Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to I suppose religion will "whither away" into myth, but not until science starts answering more questions than it raises.

I don't think science can ever answer more questions than it raises

Nearly All of Philosophy and most of Science is about determining the questons, sharpening the inquiry and defining what is not the answer. Mathematics also shares that trait, but probably to the least of all three. However, some of the greatest discoveries of all time in Mathematics have been defining what questions can't be answered, or what the answer is not, or even just parcelling up classes of 'problems' and finding frameworks to better sate them (Church/Turing thesis, Goedels result on completeness of First Order Logic, Cantor and the hirarchy of infinities, Noam Chomsky and the classification of Automata and grammars).

So, baisically, all three methods that humans have of generating intelligible understandings of the universe, by necessity, have to spend most of their time calrifying and sharpening the questions.

In fact, I would say that Religion and Science, Math and Philosophy are fundamentially different in that Religion imposes a arbirtrary solutions on complex problems, while Science, Math and Philosophy is more interested with using methodology to make the questions understandable and answerable.

DL

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