"...But _This_ Story Has Dinosaurs!"

[zingerella]

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.

Comments

[poldy]

Are more complicated (or, I would say, less comfortable) stories better or truer? I am not sure I am following the thrust of your point.

[zingerella]

Good? True? What mean these words, and where did I introduce them?
My point was that oftentimes people will default to a simpler, more comfortable story, even when evidence doesn't support it, because the story that the evidence tells is, narratologically speaking, a crappy story.

I've avoided terms like "true" or "good," because, as you wot well, in order to use these terms we must first define them, and defining "good" is something philosophers and theologians have struggled to do for millenia. It's certainly beyond the abilities of this lonely lapsed academic.

Likewise, to a lesser degree, "true." In a debate of ideology and emotion, what do we hold "true"-that which is best supported by the evidence of our senses or that which resounds best with our axia? (How we define "true" seems to be at the heart of many of the ID/evolution conflicts: those who believe in a god who created humanity in god's own image know this to be true. Therefore any nonsense about descent from apes must be false

[zingerella]

OK...I've edited to try to make my point more clear, and to clean up a few little gremlins. Now I feel like I'm saying the same thing too often and not supporting it enough, but it's time to pack up the computer and head home.

I'll add some links to fun stories later.

[poldy]

Good? True? What mean these words, and where did I introduce them? They seemed implicit in the final paragraph where the resistence to evidence is attributed to certain stories. That suggests that other stories, more difficult ones, are closer to the truth of the cosmos as disordered, or at least, not ordered with humans at the center.

what I think is true

[poldy]

This (http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellkpmoh/construct.htm) is generally what I have had in mind by science. And especially #2, when I said that truth is provisional. My criticism and scepticism is not of science, but of the way that the stories science tells create a sort of power that can be misused when the partiality of the model is ignored or when false analogies are imployed (e.g. in social darwinism). This criticism was meant to follow and extend Zingarella's point about stories, but I needed to make sure I understood her first.