[Swizec]

My favorite explanation has been: science answers What/How, religion answers Why. It's when we start asking one a question for the other that we get into trouble.

Which is what I don't like about [some] creationism. It tries to use a Why tool to answer a How question.

And as long as you take Biblical stories to be metaphors and/or best-effort explanations from before we had the data that we have now, they're perfectly fine stories that make plenty of sense as an explanation.

Adam&Eve for instance. If all you know is that it takes a man and a woman to produce a baby, it stands to reason that at some point there had to have been the first pair.

[nitrogen]

The NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria argument/How vs. Why) position is useful to try to coexist peacefully while establishing a more solid rapport, but is not itself universally accepted[0]. For example, philosophy is also capable of answering "Why" questions with or without the help of religion, and neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology can explain a lot of the "How" that actually drives what we perceive as "Why".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria#Rec...

[Swizec]

To display my ignorance: I'm not sure philosophy is that different from religion. At least much of philosophy that hasn't spun off into harder sciences.

Could religion not be considered a philosophical framework?

Thanks for showing me there's a name for why vs how. I had no idea.

I think the atrength of this distinction also varies between people. I know many religious atheists who believe in the value of religion, in its teachings and traditions, even in some hybrid concept of heaven and hell, possibly god, but who do not believe God exists as a factual entity or that anything from any religious text is fact rather than metaphor.

But I also come from a country that is 68% christian but only 32% of the population says they believe in there being some sort of god.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Apparently "Catholic Atheism" is a thing that exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism