This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “words,” is said by the artist to be inspired by a post of philosopher Stephen Law, “Pseudo-profundity—from ‘Believing Bullshit.”

Believing Bullshit is Law’s own book published in 2011, and I hope to read it before too long. His post is in fact one chapter of that book, so you can read it to see if you want to go further. The post describes six kinds of pseudoprofundity and then tells us how to deal with them (mockery is one tactic).

The species “Post-modern pseudo-profundity” includes the following holotype produced by “the French intellectual Félix Guattari” (why are the French so prone to this kind of stuff?):

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis.

People who write like that should have their toenails pulled off! Yet a generation of college students was brought up to think that this was not only serious thinking, but good academic writing. Indeed, there are some evolutionary biologists whose prose isn’t that far from the above. I have a list of examples on my computer, but I’ll spare you and avoid indicting my colleagues.

But I digress. The cartoon:



It almost needn’t to be said that theologians, especially Sophisticated Theologians™, are perhaps the most prolix generators of pseudo-profundity. Here are two examples from Catholic theologian John Haught:

“It is essential to religious experience, after all, that ultimate reality be beyond our grasp. If we could grasp it, it would not be ultimate.” (Deeper Than Darwin, p. 68).

This cannot be put into plain English because it involves not only a tautology but a misunderstanding of the word “ultimate.” What is ultimate reality anyway? Is that something different from the mundane proximate reality that we scientists and laypeople deal with?

Another:

In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. . . . Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty. (Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, pp. 203-204).

My translation: “I don’t need no stinking evidence! There’s an afterlife simply because I want there to be one.”