Summations Only

Its the proper usage in the context of this:

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"Science answers the "how" questions and religion answers the "why" questions."

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But yes, there are other usages that would be proper for other contexts.

It can be stated accurately. I think the point is to exemplify the differences in the kinds of answers that science and religion can provide you.Science can investigate damn-near everything, but this doesn't include a certain kind of why-questions (I'd call how a subset of why). With science, you need to be able to control an experiment. Some things can't be nailed down enough for scientific controls. Other things are too broad to be defined well enough for a proper scientific investigation.-why did Grandma X choose that tea?
-why are we here?You don't have multiple Grandma X's to set-up a controlled experinment with.
"Being here" doesn't necessarily imply some purpose with which to answer the question "why".Whether or not they're proper questions, and whether or not the answers that religions provides can measured for any accuracy, are irrelevant to the fact that religion does provide answers to some of these questions. Science's only honest answer to the questions would be "I don't know", because it doesn't have the necessary components to provide the kind of answers that science does. They're not the kinds of questions that science asks.How does a person choose a particular tea?
How did humans emerge on this planet?Those are more along the lines of scientific questions.

But you're not going to get a scientific answer to why that particular Grandma made her decision. There's empirical evidence for why, but an anecdote from her isn't scientific. You can generalize why people make those decisions, but that doesn't address this specific individual. Right, there you go. I think that's a great way to phrase it.Now, this fact doesn't stop religion from handing you an answer

In Message 126, Dr. Adequste wrote:

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If you ask a man: "What's your name?" and he says "John", then he has answered the question. He may not have shown you his birth certificate to prove it, but he has answered the question.

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Religion does "provide an answer".Answering the question "what is 2 + 2?" with "5", is still answering the question I think that part of what the statement is saying is that religion answers the questions that science doesn't try to; that there's some questions out there that aren't necessarily answerable in the sense that you're talking (i.e. real answers).

I don't think the statement in question is necessarily talking about some limit to empirical investigation, or establishing that there is something outside of that.Science, though, is limited by its methodology and some questions of purpose aren't defined well enough, nor do they allow for the scientific controls for an adequate experiment, for science to properly answer them.There might not even be correct answers to some of the questions of purpose, but still, even some of those have answers that religions provide, regardless of whether or not they can be determined to have any accuracy.

I don't think its making a claim about the ultimate capabilities of an emprical investigation, in the sense that we could clone some girl 10 times and let them age to Grandma status, and then perform a controlled experiment on them to determine which things cause these individuals to choose that particular tea... Its about what science does, and science doesn't answer questions like that.Too, I read it as talking about scientific questions, not empirically investigatable questions. In that sense, an anecdotal answer would be empirical but not scientific.

I'll take that as a compliment. Okay. I don't have the same problem with the wording that you do. Besides, its pretty much just a catchphrase. But statements 1 and 2 were made within a very specifc context with a certain definition of "why". Changing the context and definition to reduce their veracity isn't an honest approach.

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(1) Science doesn't ask/answer "why" questions

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It does answer some why questions, just not the ones refered to in statement 3.

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(2) The proper use of "why" is to answer questions of purpose.

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There are other proper uses of that word, just not in the context of statement 3. Suppose a Canadian said: "It never really snows in the U.S.". Now, if I wanted them to be wrong, I could assume they were saying something stupid because of course it snows down here. But giving them the benfit of the doubt, and assuming they're not just saying something stupid, I could parse the phrase as saying that, compared to the ridiculous amounts of snow they get in Canada, what little bit we do get down here doesn't really count as snowing. If you look at the context in which RAZD brought in the phrase, DB was saying that the TOE wasn't falsifiable because it didn't answer the ultimate why-question on the existence of species in the first place. RAZD pointed out that science doesn't answer those questions, but rather answers the how-questions on the emergence of species. And he was right. Now, you can remove all that context and assume he was just saying something stupid and then go to show how his statement could be wrong, but I don't think that's an honest approach to understanding the point that was being made.

I think it does. Its setting up a dichotomy that is practically taughtological - the why-questions that science cannot answer are the ones being referred to that religion can. Those that are diametrically opposed to the questions that science does answer. I read it as why-qustions like the ones of purpose that Dawn was talking about, but not of any kind at all. But you can't limit what they are talking about to what makes the most sense to you. Perhaps they were just talking bollocks all along, but that in itself doesn't mean that they should be interpreted as meaning something else.

See Message 70

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With science, you need to be able to control an experiment. Some things can't be nailed down enough for scientific controls. Other things are too broad to be defined well enough for a proper scientific investigation.

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-why did Grandma X choose that tea?
-why are we here?

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You don't have multiple Grandma X's to set-up a controlled experinment with.
"Being here" doesn't necessarily imply some purpose with which to answer the question "why".

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Or unique individual ones that cannot be scientifically controlled.
Or ambiguous ones that cannot be properly defined.

Of course. Equally? Depends... most why-questions can just be rephrased as how-questions, but those aren't the ones we're talking about. This is about the why-questions that pertain to purpose. I think questions of purpose are fuzzier than the how-questions so they're gonna allow for more of the ambiguity and individualisms that I'm talking about. I don't think that science should leave questions to religions to answer. My position is that there are certan kinds of questions, like 'why are we here', that science is not in the business of answering. Too, that religions do hand you answers to some of those question. That is all. Sounds like its trying to be all-encompassing... I guess we have different understandings on what this thread is about...But as I said above, I don't think they apply equally. The why, or what-purpose, questions are less rigorous than the how, or what-mechanism, questions and are more likely to be unanswerable by science.

You're just equivocating. Those are answers to *how* we are here.The religious woo-inspired question of "why are we here" is a different question. And its one that science doesn't answer. That's all fine and dandy, but is beside the point.

That's what I've been saying... You're missing the point. The catch phrase is not some proclaimation on the limits of science's abilities to answer specific semantic structures. I never said the answers religions give to the why-questions are meaningful. Yeah, well science doesn't answer that question either.

That's not what the question was asking for... Yeah, that's fine. Nobody's saying the answers that religions provide are correct, or even meaningful.

I don't think that's the same question. But if you're removing the underlying assuptions, then you are answering a different question. Its still answering an equivocation, not the question that was asked (which had certain underlying assuptions that you removed).