Category: Revelation and Myth

The Great Myths of Modern Men

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Biblical doctrines, Revelation and Myth, Science

The Great Myths of Modern Men

‘The lawless man is produced by the spirit of evil and armed with all the force, wonders and signs that falsehood can devise. To those involved in this dying world he will come with evil’s undiluted power to deceive, for they have refused to love the truth which could have saved them. God sends upon them, therefore, the full force of evil’s delusion, so that they put their faith in an utter fraud and meet the inevitable judgment of all who have refused to believe the truth and who have made evil their play-fellow.”  The Apostle Paul

Before we can have a rational discussion on the subject of modern myths, we need to understand the terms and concepts we are using.  When I use the word myth, I am not referring to something false, but rather to a large explanatory story or narrative that gives us some insight into what stands behind the way we view the world.  In science, they are called models or paradigms.  In religion, they are called shadows, types, or parables.  In essence, myths are large metaphors that we use to talk about the things which we cannot see and yet believe are there.  They are believed to be the truths that point to the truth that stands outside of man’s grasp.  All true myths in some fashion and to some degree depict reality.  If this were not the case, they never would have been elevated to the place of myth.  With this in mind, we are ready to talk about the great myths of modern man.

To understand the making of the great modern myths we have to understand the time of the enlightenment in Europe which gave rise to the great myths of Western civilization.  The enlightenment was a time of great upheaval and change in the thinking of man.  The old authorities in every area of life were being challenged and being replaced.  Feudalism was being replaced with democracy, magic with science, capitalism with socialism and faith with atheism.

During this period there was a tremendous effort by the skeptics of enlightenment to move the masses away from religion. To do this, they would have to convince the masses that heaven could be created on earth by man, a transcendent God, and heaven up there was no longer needed.  If you recall mankind had once tried to build a tower to heaven, which ended with Babel[1].  If he could not storm the gates of heaven, he would simply build his own on earth, while shaking his fist in defiance at the God of the true heaven.

However, to storm the gates of heaven and bring heaven down to the earth mankind would need a huge resource of power.  He would need a machine that could replace God.  He found his machine in the creation of the modern state[2].  The state would be God walking on the earth creating heaven on earth, a heaven in which the God of heaven was no longer welcomed. In the new myth of the state it would be God who is banished from the new paradise not man. In this, we see the birth of the modern state and atheism, which are the two greatest myths of modern times.

In order for the modern state to become a god in the eyes of the majority of people, they would have to believe it had the power to save them and deliver them from the forces beyond their control. Forces like natural disasters, diseases, and the very forces of nature, even death.  In order to accomplish this, the state would need to have a mechanism to convince the people that it was the true savior and not religion. It would also need a discipline that could be used to support it. It found that discipline in the new field of science. It is self-evident that science and the state have grown together and are very much dependent on each other.  And since the time of the enlightenment the state has continued to annex more and more of the scientific enterprise for its own selfish ends. Its ending being ultimate authority and domination. In the last few decades, science has been increasingly controlled by the flow of money provided by the state to support its research.

 Another great myth of modern man is Darwinism. The thinking of the Western world has been controlled by the concept or myth of undirected evolution since the time of Darwin. In fact, it has become the dominating concept behind most science and thinking in general. For many, the concept is now a self-evident truth. To most, everything is getting bigger and better, moving from the simple to the more complex[3].  Of course, this concept fits well into the ideological concept of progress that was implanted in the minds of the enlightenment by Christian millennialism[4] and was the foundation on which they built the humanistic project of, replace the concept of heaven up there with heaven down here. It also fit well and supported the ideology of a capitalistic system, which was the prevailing economic ideology during the time of Darwin. Darwinism has always been strongly supported by the ruling class, which maintains its place through the educational system of the state.

You could say that Darwinism was the missing link that the humanist skeptics of the enlightenment (not science) needed to banish God from the earth[5].  They needed a theory of how things could be explained without an appeal to a deity. So the maxim was created that everything in the new discipline of science must be explained by natural causes without an appeal to a deity.  Of course, this sealed the fate of the new discipline of science as the weapon of choice for the skeptics and atheists to support and spread their non-belief or should I say their new belief.

However, true science was not created to banish God from the earth and many of the greatest scientists have been believers[6]. Science as a discipline is the study of nature and has little to say about the existence of a God who stands outside nature[7]. Science can make the statement that it has not found God in nature, which is a statement that theologians could make as well; on the other hand, many men of science can and do say that they see things in nature that seem to point to a deity who had organized all things.

To the thinking person and the person who truly understands science, science explains nothing it only describes things. It answers the “how” question not the “why” and “what” questions. For example, when it speaks about light it does not explain it but rather describes the way it behaves. Sometimes it behaves like a wave and sometimes it behaves like a particle, but these are metaphorical descriptions and do not tell us what light is. If we were to ask science to explain it, it could not without the aid of philosophy; in itself, it could only tell us what it does, not what it is.

What are the great myths?  They are the myth of the mega-state and its power to save mankind, the myth that it has the power to save which is the myth of modern science-ism.  It is the belief or myth that everything can be explained by a materialistic evolution explanation of reality alone. Evolution is surely a part of the circle of existence, but it is not the whole. It may help us with many how questions, but it never answers the why questions of existence and it is the why questions, which gives life meaning.

Given the above, the question must be raised, how much of the new myths square with reality, and how much are they an illusion?

[1] Babel means confusion. 

[2] Note “The Myth of the Machine” by Lewis Mumford.

[3] This view of evolution is not based on science and is believed by the masses.

[4] The Christian faith believes that everything is moving towards perfection and completeness.  This concept evolved in the West, into a strong belief in the concept of progress. Without the Christian faith the question must be raised are there any grounds for a belief in progress?

[5]  Of course, true science explains nothing it simply describes things. When it slips into explaining things, it ceases to be science and becomes philosophy or something else.

[6] To name a few: Nicolas Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

[7] The US National Academy of Sciences has gone on record with the following statement: “Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” Taken from “Who made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything” by Edgar Andrews.

Revelation and Myth

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Revelation and Myth

Revelation and Myth

The word revelation simply means an unveiling or the lifting of the veil.  We often use the word in a religious sense as an unveiling of the Uncreated One or the essence we call God, but the word God is a metaphor that points beyond itself to what is beyond and transcends human intelligence.  The word God itself is a revelation because it brings that mystical essence a step closer to our consciousness.  The word God to some degree enables us to communicate with each other about this mystical essence and our experiences of it[1].  We men have been analyzing and refining our knowledge of this Totally Other since the dawn of human consciousness.  Some have even pretended to be that consciousness when men had a corporal view of God.  It was the nation of Israel that first codified that God could not be imaged by the human mind, a revelation that could be traced back to Moses and his encounter with God on the sacred mountain.  The Uncreated One is not a creature that man has the right to name, as Adam named the animals brought before Him.[2]  Be careful about speaking of God.

It’s not hard to figure out how revelation worked.  In the past men experienced the Totally Other in various ways.  When they talk to others about their experience there seems to be a thread that connected these experiences, a thread that basically said that there was something beyond the mere physical.  Something so lofty that the human mind could not comprehend it.  It was this something that primitive man gave the title God.

This helps us to understand the ancient myths.  Myths mediated the presence of God to mankind through story and poetry.  It was through these forms of mediation that the foundation of all being began to reveal himself to mankind.  This is why we see a thread, though sometimes thin, of the same themes in myth and story throughout the world[3].

You could say that myths were the temples God used as a meeting places with men.  They were the bridge that spanned the chasm between the spiritual and the physical.  Myths are metaphors that come alive in story form.  Unfortunately, some men are metaphorically disadvantaged because of their concrete thinking which came about by a scientism that denies anything other than our sensorial experiences.

What about Jesus and revelation?  Well, Jesus is the image or revelation of God.  He said if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.  The apostle Paul refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God.”  Paul goes on to say that God packed into Jesus everything that humans could possibly know about God.  So, in that sense Jesus is THE revelation of God.  Jesus became a living metaphor that pointed to God.  That’s why John could say the Word (revelation) became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).  He goes to say, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known (John 1:17-18).  In the Word, the Forms and the Archetypes all took on a bodily form in Jesus.

[1] In his book “The Idea of The Holy: An inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the idea of the Divine and its’ Relation to the Rational” Rudolf Otto gives an excellent overview of these mystical experiences and encounters with the Totally Other.

[2] Heb 1:1-3 “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe”.

[3] “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. Also, note the works of Joseph Campbell.