Are most philosophers of religion theists? You may be right, but I don't actually know. And I also don't know whether most philosophers of religion are theists before they study philosophy of religion. I also don't know how many philosophers change their minds after they study philosophy of religion. My sense is that what you're really interested in is how much influence philosophical arguments have on people's religious beliefs—at least, if the people are people who study philosophy. It's an interesting question and all I have to offer are personal impressions, which may well be wrong. I'd guess that there are lots of philosophers who stopped believing partly because they studied various arguments for the existence of God and found them to be inadequate. I'd guess that because it fits a fair number of people I've known, but as they say: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." I'd also guess that there are far fewer philosophers who started out as non-believers and became theists because of their...

I just wanted to clear up an important point. The article was not removed. It is still in the journal, including the online edition, and it will stay there. I'd suggest reading this piece http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Journal-Article-Provoked-a/240021 which gives a clearer picture of the review process of the journal itself. In particular, it makes clear that the associate editorial board doesn't make decisions about what gets published, and isn't involved in the day-to-day operation of the journal. I will leave it to others to discuss more substantive issues.

No. A PhD would't be necessary. We have had Russian students in our PhD program, and they did not come to us with PhDs. The most important thing will be evidence of philosophical ability. Course records matter; so do informative letters of reference. The writing sample is particularly important. And if there are publications (not required) they would be useful too.

Not as such, though perhaps not quite for the reason you might think. The discipline of philosophy isn't a cure for "inauthentic living." In my experience, at least, philosophers are no more and no less prone to being "inauthentic" than anyone else. Philosopher often have pretty good BS detectors, but being good at spotting BS and living "authentically" are probably only loosely correlated. Philosophers who set their minds to it could no doubt offer up some subtle and interesting reflections on what counts as leading an authentic life. But being articulate about it and being good at doing it are very different skills. Compare: it's one thing to be a good art critic. It's another thing to be a good artist. That said, some people who follow a particular "philosophy" may see the attempt to live authentically as closely tied to following that philosophy. This might be true, for example, of committed, thoughtful Buddhists (among others.) Such people may, on average, be more authentic than the average...

For sure. Every panelist on AskPhilosophers is fabulously wealthy. (I'd offer a more serious answer, but I'm too busy making money.)

"Should" is a bit strong here. Some people have a talent for public speaking; some don't. My unscientific canvassing of my own experience suggests that there's more or less no correlation between how good a philosopher someone is and how good they are at public speaking.

When it comes to what will happen, I'll have to plead lack of a crystal ball. I can't even say what might happen. I'm not sure what sort of administrative politics you have in mind, but at least at my institution, I haven't noticed that administrators have any special animus against philosophy. I suppose at some institutions, someone might argue (whether soundly or not is another matter) that studying philosophy leads to poor employment prospects, or that in general, philosophy is in some way or another "impractical"; more on that in a moment. As for philosophers being unpersuasive in their arguments, I gravely doubt that most administrators either have an opinion or are qualified to. (That's not a criticism of administrators. It's just the usual situation for people outside a discipline; they tend not to be familiar with its workings.) Would it be a good thing to force philosophers to justify the existence of their field? Only if it would be an equally good thing for people in other disciplines...

One quick note on credentials. We rely on them because they are, in general, pretty reliable and they save an enormous amount of time. This bears on your question. Suppose you applied for a beginning-level assistant professor job at my institution, having no degree. I would need to decide if it was worth the time to investigate whether you have the skills and knowledge needed, and a good deal of past experience with people from outside the academy who think of themselves as philosophers would make it a poor bet. You would probably get sorted very quickly to the "Reject" file in the triage process. That might be a mistake. But academics, like most everyone else, are busy people, and given the (literally) hundreds of applications that a job ad might generate, we have no serious choice but to rely on heuristics of this sort. We'd also wonder -- if we got around to it -- whether anyone who claims to be so averse to the academy as a student is likely to do well there as a faculty member. That said, it...

Right after the secret handshake... More seriously, there's no single answer, and no clear one in any case. Does someone who has a BA in philosophy count as a philosopher? How about someone who has no formal education in philosophy, but through lots of reading and informal conversation has gotten good at the sorts of things philosophers do? Sufficient conditions are not so hard to come by. Someone who regularly publishes in recongnized philosophy journals would count. So would anyone who regularly teaches bread-and-butter philosophy courses in a university philosophy department. But not all philosophers publish, and not all teach. Necessary conditions aren't hard to come by either. Someone who had poor verbal skills and neither has nor ever had any talent for thinking analytically wouldn't count as a philosopher. But there are many linguistically gifted analytically-skilled thinkers who aren't philosophers. (An excellent lawyer, for example.) There are some useful generalizations, of course...

I don't know (and my guess is that my co-panelists don't either.) That, I'm assuming is why it's taken so long for anyone to respond even with such a useless answer. But in defense of myself and my colleagues, most people who belong to a profession, I'd guess, have a relatively scant knowledge of the institutional history of the profession. For example: most physicists probably don't know when or where the first university physics department was established, most dentists probably don't know where the first dental school was, most insurance brokers probably don't know what the first insurance company was, and so on.