The difficulty with philosophy is that there are no standards. There's no clear cut way to distinguish between a genuine philosopher and some chucklefuck pandering their ideology. It's at this point in the discussion that somebody points out that we don't do that so that we don't hobble philosophy by limiting the discourse, and there is a valid argument to be made for that. There's also a lot of god-bothering turd-polishers parroting the same line, mortally frightened that some of their last remaining habitat will come under the same scrutiny that got them laughed out of the rest of the modern world. Without some metric to tell them apart, your average skeptic views the 'philosopher' with distrust, and rightly so. Theologians have had precious few other options ever since science started demanding results, schools banned nuns and The Lord's Prayer, congregations started looking for meaning, and the Arkham Assylum for the Criminally Insane ended out-patient lobotomies. Philosophy will be regarded as one of the last havens of people pretending to think while under the influence of religion until they finally put up the big sign that says,
You'd think there would be a fairly simple solution to all of this. After all, philosophy includes these self-proclaimed "Philosophy of Religion" chaps and you'd think that they'd be able to distinguish between their product and everybody else's. They're usually pretty intense about their exclusivity, but they're oddly silent in this particular case. Perhaps we need to stop throwing food into their cage until they figure that out.
Until then, there are some simple critical tools that we can use to discriminate between the signal and the noise. To separate the chaff from the unalloyed bullshit. Is somebody engaging in blatant equivocation in a shameless attempt to draw unjustified parallels between belief in their imaginary friend and science? Apologists masquerading as philosophers love to try and link science and philosophy, philosophy and religion, religion as a whole and their particular set of peculiar personal beliefs. It's almost as if they thought that the contrast produced by juxtaposing the successes of science with the manifest failures of the churches on so very many fronts was a good thing for them. Putting lipstick on a pig only serves to illustrate how nasty the pig looks and that somebody involved is a particularly dim-witted con artist. So no, science isn't philosophy, just as chemistry isn't a branch of alchemy, astrology isn't a subsect of alchemy, and people aren't fish. The one may have roots in the other, lost in the mists of time, but they've been off doing their own thing for so long as to have changed into something new and altogether different. Anybody still trying to conflate the two is really just abusing both of them in a shameless attempt at promoting their unwholesome religion fetish.
"You must be at least this tall --->
To go on the Philosophy ride!"
You'd think there would be a fairly simple solution to all of this. After all, philosophy includes these self-proclaimed "Philosophy of Religion" chaps and you'd think that they'd be able to distinguish between their product and everybody else's. They're usually pretty intense about their exclusivity, but they're oddly silent in this particular case. Perhaps we need to stop throwing food into their cage until they figure that out.
Until then, there are some simple critical tools that we can use to discriminate between the signal and the noise. To separate the chaff from the unalloyed bullshit. Is somebody engaging in blatant equivocation in a shameless attempt to draw unjustified parallels between belief in their imaginary friend and science? Apologists masquerading as philosophers love to try and link science and philosophy, philosophy and religion, religion as a whole and their particular set of peculiar personal beliefs. It's almost as if they thought that the contrast produced by juxtaposing the successes of science with the manifest failures of the churches on so very many fronts was a good thing for them. Putting lipstick on a pig only serves to illustrate how nasty the pig looks and that somebody involved is a particularly dim-witted con artist. So no, science isn't philosophy, just as chemistry isn't a branch of alchemy, astrology isn't a subsect of alchemy, and people aren't fish. The one may have roots in the other, lost in the mists of time, but they've been off doing their own thing for so long as to have changed into something new and altogether different. Anybody still trying to conflate the two is really just abusing both of them in a shameless attempt at promoting their unwholesome religion fetish.
