As usual, the South Park guys put their reasonable assessment in Stan's mouth. In response to Richard Dawkins, he calmly utters the how/why dichotomy, that, in it's very utterance, displays both a disgusting ignorance of history and of epistemology.
Christianity and all other religions arose as HOW answers. How did the plagues befall Pharaohs people? God's will. How did humans lose their innocence? Adam and Eve? How did the fossils get deposited? God made the flood. How did various semitic populations die to the benefit of the ancient Jews? God killed them.
But, as empirical evidence has increasingly been favored over metahporic reasoning, and imperatives of the past, Religion's explanatory role has been further and further eroded to the point where it desperately clings to any gap that scientists have not yet explained.
Why questions are questions based in empirical reality, and debatable and answerable by reference to empirical reality.
The bible and all other myths were propositions of how things happened and what people ought to do in their lives. As such, it is subject to the same faculties of reasoning that the prospect of murder and fixing a car are subject to: empirical observation, falsification, and demonstrable evidence.
How VS Why? As if this atheism-theism just arose twenty years ago? Pathetic.
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