"...But _This_ Story Has Dinosaurs!"
I have got to stop reading Pandagon at lunch. I wind up taking far too long to draft lengthy comments on tangential points.
Case in point, a comment that I'm really quite proud of, inspired by this comment from a thread on The identity politics of atheism. So I'm re-posting the comment here, prettied up and slightly edited.
I have a theory, which addresses not only why people accept religions, but also why even non-religious people often hold inaccurate views of certain phenomena, in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden says it best, and I’ll paraphrase: Humans are story-seeking creatures.
We look for patterns in the world-as-we-perceive-it, to help us deal with the bigness of everything. When we see or think we see patterns, we build narrative around the patterns to express How Things Work.
These narratives become part of the set of assumptions by which further observations are examined-we look at new information and experience by trying to fit it into the stories we know. As we get more information, some of which doesn’t fit into our stories, we tend to cope in one of two ways:
Squoosh the story and the information until we find a way to make the information fit; or Look at the story, and decide it’s the wrong story and create a new one.
When we feel that the story has worked to explain everything we are often loathe to decide it’s the wrong story, because, having done so, we’re faced with a scary universe in which nothing makes sense anymore.
I’m going to use theories of evolution to illustrate, because the controversy is one in which people identify themselves by the stories they choose, and where there are a number of different stories.
Obligatory Disclaimers
1) I am not looking to debate theories of Whatever You Call the Beginning of Life. If any reader subscribe to intelligent design theories, that’s the reader’s choice. My bias is clear in the text, and you’re not likely to change my mind. If you feel compelled to try to do so, well, I guess that's your perogative. I won't delete any such comments, but I won't feel compelled to respond, either, because in my experience, religious argument changes nobody's mind. I’m using The Beginning fo Life as an example because it’s come up recently in my work and in my recreational reading.
2) I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist. I’m writing from my limited understanding. Please feel free to correct any factual errors or errors of interpretation.*
[/Obligatory Disclaimers]
So people look at life and wonder “How did humans, who have computers and spaceflight and poetic forms and hospitals and soy lattes happen? Dogs don’t have any of these things. Octopi don’t either. Something musta happened to make us the life form that gets all these things.”
In early societies, lots of different groups of people came up with stories about rivers flowing from a giant cow's teats, water beetles dredging the earth up from the waters, and form being created from chaos. They told stories about Gods fighting, mating, making humans, gods singing, gods playing in the mud, and their creations causing trouble. These stories work, in that they present explanations in a nice, tidy, narrative, and they’re fun to tell, too.
At the moment we have a bunch of people who have a story that explains the world in terms of a God who created men and women. We call these people creationists. They’ve got a lot invested in the idea that humanity is God’s last and best creation. The story about the Garden and the Fall and all of that is fundamental to how they’ve built their social and political realities. And the story is fun to tell.
So, faced with evidence that seems to contradict that (such as a fossil record that indicates that life is way older than the Bible says creation is), some of them flat-out deny the evidence.
Those who can’t flat-out deny the evidence (for reasons of intellectual honesty or whatever) look for ways to make the evidence fit their story, and they add on to the story and call it intelligent design. The reality-based scientific community says “Dudes, that still doesn’t answer X, Y, and Z,” so some of the creationists try harder and create more baroque stories to try to fit everything in. Some of them are happy with the results. But people who want simple stories mostly seem to use ID as a way to reconcile the evidence they’re confronted with with the story they understand. This way, they get fossils, and they still get a big powerful god, and as long as they stick to the essentials, the story is fun to tell.
We have other members of the non-creationist society who want a story to support a cozy world view with humanity as the pinnacle of creation. They create a story that they call “evolution” that has Life starting as primordial ooze and progressing up a ladder called “evolution,” always striving for something better, until Life is perfected as Homo Sapiens.
It’s a cozy story, because it leaves us in charge, and takes into account the fossil record. So we can have fossils, which are cool, and a clear narrative which may be less fun to tell than the one with the god who makes zebras and hedgehogs and gardens (or not, depending on who’s doing the telling), but it’s still a clear narrative, with a nice beginning, middle, and end, and a clear hero (that’d be us, homo sapiens).
But it’s not the whole story, and it’s not even the right story.
As best we can guess right now, the story goes something like “Lots of life happens. Many more are born than can survive. Statistically, certain traits favour survival in certain environments. Statistically, more creatures with these traits will survive and pass their traits on to their offspring. Over a long time, these inherited traits become distict enough that individuals with one group of inherited traits can’t breed with indivuduals with another group of inherited traits and speciation occurs. Human beings are very well adapted for survival at this particular moment, but, we’re also pretty lonely. Statistically, bacteria are way more successful.”
This is not a simple story to tell, and it’s not a fun story to tell (unless you’re a really darned good storyteller, and you have a very patient audience). It isn’t easy to represent graphically, though you do get lots of fossils, and crazy, bushy-looking diagrams. It challenges a lot of our cozy notions of how the world works-it has us with our computers and spaceflight and poetic forms and hospitals and soy-lattes, being statistically less evolutionarily successful than a bunch of single-celled organisms that, as far as anyone can tell, haven’t even invented the wheel. Moreover, it lacks narrative cohesion-the beginning is unclear, the middle long, boring, and confusing (way more than War and Peace), and the ending hasn't happened yet! So people who would blush to call themselves creationists default to the simpler story of the ladder of evolution, for mostly because it’s a simple story, a much more narratively satisfying story and it doesn’t challenge their assumptions.
Stories are seductive, and they're really great tools both for teaching and understanding. We make them and map our worlds to them. Swapping a simple story for a complicated one is never simple. As we gain more information about the cosmos, we're faced with the task of integrating that information with the stories we've told ourselves about how the world works. Sometimes this is easy, because our stories are robust, or because the evidence supports our stories nicely. Sometimes it's more difficult, and we face the difficult and frightening task of either changing or abandoning our stories. People usually resist being left with a cosmos that makes no sense, and people tend to prefer stories that are good in the telling. Is it any wonder that many people resist evidence, when accepting that evidence would require them to retell the world?
* Convincing me of the validity of creationism or intelligent design does not count as correcting a factual error or an error of interpretation. I'm just sayin'.
Case in point, a comment that I'm really quite proud of, inspired by this comment from a thread on The identity politics of atheism. So I'm re-posting the comment here, prettied up and slightly edited.
I have a theory, which addresses not only why people accept religions, but also why even non-religious people often hold inaccurate views of certain phenomena, in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden says it best, and I’ll paraphrase: Humans are story-seeking creatures.
We look for patterns in the world-as-we-perceive-it, to help us deal with the bigness of everything. When we see or think we see patterns, we build narrative around the patterns to express How Things Work.
These narratives become part of the set of assumptions by which further observations are examined-we look at new information and experience by trying to fit it into the stories we know. As we get more information, some of which doesn’t fit into our stories, we tend to cope in one of two ways:
When we feel that the story has worked to explain everything we are often loathe to decide it’s the wrong story, because, having done so, we’re faced with a scary universe in which nothing makes sense anymore.
I’m going to use theories of evolution to illustrate, because the controversy is one in which people identify themselves by the stories they choose, and where there are a number of different stories.
Obligatory Disclaimers
1) I am not looking to debate theories of Whatever You Call the Beginning of Life. If any reader subscribe to intelligent design theories, that’s the reader’s choice. My bias is clear in the text, and you’re not likely to change my mind. If you feel compelled to try to do so, well, I guess that's your perogative. I won't delete any such comments, but I won't feel compelled to respond, either, because in my experience, religious argument changes nobody's mind. I’m using The Beginning fo Life as an example because it’s come up recently in my work and in my recreational reading.
2) I Am Not An Evolutionary Biologist. I’m writing from my limited understanding. Please feel free to correct any factual errors or errors of interpretation.*
[/Obligatory Disclaimers]
So people look at life and wonder “How did humans, who have computers and spaceflight and poetic forms and hospitals and soy lattes happen? Dogs don’t have any of these things. Octopi don’t either. Something musta happened to make us the life form that gets all these things.”
In early societies, lots of different groups of people came up with stories about rivers flowing from a giant cow's teats, water beetles dredging the earth up from the waters, and form being created from chaos. They told stories about Gods fighting, mating, making humans, gods singing, gods playing in the mud, and their creations causing trouble. These stories work, in that they present explanations in a nice, tidy, narrative, and they’re fun to tell, too.
At the moment we have a bunch of people who have a story that explains the world in terms of a God who created men and women. We call these people creationists. They’ve got a lot invested in the idea that humanity is God’s last and best creation. The story about the Garden and the Fall and all of that is fundamental to how they’ve built their social and political realities. And the story is fun to tell.
So, faced with evidence that seems to contradict that (such as a fossil record that indicates that life is way older than the Bible says creation is), some of them flat-out deny the evidence.
Those who can’t flat-out deny the evidence (for reasons of intellectual honesty or whatever) look for ways to make the evidence fit their story, and they add on to the story and call it intelligent design. The reality-based scientific community says “Dudes, that still doesn’t answer X, Y, and Z,” so some of the creationists try harder and create more baroque stories to try to fit everything in. Some of them are happy with the results. But people who want simple stories mostly seem to use ID as a way to reconcile the evidence they’re confronted with with the story they understand. This way, they get fossils, and they still get a big powerful god, and as long as they stick to the essentials, the story is fun to tell.
We have other members of the non-creationist society who want a story to support a cozy world view with humanity as the pinnacle of creation. They create a story that they call “evolution” that has Life starting as primordial ooze and progressing up a ladder called “evolution,” always striving for something better, until Life is perfected as Homo Sapiens.
It’s a cozy story, because it leaves us in charge, and takes into account the fossil record. So we can have fossils, which are cool, and a clear narrative which may be less fun to tell than the one with the god who makes zebras and hedgehogs and gardens (or not, depending on who’s doing the telling), but it’s still a clear narrative, with a nice beginning, middle, and end, and a clear hero (that’d be us, homo sapiens).
But it’s not the whole story, and it’s not even the right story.
As best we can guess right now, the story goes something like “Lots of life happens. Many more are born than can survive. Statistically, certain traits favour survival in certain environments. Statistically, more creatures with these traits will survive and pass their traits on to their offspring. Over a long time, these inherited traits become distict enough that individuals with one group of inherited traits can’t breed with indivuduals with another group of inherited traits and speciation occurs. Human beings are very well adapted for survival at this particular moment, but, we’re also pretty lonely. Statistically, bacteria are way more successful.”
This is not a simple story to tell, and it’s not a fun story to tell (unless you’re a really darned good storyteller, and you have a very patient audience). It isn’t easy to represent graphically, though you do get lots of fossils, and crazy, bushy-looking diagrams. It challenges a lot of our cozy notions of how the world works-it has us with our computers and spaceflight and poetic forms and hospitals and soy-lattes, being statistically less evolutionarily successful than a bunch of single-celled organisms that, as far as anyone can tell, haven’t even invented the wheel. Moreover, it lacks narrative cohesion-the beginning is unclear, the middle long, boring, and confusing (way more than War and Peace), and the ending hasn't happened yet! So people who would blush to call themselves creationists default to the simpler story of the ladder of evolution, for mostly because it’s a simple story, a much more narratively satisfying story and it doesn’t challenge their assumptions.
Stories are seductive, and they're really great tools both for teaching and understanding. We make them and map our worlds to them. Swapping a simple story for a complicated one is never simple. As we gain more information about the cosmos, we're faced with the task of integrating that information with the stories we've told ourselves about how the world works. Sometimes this is easy, because our stories are robust, or because the evidence supports our stories nicely. Sometimes it's more difficult, and we face the difficult and frightening task of either changing or abandoning our stories. People usually resist being left with a cosmos that makes no sense, and people tend to prefer stories that are good in the telling. Is it any wonder that many people resist evidence, when accepting that evidence would require them to retell the world?
* Convincing me of the validity of creationism or intelligent design does not count as correcting a factual error or an error of interpretation. I'm just sayin'.