How is the Christian to look at this historic development? The Christian who affirms God's ultimate sovereignty despite the apparent free-will of the human soul finds himself suspended in the tension between two "incontrovertable facts" that are, humanly speaking, contradictory. When we venture into this realm of faith "off the edge of the real world", as it were, we are reaching out toward the eternal world of the Designer/Initiater/Creator/Sustainer of the whole universe. Those who cannot bring themselves to venture beyond the physical environment are locked into the rational real world of human sensation to the point of denying to themselves the existence of the eternal thought-world.

They justify their rejection of the supernatural as part of reality on epistemological grounds. Since primitive man understood things mythopoeically they simply imagined a world that did not really exist, either then or now. If the supernatural were real it could be known scientifically. Parts of the imaginary mythopoeic cultural product have proven to be real, that is, consistent with known nature. Other parts of the mythopoeic cultural product must be rejected because they cannot be known or proved to be consistent with nature. From the standpoint of rationalism there is no way any thing imagined (like all hypotheses) can ever be considered true unless it is proven rationally (i.e. scientifically, by predictable experimentation) on the basis of the perceived consistency of physical reality (i.e. natural laws). For the person thus trapped in rationalism the existence of God is an unprovable hypothesis, a delusion.

Therefore, for the rationalist religious faith is a decision to step into a delusional world in order to enjoy the transitory but desirable social, psychological and emotional "benefits". It is a concession to human frailty. It is not unlike the decision to get drunk, to use drugs or indulge oneself for amusement, except that religious faith usually has fewer negative side effects. I would offer a counter to that argument by putting it this way. God's creation certainly included mankind, a physical being capable of both consciousness (awareness) and abstract thought. Every person's consciousness begins with an awareness of the physical environment. Eventually mankind penetrates beyond the screen of physical sensation into the realm beyond the obvious, the realm of understanding (the Greek word is hypostasis) This is just beginning when an infant recognizes its mother or other objects in its surroundings.

As I have argued at length elsewhere the earliest understanding acquired by mankind was mythopoeic or animistic. Now the question raised in this discussion is whether the mythopoeic understanding was in any sense true or real? As Christians we obviously cannot accept the conclusions of mythopoeic thought applied to religion, namely, polytheism. As Christians we have been quick to assert that myths are without basis in fact and therefore merely artifacts of primitive, pre-rational and unproven hypotheses that were accepted because, sadly, they didn't have a better explanation.

But even though the ancients conclusions were wrong, was their basic method somehow illegitimate? Were they not reaching out into the unknown in search of answers, of understanding? We might still profitably step into the unknown in search of answers believing as the ancients did that "answers" are to be found by seeking beyond and behind the facade of this natural realm where existence is limited to a cyclical time-bound process involving matter and energy.

If not from the natural realm, then where do the answers come from; who or what causes those answers to be there, whereever that is? The rationalist has an response to this question! The so-called supernatural "answer", from beyond the realm of nature, is merely a wishful but unprovable hypothesis, developed by an overactive human imagination under stress. Most Christians would not want to argue that God is in any way confined to, dependent upon or limited by the natural realm, so He obviously does not "exist" in nature. The rationalist may be altogether too consumed by the questions what, how, when, and where (all facets of existence in the natural realm) and unwilling to pursue seriously the question of why. Rationalism understands the sequence of cause and effect within the natural realm, but the pursuit of why strands us on the precarious edge of the rationalist's world, grasping an effect without a cause! Or looking at the other end of the sequence, this existence becomes a cause without an anticipated effect or purpose other than continuing to exist. The rational explanation of reality finds itself lost--swallowed up in the vastness of a missing explanation.

Another of the specialized rituals defined by mythopoeic practitioners and preserved in written form has been treated with more respect, probabaly because of their pragmatic character. I refer to the ancient codes of laws. We may have rejected myth stories as nonsense, but we have not been so hasty in disparaging the written law codes. The lawgivers, even those who rehash laws given by previous lawgivers, clearly assert that the authority of the laws derives from the realm beyond the obvious. Every law was an understanding. The cause or authority, the sanction, expressed by the law was identified with a deity feared, respected, and/or reverenced in that culture. Early human legislators were always identified closely with the appropriate deity. Archaic laws, the gift of a deity, are artifacts of an earlier culture, and obviously no longer meaningful to an entrapped rationalist, and although we have redefined what law is we have not rejected the cultural usefulness of law just yet.

In the Greek or Hellenic world from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC we see an interesting transformation. The social stature and intellectual leadership of the priestly figures was challenged by the development of non-priestly scholarship with an emphasis on sophia, wisdom. In the fifth and fourth century BC philosophical schools were founded in Athens where those who loved wisdom were just beginning to dabble in the new intellectual approaches while at the same time criticizing, questioning, recasting or rejecting some of those hallowed sacred (mythopoeic) understandings of the past. From our present day vantage point everybody knows something about Plato and Aristotle, but no one can give you the name of a single priest in Athens. Ironically, it may well be that Plato was a priest of the Attic god of oak trees, Academus, just as Aristotle may have been a priest of the god Apollo Lyceus.
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The contents of this page, ht3463b02.html, is copyrighted 2004 by Harlie Kay Gallatin and is accessible as an appendix from Part One of the Christian History Handbook. The page is linked from "Transition to Rational Thought" in the index for Appendix I at ht3463aa01.html.