I don’t care much for facts. The etymology of the word “fact” shares with that of “factory” and “manufacture.” We as humans, as minds, create facts from existential reality. Sure, they’re important. They give us evidence upon which to build support for an argument, but the thing about facts is that they are little fibbers. They try to pass themselves as some sort of objective Truth. But existentially, there’s always a lot more going on, or happening, in the event from which they are fabricated. They are merely fibers in the fabric of a tapestry.
See, we take the word “fact” and attach to it this connotation to mean something like “Truth,” but a better connotation ought to be “something like truth” or “Truth distilled” or “Truth lite,” or maybe “verbage culled from a real-life encounter in which there are more things happening than anyone could ever possibly comprehend but is really extracted information with the intent of fabricating a sense of authority.”
Imagine the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Teachers will quiz their students with, “Name the year the Declaration of Independence was signed,” and proceed with the correct answer of “1776.” Okay, fact. But in reality, in that room in which the forefathers signed the Declaration, there was a lot more going on. If you were to travel back in time to the year 1776, located the room in which Jefferson, Franklin, Handcock, and the rest met to establish themselves as a free nation from under Britain’s rule, you might find there was a lot more happening here than simply a signing. What else was going on? Was there tension in the air? Was there anxiety? Stalwart confidence? What other political intrigues played in the background? How else were the men related? What about all those other guys in the picture? Why were they there? Why don’t we learn about the rest of their stories? What building were they in? Why that one?
Nope. Fact. The Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776. That’s all you need to know. It doesn’t make for a very engaging story, does it?
Facts are like grains of salt. Citing a fact and calling it Truth is like asking someone to pass the salt, and they deliver to you a single grain. Science tries to gather a collection of facts in order to make an argument, but even that falls short. You might get a salt shaker from science’s efforts, but there’s still the whole salt quarry left unattended.
Facts inherently exclude themselves from the context of their stories. Stories are more engaging, more holistic. They put the learner in the center of experience. That’s the beauty of imagination. We can transport ourselves to remote places and times and learn about things we have only experienced second-hand, and more importantly, they create meaning. 1776 means nothing. That there are starving people in Africa means nothing without the story that surrounds it. The facts of global warming mean nothing without the story of environmental catastrophe that surrounds it. War? Disease? Famine? Poverty? Newspapers inform us of these daily, with “just the facts.” In their standalone delivery, facts are close to trite. They are basic forms of knowledge, simple knowledge, like bricks in a building in a city of skyscrapers.
The Cosmological Principle 