How vs Why

There is a certain three year old in my life who has developed the charming habit of asking “why is/does X…?” More often than not, these come in a sequence of “why’s” until the answer is irreducible.
It strikes me that “why” questions about the world are actually “how” questions in disguise.

For example, “why is the sky blue” decomposes, eventually, into a description of *how* light refracts in the atmosphere. Once you get to the “how” of a thing, the “why” dissolves. 
Of course, there is usually another “why” lurking beyond the base-level “how” answer. 

Take gravity. Before you know about gravity, you ask, “why do things fall to the ground?” When you learn about gravity, you realize that the answer is an explanation of how: all mass (at least, all mass in our common experience) has an an intrinsic attractive force. Yet, the answer almost immediately raises another why question: why is there gravity? As I understand it, there’s no good answer to that question, precisely because we don’t understand how gravity works yet.

Ultimately, scientific exploration answers “how” questions. Religion, on the other hand, seeks to answer naive “why” questions directly, without considering how. Religion, ultimately, gives up on how and renders it up to gods. Why is the sky blue? God wills it so. Why do we die? God wills it so. Why do bad things happen to good people? God wills it so.

Religion doesn’t answer the important questions. Rather, it pushes them away into god’s bucket of mysteries. Religion offers only intellectually lazy answers.
Richard Feynman described scientific inquiry as similar to watching a game of chess without knowing the rules. The longer the game plays and the longer you study the moves, the better you understand the rules.

The real questions are “how” questions. How do the chess pieces move? And the real answers, once we find them, are simple, satisfying, and not mysterious. Getting to those answers, however, takes effort, patience, and intellectual rigor. Religion is a lazy shortcut–the equivalent of throwing up your hands and declaring it’s all a mystery.