I want to agree with a lot of this, but I think there is a lot that is more complicated than this essay allows for.

Consider in the footnote:

> There may be some things it's a net win to include in your identity. For example, being a scientist... A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to rejecting it.

The comparison of "scientist" to "biblical literalist" is, when you think about it, sort of an odd one. Creationists get a lot of press, but strict creationists make up a minority of religious people (depending on how the question is asked, something like a third of Evangelicals believe in Creationism according to https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-many-c..., and even less of other Christian religious groups). It's kind of like comparing Thomas Aquinas to the pseudo-scientist Aliens guy from History channel. After all something like a third of all US adults believe that some UFOs have been alien space craft (https://news.gallup.com/poll/350096/americans-believe-ufos.a...... meaning many more Americans believe that we've been visited by aliens than believe in Young Earth Creationism). At the same time, Aquinas's Summa was structured around surfacing objections to religious hypotheses of the day.

But whether the "scientist" label really is as Graham says is debatable. For one example: I wrote a paper in college for a class in Artificial Intelligence, where we were assigned to pick a problem and write about how people solved it. I wrote about some AI approaches taken to learning the suffixes of English words. As I dug, I found that there were two really well entrench camps between Connectionist (people who favored approaches using Neural Networks) and Symbolist (people who favored approaches like decision trees). There was a several-years back and forth between the two camps, and they were pretty clearly not "following the evidence wherever it leads." Whenever the authors were comparing their own algorithms to the other side's, they used the best version of their own but a mediocre version of the other's algorithm. Perhaps though this examples serves to bolster Graham's larger hypothesis, that people don't like to consider things that go against their identity, as the scientists in question clearly identified as Connectionist and Symbolist camps.

I don't know how pervasive it is among scientists, but given the frequency it comes up in the EconTalk podcast as the host talks with academics, it seems like it is pretty common for scientists, being humans, to fall into the same trap of identifying with their own work.

On the other hand, many (not all, but many) of the theologians I've read actually do a pretty good job of following the evidence where it leads. Or, in many cases, where it led them, as many of the most compelling theologians are converts. CS Lewis is a pretty famous example - and his book Surprised by Joy is a great account of simply following the evidence. Thomas Merton is another good modern example, as is Peter Kreeft. Of course, St. Augustine's Confessions is still the archetype of this conversion story. So I don't think it's as simple as "religion = labels, science = pursuit of truth" in the way Graham portrays it.

> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity...

Graham does make note in the opening that people often make arguments for which they have not much evidence, but there is a gap between "people can't think clearly" and "people don't think clearly." There are plenty of examples of people thinking clearly about things where are part of their identity, as there are plenty of examples of people including something in their identity because they've thought clearly about something. One of my favorite quotes from GK Chesterton is "the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." Yes, some people use labels as security blankets. But plenty of people apply labels only after a long-fought intellectual struggle. Chesterton is himself an example of this, as he describes in his own writing how he embraced the label "orthodox" after a circuitous route of trying to discover truth for himself.