For natural theologians, proving God was beside the point

This article seems to be saying that science and religion are trying to answer the same question, how did we get here. But I feel like that's misguided.

I've always been under the impression that science is descriptive, it answers how?

Whereas religion is deeper than that and aims to answer why?

We can explain how natural processes work, but, and I believe this is a question Aristotle asked with the immovable mover, we'll never be able to get to a root cause of why everything exists and what started it all.

Either the universe is infinite and time has no beginning, or there is a beginning and potentially an end. If there's a beginning, what was before the beginning? If it's infinite, how did it all start? These are the questions that I thought religion tried to answer. Science can (most likely) never answer why. Science is fundamentally based on repeatable experiments, and that's fine. We can use it to build a model of how the universe works, but as of today, we can't use science to answer the fundamental questions about the reason for the universe.

1. we are "computationally" equivalent to a turing machine: a tape with symbols on it and a head that reads and writes symbols to the tape according to rules.

the natural generalization of a turing machine to infinity would be a hyper turing machine: an infinitely wide tape and infinitely many heads.

i think language of "god" is mostly expressed in terms of infinities. e.g. pi (most infinite numbers are inexpressible to us, since most infinite numbers are transcendental numbers)

2. The alphabet our math uses is pretty much all finite. What percent of the axioms and theorems that you know are infinitely long? Shouldn't the overwhelming majority of axioms and theorems be infinitely long (and in particular map onto an uncountable set?). It just seems natural given the circumstances.

> I've always been under the impression that science is descriptive, it answers how?

This may be philosophical, but has science ever actually, and by that I mean explicitly, answered how? Is how even possible to answer?

I think probably not, given our current understandings, or probably not just period. Science is about building models of the reality we experience. The models are not reality themselves, so they don’t answer how. They only answer how relative to our own knowledge and experience. Also, it isn’t clear if our experience of reality is objective. I have a feeling that there is such a thing as relative objectivity among the different participants of the universe.

> Whereas religion is deeper than that and aims to answer why?

Religion is more of an organizational collective of power and control, but religion proper, let’s call it, and spiritually are more about consolation, in my view. This is related to why, but I think it also helps to frame religion and spirituality as “what now”? We’re here, there’s this life, this Earth, this Universe, so what are we supposed to do? I think why creeps in there as well.

I’m reminded of A Serious Man and the repetitious “what’s going on?”.

Sort of. Academic theologians want to answer why. A religious person already knows, if you have to find data and infer things then it is philosophy not religion. Religion is based on information directed by the creator either directly to the believer or via trusted proxy. For example if you asked me why the universe exists I already know: because God willed it so. Most religious questions are a whether or not something is the will of the creator and how to implement that will. Of course that is monotheistic but with hinduism for example their many gods do things and that is why things are, how to do things to align with them is also a question as is with buddhism and reincarnation based on how well one implements the universe's will but my point is religion is what is there based on the answers to the questions you mentioned not the pursuit to answer that question. If you come up with a religion on your own I suppose you can call it that (although I must question the difference between that and a philosophical principle) but religion as is organized religion already has answers for the believer.

Tangentially, I am a bit baffled by folks that are not believers yet try to make sense of a religion, don't they understand hierarchy of belief? As in you need to know arithmetic before you can do linear alegbra? How can one understand anything religious without being theistic (buddhism aside). Most of the common atheist questions about faith are easily answered with the prerequisite of theism fulfilled for example.

The fundamental difference between science and religion in my opinion is that science says "I will believe things only if I can understand them" while religion says "The things you can understand and that are beyond human capacity to understand are described this way" religion is based on the acceptance that one cannot understand all things in reality, that things beyond our understanding or currect capacity or ability to know are still real and have effect in our reality.