What?? You want to inquire into meaning and purpose and you ignore the discipline of inquiry into meaning and purpose? That is absurd.
If you can ignore for a moment the archaic sexism of terminology, there’s a reason why mathematics is called “the queen of the sciences” — the king, or Ursprung of them all, including mathematics, is philosophy.
For example, she claims that God exists. A typical trait of God is knowing everything about the universe; say, knowing the positions, momenta, and spin of every particle. But QM gives us Heisenberg's Uncertainty, which prevents anybody, including hypothetical deities, from knowing that information. Indeed, QM typically isn't materialistic; it is wrong to insist that all of those particles definitely have some position and momentum at an instant in time. So, whatever her God is, it isn't the all-powerful one. (The all-powerful God has many better-tread problems in pure metaphysics, like the Problem of Evil, but I don't know what "evil" is and so I'm leaning on QM.)
There is no problem in having to learn philosophy by reading surveys of historical ideologies. Philosophy is cumulative, and as little as one semester of studying historical philosophy can massively improve a person's critical thinking skills.
Really, the problem is in not taking seriously enough the invalidation of old philosophies by newer thoughts, as we continue to improve what we know. There are many positions that are simply wrong, including positions which we currently think are correct!
and the problem of evil is only significant to lay people; in the study of the philosophy of religion it has been considered a rather weak objection for some time now.
We're both deists, by the way. I follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster. However, the FSM is absurd, which means that I cannot use the FSM's existence to conclude facts, and additionally doesn't affect the material universe. Also, the FSM doesn't maintain cults, encourage child abuse, start wars, nor allow simony.
Your "traditional theism" is metaphysically and epistemically weak; it cannot say anything about the world other than that its deity exists and has material affect upon the universe. However, empirically, there is no evidence of the deity (because they are supernatural), and so the deity cannot have any scientific method associated with it. Simply put, there's no room in the natural world for a supernatural being! Every empirical effect is instead considered scientifically.
The only gap left would be for you to show that miracles or other supernatural phenomena are real. On that, I have nothing polite to say, just to wish you good luck on what will definitely fail.
Let's not pretend that naturalism rests not on metaphysical assumptions.
I don't have a straw man. I have any deity which is like Jehovah, with Jehovah himself as a special case. Any deity is subject to self-defeating arguments and open to criticism from science.
I am not a naturalist, but that's the closest position that you can imagine, I guess.
Anyway, if you don't actually want to talk about QM, then we'll just have to talk about how Jehovah's followers keep trying to do something about COVID-19, but all of their appeals have led to nothing. Meanwhile, science and technology give us models for understanding, combating, and preventing the pandemic. Are you really going to pledge yourself to your deity and cough your lungs out?
Science can only posit the how. Not the who or the why. Throwing quantum mechanics at the problem doesn't solve anything either, because ultimately you at some point at the end of a nigh infinite chain of why are left with the question "Why something rather than Nothing?"
The answer is either silence, or God, the recognized nominative signpost of the answer , even by the Wittgensteinian approach.
Your COVID-19 related rantings commit the fallacy of assuming the nature of God, or committing the anthropocentric fallacy of thinking God even gives a rat's arse about us, or that there is enough of a working understanding of prayer to count on it in a technological way. It's not a terribly uncommon itis for the modern theistic skeptic, but does demonstrate a horrendous lack of effort in having grounded one's skepticism through actual effort to confront and dismantle the theistic construct at it's core, or to understand it's place in human society.
Religion has no beef with science, nor the other way around.
Your bold claim "why something rather than nothing?" assumes that there is, in fact, a something to refer to, and QM directly challenges the simplicity of that assumption. So many words to fight against the lack of an ontic wavefunction!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...
I'd be the last person to argue that there is a lot of trash in philosophy. Hermetic stuff that revolves around itself and simulates complexity of thought through choice of words. There are definitely many pearls as well.
90% of everything is trash, that's true nearly everywhere.
Edit: Actually, rereading this article, the author is clearly saying basically the opposite. The author is saying philosophy is useful if it is critical.
"""Unfortunately, many important problems are fundamentally philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is unavoidable. How can we proceed?"""
How can you point to this article as proof that we shouldn't be studying philosophy when the article says it is unaviodable?