Truthiness is that gut feeling that makes something sound true, even if it isn't. It is intuition, emotion, feeling, maybe even faith. Politicians and media use truthiness to sell people lies. A lot of people reason their way through life by truthiness rather than the truth. Hats off to Stephen Colbert for popularizing the term. Let's see if we can put it to good use.

The problem with the REAL truth is that it is often not very truthy. Evolution does not make intuitive sense to someone who doesn't understand it. In fact, the most important scientific truths are extremely untruthy. Einstein's relativity is not truthy at all. Neither is the Big Bang. Think about it for a second. If these real truths were truthy, then they would be common knowledge! If everybody knew by gut feeling that simple things can evolve into complex things, then there wouldn't be any debate over evolution. It would instead be a no-brainer to the majority of people.

Our primate brains are wired for detecting truthiness, and most people just go with that. It takes some time and effort to develop a personal rational system of thought that values the truth over truthiness. And let's face the truth, most people don't bother. Truthiness can get you by in society, at least at the individual level. But if we rely solely on truthiness, then the truth is that we are in extreme danger. And that's where we find ourselves today.

Only the truth can get us back on track. But the truth isn't truthy, and the masses don't want to hear it. They want only truthiness. So, let's give it to them. Let's tell the truth wrapped in truthiness!

There's no rule that says that things that are truthy have to be false, or things that are true can't be explained in a truthy manner. Freedom is a good example. Everybody knows that it is good to be free; freedom is truthy. But it really IS good to be free; freedom is also true.

Martin Luther King Jr. was great at showing the truthy side of freedom. Why can't we do the same with scientific truths, with showing the danger of blind belief, with evolution, cosmology, etc.?

Ourselves, we have learned enough and gotten to the point where ideas like evolution are intuitive to us. We can see how it works without having to go back to the textbooks we initially learned it from. We need to communicate on this intuitive level if we're going to convince the majority of people.

But my intuition is different than a theist's intuition, so using my own version of intuitive arguments for evolution won't do much to convince a typical theist that evolution is true. I need to understand how *their* intuition works and then use that understanding to wrap the truth of what I'm saying in some truthy language that speaks to the theist's intuition.

The ultimate would be if we had a large barrage of endless truthy arguments promoting the truth, and promoting systems of finding the truth, like science, logic, rationality, pragmatism, and whatever else. That way we can use people's intuitions to teach them to get themselves out of the truthiness trap.

Some ideas to think about: Truthiness is usually conveyed with simplistic arguments and fallacies. Fallacies work *precisely* because they are truthy! That's why they pop up *again* and *again*, because they target intuition. So, I wonder, is it always wrong to use fallacious arguments to teach the truth? Maybe some fallacies are worse than others? Maybe the argument from emotional appeal is a fallacy, but you gotta admit that it is damn powerful. I just watched The 300, and it had some great emotional appeals to promote reason over mysticism. I had tears in my eyes by the end. Is that so wrong? Why shouldn't we appeal to people's emotions if we are explaining the importance of reason and rationality? You can see such appeals and truthy-truths in Sam Harris' books. He talks about the dangers of fanaticism which could lead to global disaster. That's a fallacy, the fallacy of Appeal to Consequences. But it's still TRUE! It's a truthy-truth, and I personally have no problem with it.

What about you?