During my next-to-lastone of my MFA residencies an Advisor commented, to me and another student, that he thought people who believed in the Bible were “stupid”. Though I am not a literal believer, I was both shocked and offended. “It is a beautiful and important book,” I think I said, though this was seventeen years ago, “it contains wisdom. Have you even read it?” Religions always reflect wisdom, definitions of right and wrong, warnings and promises. There is ample evidence that most people and in all times have believed in truths beyond themselves and personal experience. It is not the only reason most of the characters in my novel are clearly people of faith.

When I was a girl and at least into my teens the conventional wisdom and current science contended that only “man is the toolmaker” and this capacity distinguishes human being from the “lower animals.”

That definition changed. Wikipedia: “Nearly all chimpanzee populations have been recorded using tools, modifying sticks, rocks, grass and leaves and using them for hunting and acquiring honey, termites, ants, nuts and water.” Awareness of that toolmaking ability among chimpanzees was demonstrated in work of primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, a fact Wikipedia notably fails to note. She corrected what we thought we knew about humanity.

Toolmaking is not a capacity unique to human beings or even to mammals. During the past few decades birds and other vertebrates have been observed making tools. A native wild crow in Madagascar was documented on film creating a tool to access a tool to open a trap containing food. Whales and seals might make tools if they had the need. Technology is not the key indicator of intelligence.

Since then, I have heard other behaviors such as crying and play described as uniquely human (that last is ridiculous).

Human beings create imaginary stories. Bees tell stories through dance-like movements about where to find food. Crows on the Seattle campus of the University of Washington pass on information about threats to further generations. Anyone who has watched birds build nests and arrange and rearrange twigs, the gather of bright objects, the curiosity that overcomes fear, knows that living creature are more complicated that eating and mating. There might be stories there.

What human beings do that might be unique is making things up. We tell stories about dangers and pleasures, about potentials, about things that have never happened to us and maybe never will. Things that might happen. True stories condensed or fabrications meant to entertain. Our stories are warnings and suggestions, they invite the listener or reader to experience situations and places and people they might otherwise never know. Overwhelmingly, true or false, we believe the stories we’re told. Fiction can be true.

Recent brain science finds that we learn not merely from experience but from stories, and that we recall the lessons from invented stories in precisely the same way that we do from firsthand experiences. That is, most people respond to the danger described in a fictional story with the same intensity and recall the lesson for the same length of time as an actual experience. Consider: Hearing the story about prayer in the closet is as powerful as if Jesus were here showing us our flaws.

We are the stories we tell.

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

—Luke 11:1, King James translation

The Bible warns that espousing good behavior before others is its own reward. True virtue lies in doing right in private without witness but only for goodness sake. Human stories, even those containing events we know absolutely are fiction—Aesop’s fables, for example—are how we pass on wisdom too important to chance loss. We tell stories with magic and stories of faith and danger and hope. We make up stories and we believe our own fictions.

Inventing stories might be a uniquely human activity.

Somewhere between proselytizing and pretending religion does not exist at all… the first can be offensive, the second is naive. In my stories, I want to reveal the reality. A recent Pew Research poll finds that the largest single group of expressed “religion” in the United States is now “none” (28%). That does not mean that closing in on a third of Americans have no faith at all. It only means that they do not belong to a narrow definition of what it means to be faithful. It might only mean we do not go to church or we disagree with some things we are expected to believe.

It might even mean we pray silently and in private and no less fervently for the good of all.