What's wrong about pandering to fiction? Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy and Goethe spent their lives pandering to fiction. Paul Auster does. Since when is it wrong to pander to fiction?
Our memories contain a lot of "natural fiction", re-arrangements, retrospective insights, little dramas and wrong memories - that's how our mind works. Every time we learn something new, it changes the way we see the past. We create our fictions, we are partial, why should that be wrong? It's impossible to be otherwise. Every researcher knows it and tries to neutralize his/her bias.
We prop up ourselves by fictions and half fictions. Our ability of making cohesive narratives from our splintered experiences makes us humans and helps us to function.
Does this friend of yours spurn literature, theater, historical research, any kind of metaphor or generalizing explanation?
I'm all for pandering to fiction. I'm for music, art, literature... and natural science uses narratives, too. Every hypothesis contains fictional elements, speculation, filling in the gaps of knowledge by imagination. Freud used narratives and fiction to understand how the mind works. Jung's theory thinks about the intimate connection between the fiction we grow up with and our psychological make-up.
Tarot uses visual clues filled with meaning through esoteric tradition on the one hand, through intuitive reaction to images on the other hand, to get into touch with our own inner lives and questions. It's a creative use of fiction in order to solve problems and see them from another angle.
I compare tarot (and other techniques) to the shield of Perseus. When he wanted to slay poor Gorgo Medusa, he couldn't look at her directly because her eyes would have turned him into stone. So he used his polished shield. It showed him her reflection, and he could slay her.
By not thinking directly about a problem or question but using the shield of tarot to see its reflection, we get a better view of the problem and can then tackle it.
Of course, the story of Perseus and the Gorgo Medusa is only fiction. It's just some poppycock people have chosen to tell each other for some 3000 or 4000 years. Yeah.
If your friend lives without any fiction at all in his life, I really really pity him.
I wouldn't defend tarot at all to him. I'd buy him an icecream to comfort him for life in a fiction-less world.