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Last week's discussion made a lot of us think in different ways, I'm sure. We all come from different backgrounds with slightly different perspectives of the world, how it was made, and what happens next. Some of us were raised to believe that both Genesis and Darwin were right, others are devoutly loyal to one or the other, and some may even fall outside of those beliefs. I am one of those who was raised Christian and became disenchanted with it at an early age, fervently believing the scientific explanations of everything. I saw Christianity as a string of, well, stories. I never realized quite how much storytelling comes into play when considering the origin of the world.

I recently went to South America, and this course has me thinking a lot about it. I spent the first week in the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin discovered his famous finches that revolutionized evolutionary thought. I spent the second week in Peru, learning about the Inca and the Andeans who believed in four deities: the sun god, the moon goddess, mother earth, and the storm god. It was interesting to see these two places back to back, representing such different views of the universe. And I understood perfectly both why Darwin saw those islands as an example of natural selection, and why the people of the Andean mountains worshiped the 4 aspects of nature that their lives revolved around. I thought a lot during that trip about these questions. When do stories become fact? And how do we distinguish between them? What does faith even really mean?

I think faith is mostly about stories. Scientists put their faith in the stories they are told by other scientists, as much as Peruvians put their faith into the stories their elders told them. Who is either party to question those "realities" when they see such proof of it every day? 

And here we are in 2010, thousands of years after the Andeans, still having no idea what the "truth" really is. People will always search for the answers because there will always be questions. The author of the Truth About Stories is right. We are just made up of stories. Because when you think about it, what else do we have?