no scratch that, you explained it well enough. Although i would say Newtonian physics are real, not just an approximation. Its more that they dont cover everything, which Newton was first to point out.
Had to reply to this as I didn't see it earlier. It's interesting because this is essentially what Jordan is saying about these 'hyper truths' as well. You're right, my language was imprecise. Newtonian mechanics are definitely true, repeatable, reliable science. We understand them quite thoroughly, and as mentioned we've used them to go to the moon, to launch Voyager to the boundaries of our solar system, and to open our eyes to our place in the cosmos. But they are incomplete. They don't tell the whole story.
And what Jordan posits about hyper truth is essentially the same thing. Less stringent controls on the experiment, sure, but we can see that these things matter. That these stories, spoken traditions, archetypes of monomyths contain truth. Not complete truth. Not absolute truth. They're incomplete, they don't tell the whole story, but they did a damn good job of getting us to where we needed to be to learn more. They still have things to teach us today. And that means that, following basic logic, they have value. Because if they have no value then how did we get here? Did they mean nothing? Does any of this mean anything?
If nothing else, they inspired us, they helped free us from our animal natures to begin to change ourselves and the world around us.
I still have trouble reconciling a scientific outlook with something that does not have a purely scientific basis, but his argument is persuasive. I do strongly believe that what we do matters, even in the face of oblivion. There is some kind of purpose to this shit.
People will conceptualize that purpose in their own way, but the point is that for each of us a purpose exists. When it doesn't, we die. We don't stick around, we eat a bullet, jump off a bridge, drive into a tree. Even if our purpose is just to survive one more day in the hopes that tomorrow will be better, it's there, it's REAL. And that purpose encompasses scientific truth and dogma and borders and artificial divisions. To reduce it to survival instinct is to diminish the other parts of it. Amoebas survive. Depressed people 'survive'. We do more. We don't have to.
It's bigger, and if you're more interested in conveying ideas than latching on to semantics it's not unfair to call it divine.