Why

If science deals with how while religion deals with why, then religion has not held up its end of the bargain. There is plenty we don't know yet. But all we do know comes from science, not religion. This is because most of the time why without how is useless.

A child asks "Why? Why? Why?" because her world revolves around her. She demands to know why things happen to her. That's pretty reasonable. Then the child grows older and begins to learn in a structured environment, school or what have you, and is called upon to discover how things work because that's how we accumulate knowledge. This also begins the shift in the child's understanding away from the ego-centric view of the universe.

Why is an important question in many situations. Why was I fired? Why can't I touch the hot Corn Baller? But in most cases why is a part of the larger how. Why did the bridge collapse? We can't answer that unless we know how it's supposed to work, how metal, brick etc behave, how gravity, weather etc affect the structure.

Religion was invented by our ancestors as a pre-science way of explaining our experiences. Why did the rain flood us out? There must be some angry force to which we are responsible. Why are there earthquakes and forest fires? Because the gods of earth and fire are angry. Then we started to learn how these natural forces work and how do deal with situations as they arose and even to make predictions about some of them. As a result, we started not getting dead whenever there were natural disasters. We began to understand that how was a much more useful question to ask than why. And how much more exciting it is to learn about the world and the cosmos than to wonder at it without knowing!

But for many, the need to know why, especially why we are here, is a question that drives the more practical curiosity out of the spotlight. For many, "Why are we here?" is the ultimate question. The problem is that in all the thousands and thousands of years since we've been pondering the question, religion has yet to bring us an answer.

Religion is the refusal to grow out of the toddler stage of needing to be the center of the universe, of asking why without asking how.