begins his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the famous words “Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist.” The world is all that is the case. Over the last few days there have been a number of attempts to distinguish science, as the study of what is the case, from other disciplines or modalities of thinking which also take note of what is the case. And, just for the record, all these discussions are really (to use Wittgenstein’s famous word for it) doing philosophy, and consitute an attempt to say what is the case with various kinds of utterance, whether scientific, moral, religious, and so on. For instance, Russell Blackford attempts to do something like this in his Talking Philosophy post, entitled “Is Science So Limited?” And Jerry Coyne has addressed the question in a number of posts: “Brother Blackford and Other Ways of Knowing,” “Can philosophy or religion alone establish facts,” and “Guardian writer foolishly claims that religion answers factual questions,” to go no further than three, and we should include Jim Houston’s Talking Philosophy piece here as well, since it was at least an oblique response to Jerry Coyne’s rhetorical challenge to Keith Ward about the factuality of religion. And all of them are doing philosophy, whether well or ill.

One of the real issues here, just to fill in a bit of background, is whether only science can tell us what is the case — was der Fall ist. But notice that when science tries to do this it must move into a different register, what we might call the basso profundo of philosophy. Because this movement into a new register is often not acknowledged the accusation of “scientism” is frequently heard from religious believers who claim that the new atheism is scientistic (not scientific, note, but scientistic) — that is, whether the new atheism is an ideology which simply declares certain things not to be the case, or, at least, to limit what is the case to the propositions of science. We can quote Wittgenstein again:

4.1 Propositions represent [darstellen = portray or picture] the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences).
4.111 Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.
(The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose places is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)
4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.

So, for Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus phase, only science dealt with what is the case, and the totality of true propositions comprise the totality of science. But then, of course, it becomes almost impossible to say this, which is why, he suggests, what he says in the Tractatus should be used like a ladder, and then thrown away. Of course, as most people know, Wittgenstein was finally not content with this positivism — he simply could not remain silent, because he had so much more to say that did not consist in the propositions of science, and were in some sense true — a positivism which was doubtless influenced by his relationships with those who made up the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle), a group of philosophers centred around the University of Vienna in the 1920s. But the First World War changed all that, and perhaps just being a Wittgenstein changed all that too, for like his brothers, three of four of whom died by suicide, Wittegenstein had some pretty significant psychological problems. However, unable to remain silent, he went on to “invent” (that would not be too strong a word, I think) a kind of philosophy which dominated English-speaking philosophy in the fifties and sixties commonly known as “ordinary language philosophy,” and consisted in the clarification of our ordinary everyday concepts. And while one might want to say that philosophy must go much further than this, the achievement of conceptual clarification that was undertaken during this ordinary language period was not nugatory.

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