The other day, as this post recounted, I discovered that Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence and I seem to be on the same wavelength - in that instance thinking about haecceity and both being fond of the poetry and essays of J.V. Cunningham.
Now it so happens that Friday night and yesterday I spent some time paging through the Collected Poems of R.S. Thomas. I was even thinking this morning that I might post something about the presumption on the part of many nonbelievers that we believers are a complacent lot, smugly settled into a narrow faith. Well there's nothing smug, complacent or settled in Thomas's poetry - and he was an Anglican priest.
In any event, I turn on the computer this morning, check my email, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an email from Dave Lull pointing me to this link to Anecdotal Evidence: On the Great Dane, in which Patrick quotes three poems from ... the Collected Poems of R.S. Thomas, the third of which in particualar goes far to make my point about complacency. Come to think of it, Kierkegaard's faith was hardly complacent. Nor was Dostoyevsky's or Mauriac's or Bonhoeffer's or Berdyaev's or Gerard Manley Hopkins's or ... the list is too long.
From R.S. Thomas' “Balance” (1978):
ReplyDeleteIs there a place
Here for the spirit? Is there time
On this brief platform for anything
Other than mind’s failure to explain itself?”
That reminds me of something Freeman Dyson said recently when accepting the Templeton Prize:
"I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."
Richard Dawkins asked him in reply to "explain clearly what evidence he finds to believe in God, in something more than just the Einsteinian sense (which trivially we can all subscribe to) of 'a name we give to that which we don't yet understand.'" Dyson did not respond.
Douglas Adams said that “God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and now we have vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.”
In my view, the mistake both Dawkins and Adams make is to presume that God is an explanation. Nonbelievers seem often to presume that believers arrive at faith by some process of ratiocination. God is the conclusion they arrive at after thinking things through. Genuine faith, however, is grounded in an experience of God's presence. And experience trumps all theories and arguments. You can't reason a man out of what he has experienced. Of course, you can't persuade someone else on the basis of one either. But then I'm not missionary about my faith, though I do feel honor bound to bear witness to it. Like my patron saint I think the Gospel shoul be preached always - but words should be used only when necessary. Finally, I should think it would be obvious to everyone, if not to himself, that Richard Dawkins is a Calvinist turned inside out, who therefore retains much of the mold. That is why he so fervently believes in the Great God Evolution, Which has so nicely predetermined everything and everyone. Believe that, and I'll sell you a bridge in New York cheap.
ReplyDeleteNonbelievers seem often to presume that believers arrive at faith by some process of ratiocination.
ReplyDeleteWhat bothers the nonbelievers I've known about those professing faith is that their faith explicitly eschews reason or logic. It is the premise that their experiences cannot be supported by the reasoning mind and that that's okay. It can be whatever they were told to believe, or want to believe: Ra, Jehovah, or fairies at the end of their garden. But then you clearly are not a proponent of blind faith like most of the believers I have debated with.
The other side of it is that many people who support science in this argument do not admit that there is some force of life that science cannot at the moment fully explain or measure. Because there are kidneys, a liver, a heart etc. before death and the same organs after death, there is no question that some force or consciousness is responsible for holding life in the body (you have suggested this yourself in a previous discussion and I agree). It is when this consciousness leaves that life ends. But where it goes no one really knows.
Science does not claim to have all of the answers to the mystery of life, but religion does, without being able to offer any evidence to support its claims. It is enough for me to know that a thing happens without needing to come up with erroneous explanations through fantastic stories for why. Although when provable explanations are found, i.e., when the evidence to support a theory is publicly made available, I find those explanations very interesting indeed.
On genuine faith being grounded in an experience of God's presence: if one man says he experienced God in some way, it is a revelation to him alone. When he tells others about it, it becomes hearsay. I am free to believe or disbelieve him and when I hear people saying they regularly experience God and that God tells them things, I invariably exercise my right to disbelieve them. This is not to discredit a person's personal experience - they may well be sensing or experiencing something - only that the feelings they are experiencing are not necessarily a manifestation of 'God'.
Most tribes throughout history have had religions and creation myths. Many of the rituals they engaged in resulted in the experience of something spiritual. They often believed that what they were experiencing were the spirits of animals or dead relatives or the spirit of mother earth. The idea of one God is fairly recent in human history. Considering how many religions have existed and exist even today, who can say which God is the true God, the definitive God?
In the moral of American poet, John Godfrey Saxe's poem, The Blind Men and the Elephant :
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
See, you've got me started on poetry and now I can't stop!
ReplyDeleteHi Noel,
ReplyDeleteWell, I have to say that if someone told me God was regularly communicating with him I'm afraid I'd be more than a little skeptical.
I should probably have expressed mysel more clearly. I think genuine faith is grounded in an experience of a transcendent Presence. I am very much taken with the Chinese notion of the Tao and the ancient Greek notion of the Logos, both of which emerged at about the same time in human history. I find these more satisfying, both intellectually and emotionally, than most other formulations of divinity.
The job of science, I think, is to figure out as best it can how things work.
The job of religion I would trace to what some think is the origin of the word: to bind back. It aims to help us maintain or re-establish our connection with things. For a cradle Cathlolic I do not look to the Church hierarchy to help much in this - except with regard to the ritual, which I think they would do well to pay greater attention to. It would also be nice if from time to time they indicated some deeper grasp of the mysteries they are entrusted to teach and preserve. But that appears to be asking too much.
I certainly have no sympathy for a completely irrational assertion of faith. I don't believe you can prove the existence of God. But then you can't prove the existence of yourself, either. Plenty of things are true that cannot be proved and perhaps only the least important things can be. But I think you can demonstrate that a belief in God is not entirely arbitrary or unreasonable.
Oddly, I suspect that you and I are nearer in this than I am to many professed religionists.
While you're at the poetry, take a look at Tintern Abbey and Dylan Thomas's The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. Oh, and Eliot's Four Quartets.
Thanks, I will. I've been reading The Chameleon Poet, though I think your man, George Barker, used his Catholic upbringing as an excuse for being a scoundrel, in the way Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason explained it, by:
ReplyDelete"... his being taught to contemplate himself as an out-law, as an out-cast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown as it were on a dunghill at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make approaches by creeping, and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout."
Tao also interests me, though as a philosophy rather than a religion which is how I understand it started out before taking on a religious identity.
But is religion so far from philosophy at this point? I mean, I think it perfectly possible to philosophically posit God without feeling any need to join a church.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, what turns a way of looking at life into a religion is the institutionalization of a philosophy; in other words repetition and ritual replace the thinking mind.
ReplyDeleteThat is certainly a danger, Noel, but there are dangers to everything. Religious ritual can be moving and effective - and also routine and stultifying. The same can be said of sonnets and villanelles. One can be a member of a church and still think orginally within its framework - as Eliot did, as Hopkins did, as so many others have. And plenty of people who have never set foot in a church have utterly servile minds. C.S. Lewis makes the point that the door to hell is locked from the inside. People who find themselves imprisoned in a church have usually turned the key themselves.
ReplyDeleteFrank, it's a pity your schedule is so busy because that would make an excellent subject for a book. I think you argue your point of view much more effectively than many of your contemporaries.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I love that you equate the church with hell since that's my opinion! However, I'm taking advantage. I know what you mean and I agree. It is a conscious choice for an adult to surrender themselves to a power other than themselves, unless, of course, someone is holding a gun to their head which could be considered reasonable coercion. While the Catholic church, for example, doesn't hold guns to people's heads, it did used to routinely set people on fire, but they don't do that anymore, and on the whole I think that's a step in the right direction.
Children, however, are in a different situation to adults. They are very impressionable. It is not difficult to get children to believe in such fantastic concepts as Santa, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. As reasoning adults, no one could convince us of the reality of these concepts, unless we desperately wanted to (or noticed someone pointedly building a pyre, casually tossing a little gasoline on it while hinting that we might want to reconsider our position ... particularly on the Easter Bunny).
When I was a little boy, the nice priests would come into the classroom and say things like: "Can you imagine being burned alive for all eternity? Have you ever burned your little finger? Do you remember what it felt like? You do, don't you? It hurt, didn't it? Well, you were probably playing with your Dad's matches when you shouldn't have been, but the point is, imagine feeling that pain not just in your little finger, but all over your whole body. Your whole body burning, not just for a minute, or an hour, not for a year, not even for a lifetime, but for ALL of eternity, forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. SIN does this to you. SIN, and you climb into the pit of hell and burn forever. God is always watching you so if you SIN, HE knows you're in league with the devil and that's where HE's going to send you. To live with, and be burned by, Satan."
I have children now. Before I had children, I did not understand how important it was to be honest with kids. I didn't realize how much they look to adults for direction. Growing up I had the feeling that I looked to myself. But I see now that this was not the case.
I am not certain what happens after death. It is possible that, to my shock, St. Peter will be there at the pearly gates with a pencil and pad and a long list of all the extra cookies I snuck during my sinfully voracious childhood. Aside from some harmless childhood magic, I try to be completely honest with my children and if I am unsure of my facts, I tell them that. When my kids ask me about what happens after you die, I tell them what various religions believe and then in the words of Peter Pan, I say: "To die would be a very great adventure." I think this is a lot more honest than telling them I know, the way a priest does though he knows no more than the rest of us.
I am frankly suspicious of any organization, or group of organizations, whose logo is an instrument of torture and death and who have to stoop to brainwashing and terrorizing young children in order to enlist a new generation of believers. Even if the approach is not as direct as it is in the Catholic church, the hellfire and damnation is all the more insidious when the process of indoctrination is done with more subtlety.
Sounds like the Irish Church to me - Catholicism's answer to Calvinism. I was lucky to be spared much exposure to that - taught by a French order of nuns, and the OSFS priests in high school were pretty cool, and the Jesuits were - well, the Jesuits. But I will admit that the few brushes I had with what you describe were singularly off-putting. Small wonder many have grown up to hate the Church,as I gather you do. My own view on hell is the same as the Abbe Mugnier's: I beliece it exists; I don't necessarily believe anyone is there - and I definitely believe that God's mercy trumps his justice.
ReplyDeleteI don't hate the Church - it brings comfort to some people afterall - but I do think it is a fraud because the Bible is a fraud. It is not the word of a God; it is the word of man and I don't believe in any man-made religion.
ReplyDeleteOn the idea of hell and Satan, here's what Thomas Paine had to say about the Christian mythologists who came up with the story:
"In order to make for it a foundation to rise upon, the inventors were under the necessity of giving to the being whom they call Satan a power equally as great, if not greater, than they attribute to the Almighty. They have not only given him the power of liberating himself from the pit, after what they call his fall, but they have made that power increase afterwards to infinity. Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account, omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole immensity of space.
Not content with this deification of Satan, they represent him as defeating by stratagem, in the shape of an animal of the creation, all the power and wisdom of the Almighty. They represent him as having compelled the Almighty to the direct necessity either of surrendering the whole of the creation to the government and sovereignty of this Satan, or of capitulating for its redemption by coming down upon earth and exhibiting himself upon a cross in the shape of a man.
Had the inventors of this story told it the contrary way, that is, had they represented the Almighty as compelling Satan to exhibit himself on a cross in the shape of a snake, as a punishment for his new transgression, the story would have been less absurd, less contradictory. But, instead of this they make the transgressor triumph and the Almighty fail.
That many good men have believed this strange fable and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story. The more unnatural anything is, the more is it capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration."
On God's mercy trumping his justice, Paine suggests that any system of religion that has any thing in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system and this I completely agree with.
" ... the christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it, (for that is the plain language of the story,) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse; as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it."
Hi Noel,
ReplyDeleteI should have mentioned this earlier, but my problem with Paine's reading of scripture here and elsewhere is that the man obviously didn't have a poetic cell in his body.
The Bible is not a fraud because some have made fraudulent claims about it. I mean, if one thinks of it as having been dictated from on high, one's grasp of religious inspiration is so puerile as not even to be worth bothering to refute. As a Catholic I acknowledge both scripture and tradition as the twin pillars of the faith - and tradition is the stronger of the two. But I also think there's plenty of divine inspiration to be encountered in the Vedas and Upanishads and the Tao Te Ching. I consider myself a tradional Catholic, but not a conservative one, and definitely not a liberal one - though my take on moral theology would probably be construed as such.Sure, I believe that Jesus was the Word Incarnate, but he left his church - as God has left everything - in the hands of humans. A religion is no less noble and no less true for having been cobbled together by humans. Why reject a man-made religion and accept a man-made science or a man-made literature or a man-made civilization? I'm afraid those are all we have to work with. I also think institutions should be judged by their best exemples, not their worst - St. Francis and the Masses of Josquin Desprez trumping Torquemada and Alexander VI. Finally, and this is just my personal judgment, I find the world as seen through my Cathloci imagination just a lot more aesthetically satisfying than the world as seen through Paine's rationalist specs. Bear in mind too that Paine's lofty rationalism very soon led to the Reign of Terror - which almost claimed Paine as one of its victims. (I say this fully aware that my own theological views might well have got me barbecued in an earlier age.)
Paine's reading of scripture here and elsewhere is that the man obviously didn't have a poetic cell in his body
ReplyDeleteWhen it came to the fabrication of scripture as found in the Bible and as he clearly proved was the case in The Age of Reason, I agree Paine had very little patience. However, I think it obvious from his writings that the man had a good deal of emotional depth to him and also the ability to inspire, as evidenced particularly in Common Sense, which George Washington credited as having heartened his despondent army. It is also said that he heavily influenced "much of the phrasing and substance of the Declaration of Independence."
I'm not sure that Paine can be held responsible for the aftermath of the French Revolution - he was imprisoned afterall for refusing to endorse the execution of Louis XVI - though I do think he can be held responsible for encouraging the success of the American Revolution. Without Paine, it is possible there would not have been a successful American Revolution.
I believe that Jesus was the Word Incarnate, but he left his church - as God has left everything - in the hands of humans.
I think I understand your point here, but we know very little of the real Jesus. We know he wrote nothing of what is in the Bible. In fact, he personally wrote not a single line anywhere to leave behind him. Everything we know of him is hearsay, passed down from generation to generation and altered greatly in the passing.
Why reject a man-made religion and accept a man-made science or a man-made literature or a man-made civilization?
Because religion is a fantasy and the others (with the exception of man-made literature which of course is what the Bible is) are based on facts, facts that can be tested and verified. I don't believe in any man-made religion(s), but I also don't believe we should burn all the Bibles. They are a valuable part of our history, serving as a reminder of where we came from and of what we are capable of believing in.
I posted the following comment on Dave Weinberger's site a while back and am reposting it here because it captures exactly what I feel on what you would term the poetic aspect of life which should and does exist:
I look out at the stars with great wonder and awe not because I believe God put them there, but because they are majestic simply for being themselves. The awe I experience when each new discovery is made and each new tiny piece of the puzzle is unravelled is far greater than the awe ancient stories passed down from generation to generation could ever inspire in me. While interesting, they are not comparable to the new discoveries we are making everyday. The past is useful about learning about human nature, about the mistakes we are capable of making and the things we have learned from them, but to lock ourselves into the past, deny the advances we have made and close our eyes to how magnificent it is to understand just a little bit of how things work simply because it does not conform to what we would like to believe, and have been told to believe, about how things really are is unthinkable.
Almost everyone has access to the stars, or at least access to reliable information about what they are and where their beauty comes from in the great cosmic dance of the universe. Why is it necessary to cling to the ancient idea that the universe was made, magically, just for us? Isn't it enough that it just is and we can learn about what it really is rather than settling for what we would like it to be?
I would never suggest that Paine was not passionately eloquent. Nor would I blame him for the excesses of the French Revolution. I would, however, suggest that those excesses derive from flaws in a purely rational philosophy. (Politically, I think Paine and I have a lot in common.)
ReplyDeleteThat said, there is a difference between eloquence and poetry, nicely drawn by, of all people, John Stuart Mill. "Eloquence," Mill said, "is heard. Poetry is overheard."
Actually, when I look at the stars, I too am awestruck by their beauty and grandeur for their own sake. I believe that God means us to enjoy his creation because ... it is good.
To say that religion is a fantasy is to beg the question - using as your argument the point that is to be proved. I believe that the aesthetic element in thought is underappreciated. I tend to be attracted to ideas as much for their aesthetics as for their logic. I think the idea of a world mad by God is more beautiful than the idea of world that is just a fluke. Moreover, everyone has a summum bonum. It is interesting that it was computers that gave new life to Anselm's ontological proof: Computers, apparently, always affirm it.
None of which is to suggest that organized religion has not been responsible for grievous crimes - often against religion itself.
I would, however, suggest that [French Revolution] excesses derive from flaws in a purely rational philosophy.
ReplyDeleteWe cannot blame the irrational excesses of the French Revolution on the rational philosophy of Thomas Paine. Irrational behavior does not negate the rationality of the thought.
Let me explain it this way: if someone gives me very reasonable and logical advice, for example, that I should stand up for myself in my job, and I take that direction and thwart it, go bonkers and start chopping people's heads off, how can the person who gave me the good advice be blamed for my actions?
What I keep in mind about Thomas Paine is that without those rational ideas expressed so eloquently by him, it is likely the American Revolution would not have happened, certainly not at the time it did or with the result it had. The other thing I keep in mind about him was that the reason he was imprisoned by the French Revolutionaries was for objecting to chopping people's heads off after the Revolution had been achieved.
To say that religion is a fantasy is to beg the question - using as your argument the point that is to be proved.
I accept those theories in science that come with proof and though I am interested in all theories since it is possible that there may be some truth to them, I do not accept any untested (or untestable) theories-in-progress as truth, no matter how much tradition supports them.
I tend to be attracted to ideas as much for their aesthetics as for their logic. I think the idea of a world mad by God is more beautiful than the idea of world that is just a fluke.
I can understand this. It is certainly more comforting to believe that a supernatural force has taken an interest and is taking an interest in what happens on our tiny insignificant speck of cosmic dust. But just because we want to believe something is true doesn't mean it is true.
Beauty, romance ... life without these is like a concrete slab: barren and ugly. I think scientific thought is beautiful, in the same way Vivaldi or Bach is beautiful, and though science isn't complete, that's part of the beauty of it: there's still so much to discover. It is very exciting. As Douglas Adams said to explain how he felt when he came to understand evolutionary biology:
"It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.”
On Anselm's ontological 'proof' ... a proof is evidence that a thing is really there and not a logical argument purporting that it could be there because it makes logical sense that it should be there, in some people's minds anyway, simply because the idea can be imagined. Computers deal with math problems, not with the existence or non-existence of God. Unless you wish to reduce God to nothing more than a giant abstract math problem, his existence is not given credence by porting Anselm's argument to a computer.
It's true that I am certainly no poet, though I am beginning to gain an appreciation for it.
"We cannot blame the irrational excesses of the French Revolution on the rational philosophy of Thomas Paine." Maybe not on Paine himself, but a purely rational philosophy is not rational, because the field of the rational is limited. Once you assert that everything should be judged by reason and reason alone, you have started to become, well, irrational.
ReplyDeleteAs one writer has put it: "The ideas that originated during the revolution bordered on the farcical. In their efforts to remake society based on individuality and rights, the French reformers insanely went about changing the days of the months and even instituting a church of Reason. In fact, if the cost had not been the loss of thousands of innocent, terrified lives, lives snuffed out at the mere whims of their accusers, the Revolution itself was little more than ludicrous farce played out on the stage of European history. But the Revolution was not an innocent affair; like the First World War, its sheer stupidity and ludicrousness got swallowed up in an ocean of blood and a flood of terror. While no event in European history is more important in the eventual formation of the modern state, the Revolutionaries and Napolean to follow also gave birth to modern mass destruction of human life. In sheer volume of lives lost, they are on a par with the violence of the Third Reich in the twentieth century."
The truths of science are beautiful, I admit, but they are so not because they are scientific, but because they are true. The truth - and the beauty - inheres in the phenomenon itself.
Moreover, there are proofs that are not derived from experiment - mathematical proofs, for instance. Anselm's proof isn't put forward as an experimental proof. It merely states that in order to think about a supreme being you have to think of that being as existing; otherwise you are not thinking of a truly supreme being, since a non-existent one would fall short of supremacy by virtue of its lacking existence. As I say, computers agree.
Finally, anyone who has studied mysticism knows that there is virtual unanimity among them as regards the nature of the transcendent - and that the unam-nimity is grounded in experience. That is why church authorities tend to look askance at mystics - because they break down doctrinal differentiation (which is essential to ecclesiastical power).
Once you assert that everything should be judged by reason and reason alone, you have started to become, well, irrational.
ReplyDeleteAyn Rand was asked in a 1964 interview in Playboy Magazine: "Should one ignore emotions altogether, rule them out of one's life entirely?"
This was her response:
"Of course not. One should merely keep them in their place. An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions -- provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows -- or makes it a point to discover -- the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow -- then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction -- his own and that of others."
There are many things Ayn Rand said that I do not agree with. That comment isn't one of them.
As one writer has put it ...
Are you quoting Edmund Burke, by any chance?
The truths of science are beautiful, I admit, but they are so not because they are scientific, but because they are true.
I agree. That to me is the principal difference between science and religion. The claims science makes can be proven to be true. The claims religion makes cannot.
anyone who has studied mysticism knows that there is virtual unanimity among them as regards the nature of the transcendent - and that the unam-nimity is grounded in experience.
That's interesting. What is the virtual unanimity among mystics concerning the nature of the transcendant?
There are tribes in the Amazon, for example, who feel that your dream life is as important as your real life and that is where they celebrate their spirituality: in their dream world. Some Hindu sects feel that self-denial to the point of starvation represents the ideal state of being. The Aztecs celebrated their spirituality through the sacrificing of humans. The ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun through Ra and the underworld through Osirus (later seen in the Roman concept of the ferryman, and now the concept of the devil). The Ancient Greeks had Gods that represented all the foibles and weaknesses of man and, like the Greeks themselves, were very melodramatic.
Man's spirituality is as limitless as our imagination and like our imagination, our spirituality is capable of being an ideal dream or a horrible nightmare as well as everything in between. I think the success of spirituality over the millenia has transpired by appealing to our most powerful emotions: fear, love, generosity, hatred and sorrow, and to our baser instincts: sex, violence, malevolence and revenge. Spirituality and religion do not tend to appeal to the mind except through the attempt to satisfy our curiosity by claiming to provide answers to the unknown through stories.