Zvi Zaks When it comes to cosmology (and some other fields), philosophy has been rendered largely irrelevant by science. To try to discuss questions like the origin of the cosmos without having at least a basic understanding of the observable evidence and the ideas that derive from that evidence is like trying to cure cancer by doing a scary dance (to drive out demons). It just doesn’t work.
Granted, the data lead to some highly counterintuitive and even seemingly impossible ideas, but, unless you can explain the data in another way, the only way to avoid those ideas is to ignore the data. And you have to know what the data says before you can explain it differently.
Maybe a better way of saying this is that much of what was philosophy has now become science. From Plato to Descartes, philosophers did what they could with the limitations of their senses and as yet limited tools of math. Today, we award the same PhD in quantum mechanics we once awarded to folks like Aquinas.
Another way of putting it might be that the methods used by philosophy have been replaced by the methods used by science to investigate topics like cosmology.
The amazing thing is that those same philosophers, including the authors of the Talmud can writers of the Hadith, were the predecessors of today’s fundamentalist thinkers. The only religion whose philosophy seems to grow in the fertilized soil offered by science is Buddhism.