Oswald Spengler, a great and underrated philosopher, rigorously described the different modes of thinking – and hence experiencing – which constituted science and history. From the scientific perspective, phenomena are conceived as continually possible. If certain causes are provided, certain effects can be procured. The hallmark of any scientific experiment is that it must be reproducible. If you cannot reproduce the experiments of Galileo and prove his conclusions, then he wasn’t doing science.
History, on the other hand, sees events as uniquely actual. To the historian, you actually cannot reproduce the experiments of Galileo: they happened once, with a historical meaning and significance that later imitations will not have.
Both modes of thinking, though of course entirely contradictory, are true. Playing with marbles in the lab, you can ask, “Is this the same experiment as yesterday’s?” and be answered either “yes” and “no,” depending on the answerer’s mode of thinking.
The distinction is not really one of material. In fact, many historians treat human events scientifically: “Economic collapse is possible given causes x, y, and z, which occurred in 1832, 1929,” etc. And there are branches of “science,” such as paleontology, whose business is to create a history of natural events such as extinctions and geomorphological alterations.
I think of these questions because I am convinced that at the heart of the argument between secularists and the religious is a conceptual disconnect such as this one. The reasons I hear secularists giving for disbelief frequently do not strike me as even relevant – as if someone said that they had gone to Russia, and looked at the records, and found that there was not a shred of evidence that such a person as Anna Karenina had ever actually existed. Or saying that it glorified adultery. You are almost left without arguments against such thinking, it seems so utterly beside the point.
The question is, what is the paramount conceptual framework behind religious thinking? What makes it different from scientific thinking? Religious people themselves, as far as I can tell, do not have an answer to this question, which is probably one of the reasons why they have been losing the argument, first in Europe and now in America. Again, the question is not merely differing material; religions because they are part of this world are subject to historical and scientific inquiry. But what is obvious is that their effective contents are not exhausted by these modes of thought, particularly by the scientific mode of thinking. The historical mode of thinking actually has a fair amount in common with religious thinking, and more distinction may be required in that area.
Andrew Sullivan had as usual an excellent notice on this topic, noting that calling the story of Christmas a myth is no insult. In fact it is obvious (Christians who insist on literalism really should read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason on this topic; he effectively demolished Biblical literalism more than two hundred years ago. And he is utterly wrongheaded while doing it most of the time, because to argue these points is answering fools according to their folly; but someone had to do it) – obvious that it is a myth. What does this mean? This means that the story persists because of its vast consequence to people. For an artist, this is the highest possible achievement: that your visions, whether transcribed or imagined, are the dreams of mankind, that they are the things other people will live their lives by. And when you articulate a new religious myth – the rarest and greatest of all achievements – this means that you have revealed something new about the divine (i.e. highest) nature of man.
This though these myths may well be bad science and bad history. That is not a problem. A dream in which you find a new room in your house is not an insignificant dream merely because your house did not actually get a new room that night.
Joseph Campbell has some excellent material on this, though I don’t think he quite goes far enough. For him, religious thinking is fundamentally metaphorical: it is obviously false on the surface so that it leads the mind quickly to its referent, which is literally inconceivable. The problem with this is that so many of the mythic information appears to be quite conceivable: duality vs. nonduality, immanence and transcendence, etc. Even the transcendent ideas can be made into ideas that are explainable easily enough. That doesn’t really fully explain the whole religious phenomenon. But his story of dealing with stupid secularists is illustrative of the problem. And being his puckish self, he gives it to the religionists too.
When the first volume of my Historical Atlas of World Mythology:The Way of the Animal Powers came out, the publishers sent me on a publicity tour. This is the worst kind of all possible tours because you move unwillingly to those disc jockeys and newspaper people, themselves unwilling to read the book they are supposed to talk to you about, in order to give it public visibility.
The first question I would be asked was always, “What is a myth?” That is a fine beginning for an intelligent conversation. In one city, however, I walked into a broadcasting station for a live half-hour program where the interviewer was a young, smart-looking man who immediately warned me, “I’m tough, I put it right to you. I’ve studied law.”
The red light went on and he began argumentatively, “The word ‘myth,’ means ‘a lie.’ Myth is a lie.”
So I replied with my definition of myth. “No, myth is not a lie. A whole mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and the fulfillment of a given culture at a given time.”
“It’s a lie,” he countered.
“It’s a metaphor.”
“It’s a lie.”
This went on for about twenty minutes. Around four or five minutes before the end of the program, I realized that this interviewer did not really know what a metaphor was. I decided to treat him as he was treating me. “No,” I said, “I tell you it’s metaphorical. You give me an example of a metaphor.”
He replied, “You give me an example.”
I resisted, “No, I’m asking the question this time.” I had not taught school for thirty years for nothing. “And I want you to give me an example of a metaphor.”
The interviewer was utterly baffled and even went so far as to say, “Let’s get in touch with some school teacher.” Finally, with something like a minute and a half to go, he rose to the occasion and said, “I’ll try. My friend John runs very fast. People say he runs like a deer. There’s a metaphor.”
As the last seconds of the interview ticked off, I replied, “That is not the metaphor. The metaphor is: John is a deer.”
He shot back, “That’s a lie.”
“No,” I said, “That is a metaphor.”
And the show ended. What does that incident suggest about our common understanding of metaphor?
It made me reflect that half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
That is why most of the debate between these two groups is so utterly uninteresting. But that does not mean it has no consequences.
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