Week 6 essay answer

Question 1:
After many incidents of his life, Faqir Chand has taught himself and others a lesson, as quoted in book Is the Universe an App: “your really helper is your Self and your own Faith, but you are badly mistaken and believe that somebody from without comes to help you.” The first-hand experiences from his life and work have driven him so famous about the notion that religious visions are just illusory.
His life-changing perception of religion came from an event that he was in a deadly battle with the enemy. He saw, or fantasized that his Guru, Shiv Brat Lal, foretold him about the failure of his enemy when he was in the death or alive uncertainty. However, he also discovered later on that he was also the “helper” of Shiv Brat Lal’s other disciples, and they insisted that he really helped them. From that instance on, he became skeptical about the visions of religious figures.
Later on in his work as a preacher, he also discovered other types of awareness and strengthened his own belief that “[Nobody] from without comes to help you.” Faqir Chand explains that when he thought about the simulation of the mind and realized that these images he saw were inexistent, this realization is also just “a projection.” Furthermore, although he preaches not to believe in something out of body, his disciples always insisted on seeing him solved so many of their personal problems. Because he had absolutely no idea about this appearance, it strengthened him at believing in the illusory nature of religious visions.
Just as a personal note, I think there is one contradiction in his preaching. He preaches that “your real helper is your Self and you own Faith”, but in the live/death battle he was in a worry, opposite to Faith, of death and calling out for ammunition reinforcement. Thus, there is no way that he was believing in his Self and his own Faith like he preached afterwards. Therefore, while agreeing with his notion that no one from without can help us, I do not think he has enough credential at preaching the first part of his lesson.
Question 2: What is meant by the phrase “philosophy done well is science; philosophy done poorly remains philosophy”?
The definition of doing philosophy is thinking and acting rationally. In order to perform such processes, one needs to have a certain level of effort and knowledge. The effort is needed to hypothesize then test and retest to find out whether our conclusions about the surroundings are right, and the knowledge is needed for the “test and retest” that our effort carries. Combining these two together, we get the definition of science, which is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” (Oxford Dictionary). In addition, the fundamental basis of doing philosophy is trying to use different academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology alternatively to find out the reasons, and in our modern language, these disciplines are called either natural or social science.
If doing philosophy requires effort (observation and experiment) and knowledge (systematic study), and within this knowledge is the word science itself, then philosophy done well is inevitably science. However, doing philosophy badly, which is involving poor effort and limited knowledge (science), is also called philosophy because this is just the way we trying, or try to think, rationally; having little knowledge but trying to think logically is far better than reading a lot of books but believe in people’s anecdotes right away. Philosophy can be compared with drawing. A beautiful picture is considered an Art, but a bad drawing remains drawing; the badness does not render it to become something else. This is how I understand the phrase above.