So religion is philosophy?
Is science a philosophy?
No. It's better.
How so? I consider philosophy to be more practical for the common man, whereas science is more theoretical for the intellectual crowd. However I really don't hold one to be superior to the other. I think they're eq
From a utilitarian standpoint, science makes testable predictions which can be iterated, producing models which both make predictions about unknown aspects of the natural world with great reliability, and generating practical applications which philosophy cannot.
I'll just say that science is not a belief system, but a tool for observation and study, but as I remember hearing it from a scientist during a bioethics conference (don't remember all of it, but I'll simplify it): "Science produces results and generate models, but we use philosophy to interpret that data and make rational decisions based on those interpretations." Science itself makes discoveries and produces verifiable data, but the philosophy aspect kicks in when we're left to deal with the application of it.
What I've been referring to is the philosophical problems associated with ontology: you have Idealists, Dualists, and Materialsts. Idealists believe the world is the mind, Dualists believe in both the mind and body, and Materialists only believe in the body. To a good extent, it seems most people are fine with dualism, but a growing movement towards Materialism, specifically Physicalism, has sprung up amongst many athiests, like Richard Dawkins for example. When I refer to concepts as mind and body, mind implies that the world is in our heads - like Plato's perfect forms, while Materialists hold that all we can rely is what our senses tell us (the body). Often times the arguement goes with "Occam's Razor cut Plato's beard" with the clash between these differing ontological positions.
However, I retort with Hempel's Dilemma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_Dilemma. This is where I warble about the problem between physics and meta-physics - where do we draw the line?
The only problem I have with people like Dawkins and other "New Athiests" is that they quickly assign truth value to scientific evidence without fully questioning the validity of their own "truth" as truth is a fickle and definitively, relative, term. Often the best answer I recieve from the Physicalist p.o.v is that we can only base physics off of our current scientific knowledge. The other apsect is immediately assigning of negative aspects without a firm contextual background on all of the bad things that religion has done and continues to do. This would require us to actually delve into cultural anthropology, history and economics at the time, but that is not within the part of this thread.
The other problem is that I see science as the wrong tool to measure religion: that should fall within the realm of philosophy, especially when many aspects of religion are grounded firmly in meta. People like to immediately assign it the value of woo (however, there's a lot stuff in religion I would definitely assign woo without a blink) and the problem is that woo and meta don't have a defined separation. The problem is that science cannot define or measure what we could assign meta values - such as the "truth" or a concept like the color of green independent of the physical wavelengths we can see with eyes and the signals the neurons in our brains use to interpret it.
That being said, I'm quite fine with athiesm and science, but it disturbs me when people are rushing to support Physicalism without drawing a good response to Hempel's Dilemma (or is it even possible to give a satisfactory answer in the first place?) and quick to cast philosophy off the bus, though I will agree, a lot of it is mind boggling, but it's there for a reason.
