>It's all or nothing indeed. If you accept certain points then of course you
>are accepting other points: the central issue being whether one wants to
>believe things because it's cosy, or whether one is prepared to believe
>things for only which there is a decent body of evidence.
>
>I am not certain of the usefulness today of the great philosophers in the
>specific discussion of evolution and existence of God, who were thinking
>2000 years before Darwin, Watson and Crick and radio telescopes...

Agree.  No interest in believing because it's cosy.  Believe where 
there is a decent body of evidence.

However never lose the sense of wonder or curiosity, or whatever you 
want to call it, at what is not understood.  That is the root of 
humanity - the attempt to understand more.  It's true, much of the 
philosophy I've read so far is just bad science, superceded as you 
rightly say be those whose sense of wonder led them to new ideas 
which could be tested scientifically.

But let me give you another example.

Many people think that Einstein was the first to see time as a 
dimensional concept.
He wasn't.  Googling on this fills in the details:  Wells wrote, in 
The Time Machine, that "there is no difference between Time and any 
of the three dimensions of Space, except that our consciousness moves 
along it".  Einstein was the first to use the idea, 10 years after 
Wells.  Einstein used it within mathematics, to suggest some rather 
unbelievable things.  Later, some of those unbelievable things were 
shown to be true.

My assertions so far defend no religious point of view.  The 
questions, and the answers so far, suggest that some sense of wonder, 
or curiosity, or whatever you want to call it still has a place.  For 
those people who wish to cosily think that we know everything (or 
everything worth knowing) I would no more wish to shatter their 
belief, providing they do no harm, than the beliefs of those of 
religious faith who do no harm.

If there are others who remain curious about eg.

The nature of reality (number and type of dimensions, implications of 
string theory, membranes etc);
How to understand, if it can be understood, wave / particle duality;
Unity and plurality (interconnectedness of everything vs separateness 
of everything);
The nature of morality: goodness and badness;

then we share a common interest.  As for philosophers of earlier 
generations science has both borrowed and been constrained by so many 
of their words and ideas that it's worth reading at least a little 
about them to see how we chose to explore this bit of the map / world 
of ideas rather than some other bit.  Western science exists partly 
because of philosophy, and it's not random that one of the highest 
academic qualifications in science is the Doctorate in Philosophy....

Julian