In the final chapter, titled “Ceremonies”, of his book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Chamberlin calls for the end of choosing between Them and Us. He admits that while ending the separation itself is impossible: “the way in which we divide up the world into Them and Us is inseparable from the way we understand stories themselves” (239), he argues that the danger stands in choosing a side rather than realizing that the two categories work together to form how we understand the world.
He starts the chapter with an anecdote about the history of Stekyooden, a sacred mountain to the Gitksan people which in the northwest of British Columbia. The people living in the area flourished until they forgot that the reason for their success lay in the power of the mountain. This angered Mediik, the spirit of the valley, so much that the bear tumbled down towards the village and brought half the mountain with him, burying the village.
This story alone was not enough to “assert their claims in the courts of the newcomers to the valley” (220), so another story was used: a scientific one. A drill burrowing deep into the soil of the area found that there was a layer there that matched the soil on the top of the mountain, and that it had been placed there around seven thousand years ago; the same time as the story of Mediik. Chamberlin warns us with this tale that we cannot separate the “truth” and “imagination” because stories lie on the borders between them. A story is a way that we express ourselves and relate to the world around us. An example of this might be when we visit the doctor because “the room is spinning” or “there are butterflies in my stomach”. Neither of these claims are true, but neither are false either. Rather, they are one way of looking at the world. These descriptions help doctors to make diagnoses; another story of what is happening inside your body. The two work together in order to provide us a way to relate to and explain what is happening to us in a way we understand.
Another example Chamberlin uses is the work of Impressionist paintings. These painters were “sticklers for truth as they saw it – even when what they saw was a pink cathedral” (221). These painters were not wrong in the way that they viewed a scene, they were just seeing it from a different perspective.
I like how Chamberlin believes that “We need to take a cue from mathematics and the sciences and develop a greater comfort level with contradiction as a way of life” (233). My background lies in Physics, and while reading this chapter I kept thinking about how well his ideas fit with the way physicists have to approach certain theories. One of the fundamental principles behind quantum mechanics lies in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. To describe it simply. the principle states that you cannot know the exact position and velocity of a particle. As soon as it comes into contact with an interference (such as a human attempting to measure it), this changes the particle fundamentally; it collapses. If you want to measure its position, you can, but you will have no idea what its velocity is; and vice versa. This is because it holds the property that it is simultaneously a particle and a wave.
This is how I understood what Chamberlin was saying. Neither position, neither story is any more correct than the other, they are just different ways of approaching the same thing. In simple terms, the particle has both a vague sense of position and velocity (vague due to its wave-particle duality), but as soon as we attempt to look at it from one perspective, we cannot see it from the other. Chamberlin warns us not to forget that the other perspective is present. Both the bear and the soil stories provide important ways to imagine what happened, but they are both just stories. They both walk the border between imagination and reality.
Works Cited
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
Orzel, Chad. “What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?” TedEd. 2014. Web. January 2015.
Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. October 2004. Web. January 2015.
Neologismo. “Eddie Izzard – Do you have a flag?”. YouTube. September 24, 2006. Web Video. January 2015.
Hello Charlotte, thank you for this rather interesting answer to my question; you have certainly provided some outside context, fascinating. I am always interested in quantum physics. A most interesting TedTAlk – thanks.
Hello Erika. Thank you! There are so many voices coming from different backgrounds in this class, I expect it will provoke some interesting and engaging conversations.
– Charlotte
Hi Charlotte,
Thanks for bringing your knowledge of science into our discussions! I never took Physics in high school so it was great to learn something new and see how it relates to our lessons and readings. As Chamberlin says: “Every story brings the imagination and reality together in moments of what we might as well call faith” (3). I suppose science also requires us to have faith that its theories and principles represent reality. However, science seems very objective and fact-based despite various uncertainties. What do you think of bringing in stories into science classrooms? Do you think it’s suitable to bring in Creationist stories such as the story of Charm in King’s “The Truth about Stories” or the story from Genesis to illustrate that maybe we just don’t know?
Jasmine Chen
Hi Jasmine,
That is a very heavily-loaded question, so I will try to answer it in my own view as diplomatically as possible. First, science is fact based in that if data does not match a theory the data is not ignored, the theory is thrown out. A theory in science can never be proven right; it can only be proven wrong or incomplete. This is a very important necessity of science and its theories which eludes many. A theory is a story that explains how we relate to the physical world around us, and a scientist must be willing to throw out or change a story if it shows inconsistencies of what he observes around him. We will never have the complete story.
That being said, the problem I have with teaching a creation story in a science classroom is the very fact that these stories refuse to be changed. And that is not a problem for a story to explain how we relate emotionally to the world, but when it comes to what we call “science” this is not acceptable. Science has to change. It has to move forward. To teach students that there is a story that explains it all, and there is nothing left to learn is, in my opinion, wrong for the genre of science.
The problem I have with saying that God created the world, and that is how it was done, is that it fundamentally cannot be proven wrong. A theory MUST be falsifiable, by definition. It must have the ability to be proven wrong. This is also why most scientists do not consider String Theory to be a theory. It is currently a story that has no way to test it, prove it wrong, and it cannot make predictions. By accepting this as our story of how we physically relate to the world, we stop our pursuit of knowledge in its tracks and all agree that we know enough.
I have no problem with religion, creation stories, or faith. They are powerful entities of their own right, and should be taught in a variety of different approaches. As you said, a scientist needs constant faith. I do have a problem, however, with a static story being used to teach science, which can never be static.
I realise that this might sound as if I am promoting the complete separation of the two, and that is not what I am saying. I believe that science relies heavily on many things religion teaches. Similar to the Gitksan story of the bear, creationist stories help science to build upon and form its own story. They should not, and in fact cannot, be entirely separate, because they both rely on certain qualities, such as faith. Creationism and religion is already taught, on some level, because religion is the start of the sciences. Galileo pointed his telescope to the skies hoping to see the perfection of the heavens. However, he did not. Ideas had to be changed. To teach one story as a science is incorrect. Science can never have a static story to explain itself.
Thank you for your insightful question. I hope I was able to answer it as meaningful and openly as possible.
– Charlotte
Hi Charlotte, what a nicely articulated and intelligent response to Jasmine’s interesting question – thank you 🙂