Truth and Reality

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S4E27 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we're talking about truth and reality.

Yucca: Yes. So, there's a lot to talk about here.

Mark: There is, there is, and that's, that's why we chose this topic, right? Because a lot of the places where we come into friction with other parts of the pagan community, and certainly friction with other religious perspectives other than atheism, is in the question of what is real and what is true, right?

Yucca: hmm. Mm

Mark: And I think what I want to start out with... The problem is that we have terrible language for this stuff.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: Very imprecise language that uses one word to describe a lot of different things.

Yucca: Right. I want to start also with with a little story from something my father used to say when I was little. And I don't know where he got it from, but when he would tell a story, and I would ask him, I'd say, Dad, is this a true story? He would say, Yes. The events didn't happen. But this is a true story.

Mark: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, like fables,

Yucca: The

Mark: Fables that illustrate moral principles. The moral principles may be something that we want to subscribe to, but that doesn't mean that the story about the chicken that was afraid that guy

Yucca: sky was falling, or that nobody would help her make bread, or... Oh, there's a lot of chicken ones.

Mark: are there?

Yucca: Yeah, right?

Mark: You would know more than me.

Yucca: But, so, when we say that word true, It can mean so many different things, right? Sometimes we mean it as, is it correct as in, you know, a mathematical problem, right? Is 2 plus 2 equals 5? Is that true or not, right? But we can also mean, is it true in that more, does it have importance, does it have meaning?

So,

Mark: or even in very broad philosophical senses, like, is it true that supply side trickle down economics benefits everyone in the society? And some people will say yes, that's true. I think the evidence is that it does not, but ultimately it comes down to what you believe and what your, what the underpinnings of that belief are, what your philosophies are, right? So when I see Truth. I used to just mean the objectively factual, the verifiable, right?

Yucca: right, so sort of like a positivist approach to truth, right? So what is real can be verified empirically, and the best approach to find it is the scientific method. Right? That would be our positivism, yeah.

Mark: that is true of phenomena in the objective universe outside of our skins. The earth is round ish, it's not flat. Doesn't matter what you believe about it, it's still round ish and not flat, right? We have overwhelming evidence that this is the case. And so, it's not 100% sure, because nothing in science is ever 100% sure, but there's so much evidence that it's not considered an open question at this point.

It's considered settled science. It's a fact, right? But when you get to truths like... Justice and morality and good. There are truths in there too, but they're much more rooted in the philosophy and belief system of the person that's expressing them in the culture that they grew up in

Yucca: Mhm.

Mark: than it is about something that can be measured and factually checked. against other alternatives, right?

Yucca: Right. And while we're giving things labels that would be more of a constructivist philosophical approach, right? That those beliefs are constructed from the society that you're part of and your experience and your species and that all of those things are building on each other to create reality or to create truth.

Mark: Right, right. Your, your familial ideological context, all of those, all of those things accrete to form something that more or less hangs together as a, as a philosophical belief system, right? So, that I think is a part of the reason why it becomes very difficult to talk about what is true. Because as you say, the story, the events, May not have happened, but the story can still be true, and that's why myth is so important to us.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You know, we are the storytelling apes, as we've said before, and telling stories, even science tells stories, science, you

Yucca: Oh, absolutely. That's what it's about. There's very strict rules about how you tell that story, but that's what we're doing. Yeah.

Mark: it tells, you know, chronological procedural steps, events that take place, where, you know, something becomes something else, or something comes into being and, and so it's important for us to recognize, I think, The value that storytelling has for us in the abstract,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: because just because something is not objectively factual doesn't mean that it can't be emotionally moving morally instructive eye opening in perspective,

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: You know, broadening your, your understanding of the human condition and the life that we live. So, all of those things are, are true, right? And none of them is, you know, can be subjected to a grass, a gas chromatograph.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: You can't, you, you can't measure those kinds of things.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So, I actually made a little Venn diagram using the wrong tool for making Venn diagrams. I used Microsoft Word earlier today. And I've got four circles. I've got objectively verifiable facts. I've got believed truth, cultural truth, and then what overlaps all three of those is personal reality.

Yucca: How are you distinguishing between the believed and cultural?

Mark: Well, here's a good example. The cultural truth of the United States is Christian.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: It is, you know, that, that is, You know, the cultural truth is what I would call the over culture,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: whereas the individual's personal reality might vary from that, the believed truth. You know, so we don't subscribe to many of the values or or even cosmological beliefs of the cultural truth.

But we do. And so we have our own believed truth.

Yucca: Okay,

Mark: That make sense?

Yucca: does, yeah. So just getting a sense of how you're using those words.

Mark: Yeah. And this, once again is where language is just really not very useful. I mean, having to use all these qualifiers for words, words like truth and real and fact and things like that is, it's frustrating. And because I have spoken a couple of other languages, I know that it's not entirely capturing what I'm trying to say.

Yucca: right.

Mark: We don't have quite the right words in our language to capture what I want to say.

Yucca: So I don't know if any language, some might have words that are, that are better fit, but, but language is just something that we're trying to to, to communicate these ideas, but the ideas are, language isn't enough. Right? And so I think that it's helpful for us to try to articulate it anyways, because that forces us to clarify our thinking around it, right?

We can't just throw a word on it and say that's, that's what it is, right? We have to really think about what are we trying to actually say. And that's tricky, because we're trying to think about, we're trying to think about our own process of thinking.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: more challenging than it sounds like on the surface and then put down, and think about other people's approach to it, and of course we are just these limited, limited beings, right?

We don't experience everything, we only get to be around for, exist for a very short period of time, and most of the time that we're existing for, we're not even conscious for.

Mark: Right. And our brains constantly edit, massage, invent fill in the blanks. of our perceptual array filter our perceptions in order to create an inner model of the universe that we can interact with, right? And so we can determine that things are true when there's very …