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LoginIn one of the rare moments of cleverness, Wheaton quickly rubs in Radisson’s face Hawking’s misguided dig that “philosophy is dead”. God’s not dead, philosophy is dead. Nice bumper sticker. This is one of many reasons it is ignorant, anti-intellectual, and counter-productive to the cause of critical thinking and atheism when scientists mouth off in anti-philosophy ways. In doing this scientists like Hawking and Krauss give undeserved ammunition to people who want to attack reason in general–since so much reasoning in general is more philosophical than quantifiably scientific in character.
Philosophy is unavoidable. Science does not answer every question, because some questions are not amenable to strictly scientific analyses. Or other questions that are capable of scientific analysis still require time and scientific progress and new discoveries before they can be scientific. This does not mean that theology is the answer. Theological answers are just ancient guesses with no magic plausibility just because better scientific ones don’t yet exist. There are philosophical ways to deal with a huge range of issues that people think about. Applying tests of logic, consistency, coherence, conceptual clarification, thought experiments, extrapolations from scientific findings to philosophical implications, and using common sense reasoning, we can rationally approach the huge panoply of questions that right now don’t have specifically scientific answers. The limits of science are not the door to intellectual anarchy and theology. We must grapple with other questions than scientific ones some times and when doing so we must do so as rigorously as possible, rather than as carelessly. Saying philosophy is dead is only an invitation to ignore crucial questions and, so, answer them thoughtlessly, with who knows what consequences for our lives. Our culture suffers from a failure to do good philosophy.
I may be the least philosophical person on the forum. I took exactly one (1) philosophy class in college, because it was required by my major. The instructor, a man with a doctorate, was a walking bad hair day that didn't know how to dress himself properly. And he drank some obscure brand of tea that was supposed to have mystical properties, that smelled like dog piss. Not impressed. I've also read the a Philosophy degree is considered one of the most useless for finding a job.
I got an A largely becase I mentioned that I had read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and could quote from the book. I read the book in the first place because my Mormon High Priest brother recommended it to me. Whatever.
In the time I have been on the forum there seems to have been a paradigm shift away from solid philosophical topics (read murky bullshit) to more simple, logic/rhetoric/argumentation methods. Yes, I know that is philosophy, but nobody recently has quoted Schopenhauer or Wittgenstein, which is fine with me. I think of it from a
god of the gaps standpoint- the more you know, the less sense obscure argumentism makes and the more discussions can be solved by science or knowledge.
Anyway, my two cents.
