Tipsy has some good stuff on the nature of God and the new atheism entitled God Is Dead. Long Live Our Souls. There is some good imagery in there. It made me reflect on, perhaps oddly, the nature of language. Stories and myths become forms of vocabulary for conveying ideas that are not accurately captured by mere words and phrases. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
The writers quoted on that site all have the same constraint. They all spout variations on the same theme that there *has* to be something not just unknown, but ultimately unknowable.
Stories, myths, legends, they all have their place in trying to make sense of a world that is uncaring and seemingly random, but they don’t replace actual discovery. Just because there are things we don’t understand, doesn’t mean that there are things that are ultimately unknowable.
Narrative is the easiest way of making sense of things that we don’t understand, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best.
Matt Rose makes some good comments and accurately observes that there is an unkowable, although more knowable through properly “divinded” methodology, woven throughout the piece.
Humans are story telling creatures and we convey our culture, indeed our everything, through story and metaphor. Your reference to the Star Trek episode is well taken. It is a meta lesson of transmission of cultural knowledge. But all of these stories are self-generated. They stories do not exist outside a human-enable context. We could species shift a bit. Raise our children with Klingon myth and we might end up with nothing but bikers.
I operate by two principles.
1. If it cannot be measured, it did not happen.
2. If it is not measurable and repeatable, it cannot happen.
Not to be a jerk (usually said when one’s about to act like a jerk) but keep your two principles in mind the next time you tell your significant other that you “Love them”.