I keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who. - - Rudyard Kipling

However, talk precedes walk.

We believe that a just-so story is simply a story, a tentative, speculative answer to a question, and, as such, a clarification of one's thinking, ideally a goad to further thought, and, not incidentally, a necessary preliminary to obtaining the kind of additional information that helps answer a question (which, in the best cases, leads to yet more queries). When that happens—when the narrative is testable and generates fact-based research—then, in a sense, it is no longer a just-so story, but science, pure and … rarely simple.

It bears emphasizing that not all explanations are equally valid, since science arrives at conclusions based on evidence, as opposed to postmodernist poppycock in which every "reality" is imagined to be a culturally constructed "narrative," all equally true. On the other hand, it sometimes takes a while to determine whether pure speculation—as seductive and appealing as it may be—actually connects to the real world. String theory, for example, does not currently have direct empirical support, and thus it may or may not be objectively valid. But string theory has been immensely productive of additional research in basic theoretical physics, even if, according to its critics, it carries possible costs as well: notably, wasteful expenditures of time, money, and human energy. Such downsides, if and when they occur, are probably associated with the "story" in question being a scientific dead end, as were theories about "phlogiston" (a supposed substance liberated when something burns), "ether" (actually, "luminiferous ether," a purported but never identified medium for the propagation of light), and the pre-Copernican, geocentric universe. But the only way to know for certain that a particular path is a dead end is to walk down it a bit and see what happens. And before walking the walk, you've got to talk the talk—which is to say, tell a story.

What is the alternative to proposing a just-so story? One possibility, of course, is that God did it. Another is to emulate Topsy, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who declared that she "just growed," and conclude that the wings of birds and the echolocation of bats and the eyesight of eagles "just growed," for no particular reason at all. In either case, one would be stuck with supposed "explanations" that didn't explain anything: "just-growed stories."

I do a lot of wondering but remain skeptical of answers. Things are never settled. And yet, one must get on with life applying best understandings after having insisted on fact-based tests that affirm real world connection. One can sometimes feel a bit vertiginous, or perhaps fraudulent, industriously applying methods that are never entirely believed in. The trick is to convince one's self that such skeptical animus is a correct stance so that there is some scrap of firm ground that can be relied on. It doesn't always work. Perhaps it is just turtles all the way down.