Stories

More and more, I find that the world people live in is not so much a reality to which we react, but rather a fantasy without a place for the findings of systematic research. The most relevant influences on our decisions aren't physical events, but rather the opinions of our peers & our likelihood of being excluded from our social groups. This is why holding a belief against the antagonizing influence of others is held to be such an achievement(once the belief becomes accepted truth, anyway): anyone can be alone and experience something only they know about, and thereby find belief, but an effort is needed to keep that belief in the face of criticism from others. It is this sort of perceptual integrity that is celebrated in the word "faith": the judgement of reality according to a non-social standard.

What we understand to be true is largely decided by those in power because taking such liberties with truth has always been the province of authority; we recognize authority by its confidence in describing reality to us, and truth as the utterance of those in authority. This is central to the success of theistic religions in spreading their models of reality across the planet: they were couched in the words of gods and deified prophets. To this day, it would seem absurd to find physical laws and mathematical formulae shared as freely as quotes of the famous. And yet these are the summaries we use to understand our world.

These are fundamentally different criteria for determining what is true, and each has it's virtues: where one has greater predictive power, the other is more satisfying. To say that one or the other standard should be satisfied exclusively, or even primarily, is to disregard their functions in favour of our own preferences & values. Humans like stories, and throughout our cultural history have described and remembered the world through parables & folk tales; if this method seems functionally obsolete when technology lets us study the nuts & bolts directly, it is nevertheless the one to which we are physically and culturally optimized. All the data & predictive power in the world is useless to someone stuck looking for a main character to identify with.

This perspective mutes, I believe, the arrogance implicit in the popular approach to treating science denial with greater science education; it isn't just ignorance that makes people dislike the methods of science. Students will keep asking to be shown the relevance of their education to their lives, keep asking what they'll ever use esoteric facts of chemistry for, because this is a valid criticism of being drilled with data absent any overarching themes or principles. Given the importance of such a network of associations to learning in general, it is unsurprising that the systematic presentation of knowledge to children only rarely produces adults who retain a substantial portion of their early education.