Volume 7, Issue 1, November 1997


SCIENCE and MYTH in the POST-MODERN WORLD

"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths."

-Sir Karl Popper

It is tragic to ignore the fact that our culture is still mythic to the core, in spite of our pride in reason. The teacher and writer, Professor Joseph Campbell points out that "it is not science that has diminished human beings or divorced us from divinity. On the contrary, the new discoveries of science 'rejoin us to the ancients' by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe a reflection magnified by our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech." Science is an inquiry into the nature of things, of humankind and our place in the universe. It is the accurate observation and classification of inorganic, organic, psychological, and social data for the purpose of understanding, prediction, and control. Science is a body of organized and exact knowledge.

Scientific disciplines and the researches of the laboratories can take into account only what involves measurement. By controlled observation and repeatable experiment, the scientist can give an accurate account of a restricted portion of reality. Information is deliberately sacrificed for the sake of precision. Science proceeds by abstracting and no harm is done as long as the process of abstraction is recognized and remembered.

Philosophy too has its measurable limitation. It attempts to put its findings in communicable form and therefore in propositional representation.

However, in human experience there is much that will not fall into such patterns. So again for the sake of precision measured aspects must be sacrificed. We know only what we can experience, and what experience lays down as limits and possibilities. The world of experienceable things the philosopher Immanuel Kant calls the world of phenomena or appearances. The real world, unknowable, is the world of noumena or outside of sense experience.

For Kant the "real world", though unknowable is a necessary assumption. We can say only that it is, not what it is, for it is outside of sense experience.

This meaning is like poetic vision. They are means of expression of persons who are used to grappling with detailed problems of a moral, historical, and scientific character. Their validity consists not in any descriptive or explanatory value, for they are not based on experience and observation, but in the imaginative possibilities and insights which they open to us.

Interpreted in this way the scientific method and the philosophical are not opposed to one another but are complementary, as the works of poets are.

Much of the Bible is nearer to the realm of poetry and music and art than to that of logic. Real communication is possible only when the reader occupies the place of the writer and experiences something of what the original writer experienced.

The language of the New Testament has a large part of imaginative rhetoric, alone adequate to catch up the awareness of believers. The only way we can understand it and communicate it is to enter into its original power of mythic consciousness.

Until the scientific revolution it was generally acknowledged that we could not live without myths in which we believe, with which we could identify, and through which we could communicate. Myth gave expression to believers. The only way we can understand it and communicate it is to enter into its original power of mythic consciousness.

Until the scientific revolution it was generally acknowledged that we could not live without myths in which we believed, with which we could identify, and through which we could communicate. Myths gave expression to the mystical in life, our awe as we behold the grandeur of ourselves, our world, and our universe.

Myths are dramatic stories in symbolic language to describe past events of beings, things, situations, or events. Mostly they have to do with origins. The first eleven chapters of the biblical book of Genesis is mythological in content.

A myth is not a fantasy, or an illusion of primitive mentality, but an unique way of communicating what is created and perceived by the imagination. Myths are believed in faith and, though they cannot be proved to be true by reason, they are accepted by reason as pointing to truth; necessary presuppositions.

Myth continues to serve to speak to the philosophy and principles of our universe, the dimension with which science is concerned. Science tells us more about how some of the mystery performs rather than what it is.

Scientific rationalism tends to demythologize the cosmic scene, desacralize the universe, depersonalize truth, and attempt to analyse reality by taking it apart, describing only parts of it. But neither the scientific minded nor the philosophically minded can denigrate myth anymore than they can metaphor. Both are widely and usefully used in our culture.

Our post-modern society feeds upon a host of popular myths and ones that point to a mystic rather than rational state of mind. The myth of Babel still has meaning and application today, for example. (Genesis 11).

Most importantly it seems to me, myth is most useful for teaching, giving us illustrations of how to live and face the challenges of our lives.

The knowledge of truth as we understand it is based, not on the theoretical, but on existence, on living reality.

In the Gospel of St. John it is revealed that "God is spirit, and those who worship God can only worship in spirit and in reality".
(St. John 4:24).

Reality is the quality of being true to life; fidelity to nature. It is being genuine. In the Old Testament the prophet Jeremiah in his search for reality received the message: "Go to and fro in the streets of Jerusalem. See, I entreat you, and know! And look in its broad open spaces to see whether you can find one who does justly, who practices faithfulness."

For the prophet it was an illuminating experience. He could not find truth in the collective, nor in the universal, but in the individual and in the specific.

Religion is communicated more by participation and practice than by abstract formulae. In this sense religion as a rational system tends to kill religion as participative action.

One becomes aware of truth by living experience. The eternal meaning in life becomes God in us.

The theologian Paul Tillich stated: "Life is being in actuality and love is the moving power of life." Being, or reality, is not actual without the love which drives everything. In our experiences of love the nature of life becomes manifest. It becomes the source of our existence and our ideals.

Spirituality is the highest expression of religion. To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal, the holy. Love becomes creative justice, a perspective of tolerance and sympathy, without which our lives are narrow and incomplete.

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.