Why can be asked in two ways. One of those ways you discuss. That is, Why does this wing create lift? This question is simply answered through Bernoulli's principal of a fluid in motion. However, this question can also be asked, How does this wing produce lift? which results in the same answer.
I think that you are getting yourself tangled up in the subtle overlap between "why" and "how" questions. There are many ways to answer so-called "wh-" questions (how, when, why, where, what, which), and context is often necessary to understand how to answer appropriately. So scientific questions like "why does X have property Y?" are often paraphrasable as "how did X come to have property Y?". But the question takes on a different significance when one presupposes a different context. That is why the joke question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" produces amusement. It is a play on the ambiguity of context. One looks for a more profound answer--"to get food" or "to avoid a predator"--but the jokester makes it clear that the vagueness of the context licenses a trick response. Even a simple question like "Why did I get cancer?" can elicit a variety of responses: "because I smoked", "because my genome makes me more susceptible to cancer", "because my immune system was too weak to fight cancer off", etc. So, if you are going to discuss the semantics of "how" and "why", you need to think carefully about the contextual presuppositions that guide and shape the answers. Remember that when you ask why there is life. There is never just one possible answer.
However, Why can also ask, Why am I alive? This is not asking for a mere theory. One could point to the biology, the anatomy, the biochemistry, the physical chemistry, that makes it so that 'I' can be alive. But science cannot tell me why those things work together to result in 'me'
On some levels, the scientific method can answer that question. The real issue here is what kind of answers you expect. It is certainly possible to ask questions that have no answer. Consider, for example, questions loaded with presuppositions that fail: "Why has Russia invaded Armenia?" The question cannot be answered sensibly because it fails on the presupposition that Russia has invaded Armenia. One can only sensibly ask why Russia has invaded the countries it has invaded. If makes sense to ask what the purpose of football is, because football has a purpose. It is not so clear that one can ask what the purpose of life is.
A scientific theory is an explanation of some part of the world we live in. It is characterized by, the observability of the phenomenon, the repeatability of the experiments that support the theory, and the ability to change or discard that theory when new evidence turns up. At least, that is the textbook definition of theory, from your comment it seems to me that perhaps you are using a different one.
I consider that a very poor definition of a theory. A theory is a collection of assertions that generate predictions about some natural phenomena. Those predictions allow the theory to be tested against its predictions. Experimentation is one method of testing predictions, although not all tests can be controled. Some rely just on making predictions about what one will observe in nature, e.g. Einstein's prediction that Mercury would appear to be outside its expected location during a solar eclipse. His theory predicted that light could be affected by gravity, and that led to the prediction.
"Well, science does not answer all questions, nor does it pretend to provide a definitive and final answer to all questions. If that is what you seek, then you will find religion more attractive, because religious doctrines do provide final answers, even if they don't happen to be true."
Perhaps science does not. I also don't think it does. My point was that many people treat it as though it was automatically more reliable than revelation simply because someone with Ph. D. after their name, in a white lab coat told them that this is 'scientifically supported'. This was my point, that this is hocus. I mean, I have a lab coat, and I have a creationist professor...... we could rig something....
I disagree. People treat science as more reliable because it has been shown to be more reliable than religion in explaining natural phenomena. When it has come into conflict with religion, it has almost always prevailed, an excellent case in point being its explanation of the origin of species. Revelation tells us what we can imagine. Science tells us what we can discover.
As to evolution failing to answer the why question: Why is asking for a final cause. why is not content with explanations of mechanics, because behind each explanation of mechanics comes another why, always pushing one further back into an infinite series. That is the reason science cannot answer this kind of 'why'.
Religion is not any better at solving infinite regress as the "turtles all the way down" anecdote illustrates. How did the physical reality come into existence? God created it. How did God come into existence? We pretend that it isn't sensible to ask the latter question, only the former one. To ask the former question, however, one must presuppose that physical reality did come into existence.
You are avoiding the question. Do you know how science is done? Science is all about making straight lines out of your data, and either extrapolation or interpolating it. In Analytical Chemistry, we would do this, and then predict something like the concentration of acids or some such. However, our data was considered miserably bad if our conclusion was more than a fraction away from our standard line. This is akin to the observations of all mankind, stacked up against the age that evolution demands, and extrapolating to a wildly inaccurate point in time where macro evolution is possible.
I am beginning to doubt that you have understood how science works. It does not pretend to provide ultimate answers, only answers that make sense to our experiences. As our experience grows, new questions arise. Theories don't just account for data. They define what counts as data. Fossils of dinosaurs once proved the historical existence of dragons. Now they prove the historical existence of dinosaurs, and that fits well with a wide range of other information we now have about the world. The dragon theory doesn't fit quite so well anymore, although it is still worth entertaining, if only to help us see that the dinosaur theory is a better explanation. So-called "macroevolution" (really, just the idea that evolution causes speciation over time) is no longer doubted by any serious scientist precisely because it is corroborated by so much else that we have come to learn about the world. Scientific theories are pieces in a puzzle. You won't understand their usefulness if all you want to do is focus attention on the puzzle piece and ignore the rest of the puzzle.
By the way, lets leave Divine Revelation out of this debate, you have drug it in where it doesn't belong, simply to distract us...
I have not "drug it in". You are posting in a forum entitled "Science and Religion". Revelation remains relevant to the debate. It is a direct competitor to science as a method of discovering knowledge.
...We had been talking about the incompetence of science in important 'why' questions. As it seems that you could not make any good arguments for the competence of science to speak to these matters, perhaps you should consider the explanations given by Revelation. Salvation is a terribly important matter: and as you say, science hasn't even worked out the smallest particle of 'how' we got here, can you really expect it to answer what happens after death?
You chide me for mentioning revelation in one breath, but you feel free to go with it in the next. These reversals threaten to give us mental whiplash.
I have not said that science hasn't (or cannot) work out how we got here. It has actually done a superior job to religion, because much of the Christian world has come to endorse evolution, not least of which is the Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination. They've come a long way since they burned Copernicus's books and threatened Galileo with torture.
As for what happens after death, science has done a phenomenal job in tying all mental function to physical phenomena in living brains. It seems most reasonable to conclude that all mental function ceases after the destruction of the physical brain. Religion, of course, has offered a different opinion.
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Topic: Semantics in Science? (Read 3195 times)