Science vs. Philosophy?

Given some of the recent exchanges in the comments sections of this blog, I thought this recent piece by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, responding to physicist Lawrence Krauss's dismissal of philosophy, is worth a look.

The piece is also of interest for its tangential relation to the cosmological question that drives much thinking in theology and the philosophy of religion (and, I would argue, implicitly motivates religious leanings in many ordinary people).

Leibniz stated the question in the following terms: "Why is there something and not nothing?" Physicist Victor Stenger claimed in his bestselling book, God: The Failed Hypothesis, that physicists have an answer to this age-old question. I argued briefly (but, I think, decisively) in Is God a Delusion? that the so-called answer he offers is no answer at all.

This brief exchange between me and Stenger is, in effect, being replayed by Krauss and his critics--insofar as Krauss has framed his most recent book, A Universe from Nothing, as offering an answer to the perennial question, and several philosophers have pointed out that Krauss simply does not answer the philosophical question at all--for reasons very similar to the ones I gave in response to Stenger. Krauss effectively concedes the point when pressed--but follows up with more dismissal of philosophy. He doesn't care about the philosophical question.

Fine. If he wants to confine himself to questions in physics, he has every right to do so. But he shouldn't pretend that answers to physics questions are answers to superficially similar philosophical ones. I would say he shouldn't pretend this even as a marketing ploy (which is what he basically concedes it was). And no one should pretend--as Dawkins seems to do--that Krauss has somehow managed to silence once and for all one of the deep wellsprings of belief in the transcendent.