Science has made many important contributions to our lives, but it is not the sole arbiter of truth. It can explain a cardiac arrest but not a heart ache, it can explain why it beats but not why it breaks. I would argue that our obsession with science and technology has caused us to neglect the contribution of storytellers to our quest for the meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything. As a physician, I admit I am also guilty of this cultural myopia because I tend to prefer many ideas rationally argued in the pages of non-fiction rather than a few played out in a fictional storyline. I have had to rethink my opinion because ideas have consequences and if we implement them without proper testing in the laboratory of life we may find that our New England Journal has become a Brave New World.

I suspect most people see their lives as stories and not a series of chemical reactions. If this is true, then it may well be that our search for truth is best facilitated by those who know how to craft a proper story rather than those who can sequence DNA. I met a young lady on a plane that works for an organization that solicits problems and then recruits people to solve them. She mentioned that they have creative writers on staff because the company feels that they bring a perspective the problem solvers do not have. Those that fix the problems often don’t have the foresight to recognize how these fixes may create new problems. It is only in the imagination of these writers that the potential secondary consequences of the proposed solutions are worked out. This idea is not foreign to us because we have seen it played out over and over again in the genre of science fiction. The utopian promises of the scientists are tested in the narrative laboratory and reduced to dystopian disasters. Sadly, however, these literary laboratory reports are often ignored until fiction becomes fact and their warnings of where we are headed become reminders that we have just arrived. Ultimately, the Nobel prize in literature must lie down with the Nobel prize in science if we are to properly navigate the world in which we live.

Many would object and say that stories lack empirical data and therefore are inadequate to study the world, but I would argue that a sterile laboratory is hardly a place to test a messy world. You can control for physical variables, but you cannot control for a human heart that is wicked above all things. We ignore fiction writers at our own peril because they do the hard work of taking ideas and imaginatively placing them in the hands of flawed people like you and me. The beauty of literature as a laboratory is that it has no exclusion criteria, everyone can participate, and you don’t need a PhD to understand its significance. The literary laboratory allows common people to become the primary investigators in worldview testing without having to destroy the world in the process.

Postmoderns would say that our lives are just amusing personal fables that are immune from criticism no matter how bad the grammar or incoherent the story. Modernists would reduce our lives to biological fact sheets that are interesting only because they allow us to trace the ancestry of our selfish genes. Reincarnation treats our life stories like reruns of Gilligan’s Island which have meaning only because they have entered into eternal digital syndication. Buddhism treats our lives as the illusory desire to make our stories into literary masterpieces when in reality they are nothing but pulp fiction. Christianity, on the other hand, tells us that every one of us is an important character in a story we didn’t write, fearfully and wonderfully crafted by an Author concerned about every detail including the number of hairs on our heads. God has committed Himself to the concept of story. He chooses to work through the medium of narrative. In fact, his plan of salvation, involved leaving His seat at the typewriter, emptying Himself of His Authoratorial prerogative, and becoming ink on a page, a Word in His own story. He became a character in order to prevent us from being cast into an outer bargain bin darkness where those intent on writing their own script weep and gnash their teeth as they stare at an RSVP they never bothered to send, while in the distance they hear the joyous celebration of a great cloud of witnesses at the cast party.  I think that deep down we all recognize that our lives are not complete works but rather chapters in a larger story and that our insatiable desire for purpose and meaning is really just a longing for our chapters to be included into the Book of Life.

While science can provide us with a biological CV it is incapable of recognizing the literary value of our lives. If we truly want to understand the world in which we live we need to welcome the storytellers into the discussion because in the end, it is in the literary laboratory that our life stories achieve statistical significance.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash