As a philosopher, what's your response to the contention of some scientists that philosophy is no longer relevant as a way of understanding the universe?

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I consider myself an amateur philosopher and my response would be, “sure, I absolutely agree with you!”

I don’t try to understand the physics of the universe. Whatever insights the scientists who do study it come up with, I’ll be happy to incorporate into my model of Ultimate Reality(TM).

The difference between science and philosophy is that philosophy is content with being merely descriptive. It doesn’t need to be predictive, though it’s nice when that happens. In physics, the fact that string theory is largely descriptive without being prescriptive puts it in a ‘lesser’ speculative category.

But in philosophy, the different aspects of string theory can be abstracted over to form various meta-insights about physics. Philosophy plays in a much bigger space than science does. Science has no time for questions of religion, philosophy has no time for science’s materialistic perspective and is perfectly happy to reason about God.

As a philosopher, I see all fields of science as just small sub-domains of philosophy. So when scientists make claims of truth, I’m happy to accept those claims, without even questioning their veracity or validity, because my philosophical tools work just as well with wrong claims as they do with right ones.

In my world, there is no conflict between science and religion. There isn’t even any conflict between specific claims of religion, such as afterlife vs. reincarnation. To me the conflict simply creates a new realm of inquiry that can then provide insight across both sides of the divide.

It wouldn’t even bother me if scientists attacked my field of inquiry as irrelevant. I’ll accept all your arguments as true. Then try to give color to those arguments using my historical and philosophical perspective. There’s always a vein to mine.