or Where did I put my Cynicism?
This is a response to rockinlibrarian‘s lj post, on the Death of Myth, in which, importantly, she points out that all religious stories can be termed ‘mythology’ and it doesn’t mean they’re just silly stories, it means they hold symbolic, but not literal, truth.
*
(So I had a lot of thoughts. And they are disparate and incoherent, and this is the one I’m going to focus on.)
IF (and I haven’t made up my mind yet, but bear with me) IF myth is ok, (and not, say, a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and propaganda*)…
…then we can believe in the reality of Darwin’s evolution, but also the symbolic truth contained within religious (Christian?) mythology (again; ‘mythology’ in the sense of stories which communicate symbolic, but not literal, truths; not as in ‘stupid stories believe by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’).
I speak, by the way, as an atheist. Or, if you will, an Exceedingly Sceptical Agnostic.
BUT why stop there? Why stop with just reading the Old Testament symbolically (which, incidentally, Christians have been doing ever since they wrote the New Testament, never mind since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species,) or the whole bible symbolically (ie. no, Christ didn’t really perform all those miracles, they’re just symbols for the power of God, and the values he holds dear; like self-sacrifice, or, say, feeding hungry strangers even if there’s five thousand of them, or trying to do stuff even if everyone thinks its impossible and finding you can walk on water).
What if we just go one step further and say that God is a Myth. But the good kind.
If we say, then, that God is as real as (to take Amy’s example) Persephone. The Greeks didn’t really believe in Persephone. A few ignorant peasants might have. Mostly she was just a useful symbol of springtime, a way of embodying and understanding the things in the world – which also had a scientific explanation – on an emotional level (see Everflame’s lj on the importance of emotion in human decision-making). She was not real, but what she meant was. (No one ever really believed in Proserpina though. Poor thing.)
I don’t believe in a literal God. I certainly do not believe in a God whose word is supposedly the Bible. I don’t need to rehearse the various inconsistencies or moral cruxes in the Bible, a kazillion people have already done that for me. The Bible is too small, too flawed, too human, too outdated, to be a universal word of God for all time. It is Old Mythology. Mythology is always renewing itself for new societies in new contexts with new values. (Mutation. Survival of the fittest. Just like genetics.) That is why Persephone is now just a ‘stupid story only believed by ignorant, pre-civilised peoples and kids’.
I like the Indian story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The Elephant is God. The Blind men touch different parts and decide it is a tree, a wall, a snake, a spear. God is bigger than any of these things, and they cannot grasp all of it at once.
If there is a God, it is beyond anything we conceive. It doesn’t have a special place in its heart for Earth, because the universe is much bigger than that, and there is Probably Life Somewhere. If it cares about each of us as individuals, then it also cares for every animal, every insect, every amoeba as an individual. Alternatively, to it we are amoeba and irrelevant. Its morality is, again, more sophisticated than we can possibly understand or hope to emulate. Maybe it is a creator, maybe not. Maybe it is a controller, maybe not. Maybe it has powers to change the laws of the universe, maybe not.
Possibly the most defining feature of God as it (he, usually) is understood by most (all, probably) human religions, is that he is a conscious, thinking being.
Funky Quarkism
As an atheist, it is easy to say that religion is designed to fill in the gaps of what we cannot yet explain, with, erm ‘magic’ or else ‘something spiritual’. BUT all good scientists know there is a limit to human science. We can find out the physical laws that govern the universe, and the tiny particles that make it up. We can even find reasons why those laws are so, by discovering new tiny particles (quarks) and new laws (quarks come in flavours, which must occur in certain cuisines combinations). But however far we push it there will always be another ‘why?’ And the ‘why’ that we will never be able to explain; to which the answer is ‘just because’; the final set of laws that govern everything in the universe, no exceptions; these are the ultimate Unexplained, and can, in a way, be labelled ‘God’.
But… they’re not conscious.
Incidentally, if there is a conscious God, I think he/it is superconscious. Whatever that entails. We are vegetables in comparison.
Back to the mythological God.
The Christian God is insufficient to convey truth to many modern, civilised humans, because he jars with modern science and modern morality, blah blah. I mean, his mythology is a good 2000 years old. That’s twice as long as that of the Ancient Greeks lasted. Good going, hey?
But that doesn’t mean that some sort of god mythology is not still useful, cannot still convey truth, to modern humans. We are not beyond God.
I mean, science has its prophets: Newton, Einstein. Dawkins is a zealous priest. Darwin, perhaps, is its Christ (a ‘myth’ of modern science: that the whole Victorian religious doubt thing started with Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the modern age of science begins 1859. In fact, it was a general feeling growing up among a growing community of educated men who were part of the development of scientist from an amateur pursuit to a professional career. Lamarck suggested species adaptation over time in 1809. Lyell, a geologist, argued that the world was many thousands of years older than the Bible allowed, in 1830. Darwin couldn’t have published, couldn’t have been listened to, unless a few people, at least, were already willing to hear. His Origin, you might say, is a modern mythical symbol.)
The old God symbolised a benevolent universe, a commonality between all men, reassurance in the shared inevitability of death, a reminder that in life all humans are as important as each other and deserve to have their problems heard, and a reason to be a nice to other people.
And these are good things. And this God-the-Symbol is one I am willing to believe in (provided we understand that he is symbolically, not literally, true, and he therefore avoids becoming a dangerous vehicle for misunderstandings and/or propaganda**).
But he remains an outdated myth.
And, er, I tentatively move that Darwinism (perhaps with some Quantum Physics thrown in, mostly because that I dig that shit) is the new (and better, partly because it’s a little more true, but mostly because it has evolved for our times) ‘mythology’.
* on which more later. Perhaps.
** as above.
