The problem with the "theory of evolution" is not that it's false. Being a scientific theory, a conclusion based on upon a certain methodology that structures a certain type of narrative to the exclusion of all other narratives--being, as I say, a scientific theory, it is as true as it can be given the information available and the structure allowable. The problem is that it is bad story telling. It purports to be a true--not a scientific but an actually true--account, i.e. narrative, story--of how things happen and how things have happened. We are story-charged beings. We live on story. We see and experience ourselves and our world and everything in it via story. And this story sucks. It lacks a goal. It lacks even a trajectory beyond eventual extinction, which it gets when coupled with the cosmological story that starts with an event--whether or not that event is still called the Big Bang or gets a better name and more precise description. It allows for no point and no values, nothing worth living for or doing. Nothing. Even hedonism gives us something to want, some way of marking and evaluating progress. Science disavows any relationship to value or meaning even while it serves, more than it serves anything, as the elemental structure of the grand narrative of our time, and that not for a single culture but for the whole earth. Nothing is more certain to destroy humanity than bad story telling.
No comments:
Post a Comment