First stories tell us how the world was created. In The Truth about Stories, King tells us two creation stories; one about how Charm falls from the sky pregnant with twins and creates the world out of a bit of mud with the help of all the water animals, and another about God creating heaven and earth with his words, and then Adam and Eve and the Garden. King provides us with a neat analysis of how each story reflects a distinct worldview. “The Earth Diver” story reflects a world created through collaboration, the “Genesis” story reflects a world created through a single will and an imposed hierarchical order of things: God, man, animals, plants. The differences all seem to come down to co-operation or competition — a nice clean-cut satisfying dichotomy. However, a choice must be made: you can only believe ONE of the stories is the true story of creation – right? That’s the thing about creation stories; only one can be sacred and the others are just stories. Strangely, this analysis reflects the kind of binary thinking that Chamberlin, and so many others, including King himself, would caution us to stop and examine. So, why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? Why does he emphasize the believability of one story over the other — as he says, he purposefully tells us the “Genesis” story with an authoritative voice, and “The Earth Diver” story with a storyteller’s voice. Why does King give us this analysis that depends on pairing up oppositions into a tidy row of dichotomies? What is he trying to show us?

When King tells two factually incompatible creation stories, he is trying to show is that we have a reciprocal relationship with the stories we tell, and this relationship is coloured by our human needs, wants, and values, rather than our desire to express and believe truths.

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (2).

We are our stories in the sense that we create them just as much as they create us. He uses the story of his father to show us that his need to understand why his father abandoned him and his family, and his anger he felt by this led him to construct a story that is meet these needs.

“Yet this is the story I continue to tell myself, because it’s easy and contains my anger, and because, in all the years, in all the tellings, I’ve honed it sharp enough to cut bone” (25)

Although the story of meeting his father in a bar is not true, this doesn’t matter because that is not what the story is for. He is motivated by anger and confusion when creating the story, and through years of telling the story, it has been pruned down to reflect those feelings and needs. He is the story, and the story is himself.

King extends this idea to religious beliefs. Many empiricists would argue for a copy principle of belief formation in that we experience the world in a particular way which leads us to form beliefs that correspond to these experiences. Our beliefs track truth. Therefore, the stories we tell that are constructed from these beliefs also reflect truth. Yet King argues that our motivations and emotions feed into the stories we create which is a version of social intuitionism. This view states that the evaluations we have of the world are largely based on gut reactions, and the reasons we often give for having these evaluations are largely confabulated. So King, like the social intuitionists, argue that religious creation stories are not told so much as an expression of believe – as beliefs are merely superficial in this sense – but rather, they are envincements of our motivational sets and emotional proclivities.

“Do the stories we tell reflect the world as it truly is, or did we simply start off with the wrong story.” (26)

For King, starting off with the wrong creation story involves approaching existential and moral issues will unsavory motives and emotions. The desire to dominate and justify this domination has fed into the Christian story of creation, and has been honed as these motives and emotions have been expressed throughout time. The Native story, on the other hand, reflects interdependence and harmony. Choosing between this story and the Native one is not really a matter of choosing between different versions of truth-telling. Rather, it is a choice between identities.

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