I'm going to try to answer it anyway.
In a recent diary, Va1kyrie asked
Out of curiosity... (0+ / 0-)
(...and now I find I have a hard time framing the question without sounding like a standard atheist asshole...)
As a religious person who is capable of asking the Why questions, when you find that the answer is, "God's Will," are those the exact same questions to which an atheist would say, "Well, I just don't know... yet." Or, are those the questions to which atheists typically attempts a scientifically-derived answers?
I guess my question is really: To which Why questions do you find religion/faith provides the most satisfying answers?
Let me get this out of the way: the framing doesn't sound like it's coming from an asshole of any variety, with or without some combination of "standard" or "atheist." Perfectly legitimate questions.
Second, although the rephrased question is perfectly clear, I want to sit for a moment with the first part, where Va1kyrie still isn't entirely done formulating things. The contours of that paragraph are hard for me to get my hands around. There's a weirdness in a different shape of thinking, a different Gestalt that I don't want to sweep under the rug. The weirdness of trying to think my way into that paragraph shows that what we're dealing with isn't so much contrary answers to the same questions, but a whole different way of framing questions that indicates there's some orthogonal dynamics involved.
And that gets me to my first approach to the fully formulated question: "To which Why questions do you find religion/faith provides the most satisfying answers?"
And here, I'd have to say that, for me at least, religion and faith are not primarily about finding answers. I take a cue here from the book of Job, in which the "answer" to "why do we suffer?" is "can you make a whale?" The poetic sections of the book of Job (as opposed to the tidy prose frame) make faith a matter of questioning deeper - indeed God rebukes Job's conventionally pious friends for not questioning - without the promise of an answer.
Rather, religion and faith are more about finding ways of maintaining awareness of fundamental tensions than about finding a right answer. So, let's go back to Genesis. For the folks over at Answers in Genesis, the fundamental, even Fundamentalist, orientation to religion is that the Bible provides the answers that scientists are trying to answer, and that the Bible can give a unified answer. To do that, however, they have to do a weird dance around the fact that Genesis opens with two contradictory stories about how the world began. I consider neither story factual. I consider both stories true - and especially true in combination. The story in Genesis 1 tells us, in narrative form, that some kind of ultimately dependable regularity is necessary for the world to function. So, I can take God in Genesis 1 as a metaphor for the basic scientific laws that scientists formulate and use to efficiently predict things. On the other hand, Genesis 2 presents us with a more fully anthropomorphic, localized God in a story where things go terribly wrong. The dependability of scientific laws do not prevent social evils, and often scientific progress is linked to greater destructiveness (the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and the certainty of some level of social catastrophe due to global warming are legacies of science more than religion). The two stories in Genesis, taken together, don't really give "an answer" to why are we here, as much as explore different aspects of what it is like to live in a world that is both dependable and risky.
What it is like to live in a world. And that - right there - is where I find that faith/religion is more effective than science in exploring a question. Science will do a better job of telling me what world I live in, but - and here my Protestant biases will shine particularly bright - religion/faith are about what stance I take to that world. Some years ago, when I first moved to San Francisco and was settling in, I was reading a lot of Nietzsche, whose thought begins with the parable in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" of a planet that's destroyed the minute people evolve to full consciousness. For Nietzsche in that early work, the prolongation of consciousness over a few thousand years isn't much more meaningful than the immediate destruction of consciousness. In part, most likely, due to what I was reading, in part, most likely, due to my own uncertainties about my immediate future, I developed a kind of obsession with the fact that the sun would go super-nova and wipe out the achievements of humanity. After some time, as I got settled, I found a Quaker meeting for worship, and began attending regularly. Shortly thereafter, my roommates noted, "you've stopped talking about the supernova." Worship did not make me think that the supernova isn't going to happen. What it did do is remind me of a different stance toward the world in which gratitude overwhelms futility when contemplating the limits of existence. And this is not simply a reminder "as an idea," but a practice in which I commit my whole body to being open to gratitude instead of futility. It is also more than simply going to therapy to work through a neurosis (I've done that, too, and it's helpful, and it's different), because it is about maintaining a specific conception of the self in relation to the broadest frame of reference.
My biases here are Protestant insofar as the subjective takes priority over the objective in defining where the science/religion line is. This goes back all the way to Luther in the Larger Catechism: "A god is that to which we look for all good and where we resort in time of need; to have a god is simply trust and believe with one's whole heart. As I have often said, the confidence and faith of the heart alone makes both God and idol." While Luther goes on to specify that the difference between God and idol is significant and a question of truth, he doesn't specify the content of "that to which we look" as the basis for a unified system. It's the basis for a process of discernment and reflection. And that process of discernment and reflection must, if truth is part of the equation, take scientific progress as a real challenge to winnowing the wheat from the chaff in defining "that to which we look." The Reformed theologian H. Richard Niebuhr tells a parable in The Meaning of Revelation of an eye surgery. For Niebuhr, science tells us the mechanisms of the eye surgery, but faith is about the experience of moving from blindness to sight. Niebuhr, like a number of liberal Protestant theologians before him, is not interested in "the supernatural," a category which postdates the idea of "religion" in any case. He is interested in the variety of ways we approach a natural world as meaningful. Pascal looked at the night sky and saw a terrifying void; Kant looked at the night sky and saw an orderliness to the universe that reflected an inner moral order. Both are looking at the same sky - both take a personal meaning from it. And to get us back to the earlier point of "going deeper into tensions rather than resolving things into unambiguous answers," one doesn't have to be wrong for the other to to be right.