The Bible is "Just Mythology?"

 engraving on Assyrian cylinder represents tree of knowledge




The most radical view that I hold about the Bible, from the standpoint of evangelical Christians, is probably the idea that there are sections of the Bible that make use of Pagan mythology. This is a difficult concept for most Christians to grasp, because most of us are taught that "myth" means a lie, that it's a dirty word, an insult, and that it is really debunking the Bible or rejecting it as God's word. The problem is in our understanding of myth. "Myth" does not mean lie; it does not mean something that is necessarily untrue. It is a literary genre—a way of telling a story. In Genesis, for example, the creation story and the story of the Garden are mythological. They are based on Babylonian and Sumerian myths that contain the same elements and follow the same outlines. Those other stories are older so we know the Hebrew account must make use of them not vice verse. But three things must be noted: 1) Myth is not a dirty word, not a lie. Myth is a very healthy thing. 2) The point of the myth is the point the story is making--not the literal historical events of the story. So the point of mythologizing creation is not to transmit historical events but to make a point. We will look more closely at these two points. 3) I don't assume mythology in the Bible out of any tendency to doubt miracles or the supernatural, I believe in them. I base this purely on the way the text is written.

The purpose of myth is often assumed to be the attempt of unscientific or superstitious people to explain scientific facts of nature in an unscientific way. That is not the purpose of myth. A whole new discipline has developed over the past 60 years called "history of religions." Its two major figures are C.G. Jung and Marcea Eliade.[1] In addition to these two, another great scholarly figure arises in Carl Kerenyi.[2] These two form the basis, the foundation, for modern study of mythology. In addition to these three, the scholarly popularizer Joseph Campbell is important. Campell is best known for his work The Hero with A Thousand Faces.[3] This is a great book and I urge everyone to read it. Champbell, and Elliade both disliked Christianity intensely, but their views can be pressed into service for an understanding of the nature of myth. Myth is, according to Campbell a cultural transmission of symbols for the purpose of providing the members of the tribe with a sense of guidance through life. They are psychological, not explanatory of the physical world. This is easily seen in their elaborate natures. Why develop a whole story with so many elements when it will suffice as an explanation to say "we have fire because Prometheus stole it form the gods?" For example, Campell demonstrates in The Hero that heroic myths chart the journey of the individual through life. They are not explanatory, but clinical and healing. They prepare the individual for the journey of life; that's why in so many cultures we meet the same hero over and over again; because people have much the same experiences as they journey though life, gaining adulthood, talking their place in the group, marriage, children, old age and death. The hero goes out, he experiences adventures, he proves himself, he returns, and he prepares the next hero for his journey. We meet this over and over in mythology.[4]







In Kerenyi's essays on a Science of Mythology we find the two figures of the maiden and the Krone. These are standard figures repeated throughout myths of every culture. They serve different functions, but are symbolic of the same woman at different times in her life. The Krone is the enlightener, the guide, the old wise woman who guides the younger into maidenhood. In Genesis we find something different. Here the Pagan myths follow the same outline and contain many of the same characters (Adam and Adapa—see, Cornfeld Archaeology of the Bible 1976).[5] But in Genesis we find something different. The chaotic creation story of Babylon is ordered and the source of creation is different. Rather than being emerging out of Tiamot (chaos) we find "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Order is imposed. We have a logical and orderly progression (as opposed to the Pagan primordial chaos). The seven days of creation represent perfection and it is another aspect of order, seven periods, the seventh being rest. Moreover, the point of the story changes. In the Babylonian myth the primordial chaos is the ages of creation, and there is no moral overtone, the story revolves around other things. This is a common element in mythology, a world in which the myths happen, mythological time and place. All of these elements taken together are called Myths, and every mythos has a cosmogony, an explanation of creation and being (I didn't say there were no explanations in myth.). We find these elements in the Genesis story, Cosmogony included. But, the point of the story becomes moral: it becomes a story about man rebelling against God, the entrance of sin into the world. So the Genesis account is a literary rendering of pagan myth, but it stands that myth on its head. It is saying God is the true source of creation and the true point is that life is about knowing God. The Bablylonian's had this creation story 1500 years before the Hebrews.[6] The actual story of the tree of knowledge and serpent tempting the woman is not found among the Babylonian writings. Yet we know that the story included these elements becuase we see those elements portrayed in art works of the era (see top). 

Only a very small number of scholars think this way, however.[that there's no comparison] It is very clear that these stories share a common, ancient, way of speaking about the beginning of the cosmos. They participate in a similar “conceptual world” where solid barriers keep the waters away, pre-existent chaotic material exists before order, and light before the sun, moon, and stars.
Those similarities should not be exaggerated or minimized. But they are telling us something: even though Genesis is unique, and even though Genesis is Scripture, it is an ancient story that reflects ancient ways of thinking.
Genesis 1 cries out to be understood in its ancient context, not separated from it. Stories like Enuma Elish give us a brief but important glimpse at how ancient Near Eastern people thought of beginnings. As I discussed in an earlier post, ancient texts like Enuma Elish help us calibrate the genre of Genesis. That way we can learn to ask the questions Genesis 1 was written to address rather than intruding with our own questions.[7]

The mythological elements are more common in the early books of the Bible. The material becomes more historical as we go along. How do we know? Because the mythical elements of the first account immediately drop away. Elements such as the talking serpent, the timeless time ("in the beginning"), the firmament and other aspects of the myth all drop away. The firmament was the ancient world's notion of the world itself. It was a flat earth set upon angular pillars, with a dome over it. On the inside of the dome stars were stuck on, and it contained doors in the dome through which snow and rain could be forced through by the gods (that's why Genesis says "he divided the waters above the firmament from the waters below”). We are clearly in a mythological world in Genesis. The Great flood is mythology as well, as all nations have their flood myths. But as we move through the Bible things become more historical.

The NT is not mythological at all. The Resurrection of Christ is an historical event and can be argued as such (see Resurrection page). Christ is a flesh and blood historical person who can be validated as having existed. The resurrection is set in an historical setting, names, dates, places are all historically verifiable and many have been validated. So the major point I'm making is that God uses myth to communicate to humanity. The mythical elements create the sort of psychological healing and force of literary strength and guidance that any mythos conjures up. God is novelist, he inspires myth. That is to say, the inner experience model led the redactors to remake ancient myth with a divine message. But the Bible is not all mythology; in fact most of it is an historical record and has been largely validated as such.

The upshot of all of this is that there is no need to argue evolution or the great flood. Evolution is just a scientific understanding of the development of life. It doesn't contradict the true account because we don't have a "true" scientific account. In Genesis, God was not trying to write a science text book. We are not told how life developed after creation. That is a point of concern for science not theology.

How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? Not because it contains big amazing miracle prophecy fulfillments, not because it reveals scientific information which no one could know at the time of writing, but for the simplest of reasons. Because it does what religious literature should do, it is transformative.

No need for Halfway House

 I have been in good discussions with evangelicals who knew their stuff and who intelligently argued that the ancestors of Abraham got the story of the creation form God and they kept it and the Pagans wrote it first, but the Hebrews kept it going orally and wrote it down latter. That may be possible but not likely. It's really dependent upon a lot of unlikely thing, such as an oral tradition that spans a thousand years with no written back up, then appeal to God to keep it going. It's not necessary to make that kind of gymnastic argument when we could just so much economically recognize that it's not meant to be a literal history. It does not have to be a literal history. Myth communicates with the psyche and that's the point of the story. That's why they use those pagan myths, becuase they communicate through he archetypes. Hebrew slaves in Babylon turned the story on its head. They probably combined it with their own Canaanite myths which were similar. Then they turned the story on its head saying "it's our God that was creator." That is not a lie and it's not a stretch becuase they are talking about the true creator. It is the case that in Hebrew religious genius they recognized the economy of one God and one reality behind it all.


[1] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: the Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt, 1987, original English translation, 1959.
[2] Article on Carl Kerenyi in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1roly_Ker%C3%A9nyi accessed 8/28/13.
[3] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces: the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell. New World Library, third edition, 2008. Original publication was 1949.
[4] ibid. 1.
[5] Gaalyah Cornfeld, Archaeology of the Bible: Book by Book. New York: Harpercollins; 1st pbk. ed edition (May 1982) (originally 1976).
[6] "Chaldean Account of Genesis: Chapter V Babylonian Legend of Creation." Wisdom Library on line resource. http://www.wisdomlib.org/mesopotamian/book/the-chaldean-account-of-genesis/d/doc2817.html accessed 8/28/13.
[7]Pete Enns, "Genesis 1 and Babylonian Creation Story." The Biologos Forum: Science and Faith in Dialogue. blog: http://biologos.org/blog/genesis-1-and-a-babylonian-creation-story accessed 8/28/13.
Pete Enns is a former Senior Fellow of Biblical Studies for The BioLogos Foundation and author of several books and commentaries, including the popular Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, which looks at three questions raised by biblical scholars that seem to threaten traditional views of Scripture.

Answer to Brap Gronk on rational warrant for atheism

Ancient portrait of Mythras

Our famous visitor form another planet, Brap Gronck, makes I comment that I feel is a great chance to get on my soap box. First here is the full comment:

Since you mentioned rationally warranted belief in your most recent comment, I have a question for you. Let’s assume someone is unaware of the case you present for belief being rationally warranted. Let’s also assume the seven points below are true for this person. Would you agree that non-belief is rationally warranted for that person, given the following seven points, or any subset of these points?

1. I have never seen God.
2. I have never heard God.
3. I don’t know anyone who has ever seen God, or claimed to have seen God.
4. I don’t know anyone who has ever heard God, or claimed to have heard God.
5. I am not aware of any evidence of God’s interaction with our world. Natural laws can explain how things work and why things happen, as far as I know.
6. Humans have wondered about the origins of the earth, the sun, the stars, and themselves for a long time. Many creation myths were developed in ancient times in an attempt to explain these origins, and these creation myths are easily proven to be untrue given the current state of scientific knowledge. The account of creation in the book of Genesis appears to be another easily disproven creation myth.
7. I have read “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and I can’t think of anything in that book I disagree with.

My initial answer was to say this:

Meta:

Thumbnail answer: Any given argument might be rationally warranted, depending upon how it's argued. Rational warrant is like "logical permission to believe something" not actual proof.

A person is logically justified in not believing something if that person truly has no reason to believe it.

However, there's a point at which one can go beyond the line of credulity. For example the reasons you gave for not believing would only be understandable for someone who never actually read a book and knows nothing about modern thought at all.

Now let's break it down:

Why do I say that "I have never seen God" and the other initial responses are only understandable for someone who  has never read a book and knows nothing about modern thought? The answers he gave that  I put in this category are:

1. I have never seen God.
2. I have never heard God.
3. I don’t know anyone who has ever seen God, or claimed to have seen God.
4. I don’t know anyone who has ever heard God, or claimed to have heard God.

I include these answers because they are fallacious as reasons not to believe in God. Let's consider them for a moment as reasons not to believe something we can reasonably sure is true: I have never seen an atom. I have never heard an atom. I don't know anyone who has ever seen an atom I don't know anyone who has ever heard an atom. If one lives in a Modern industrial country and has a college education that person must know that the absurdly simplistic world view of CARM atheists (atheists who post on the message boards at CARM) is extremely simplistic and overly lauds a reductionist outlook while ignoring all evidence to the contrary of that view. Anyone with a college education should know that modern physics, for example, is largely theoretical and deals with things no readily observable. Even a middle school student would know that now days seeing and hearing something are too surface level to understand as epistemic proof. Any one who has been around since Descartes ought to know that. I'm just assuming a sparse exposure to philosophy. Anyone with any kind of real knowledge of religious belief should understand that 99.9% of religious people in the world do not believe the deity is physically observable.

No 5 is an interesting case:

5. I am not aware of any evidence of God’s interaction with our world. Natural laws can explain how things work and why things happen, as far as I know.

Of course that statement suffers from the same flaws as the first four (I assume "our world" means the life world of 20th century earth not this guy's pretend planet).  In  that sense this is just a multiplication of examples from 1-4. But it also appeals to natural laws in general as an alternative to belief in God. Logically that's a non starter because no religious person I know of has said that physical laws are opposed to God, or God has to make things happen directly without recourse to natural law. Atheists have this odd habit of thinking that just becuase it's "natural" it guaranteed to be separate from God. the reason for that is because LaPlace assumed so ("I have no need of that hypothesis"). He was basically the one who kicked off the secular nature of modernity and offered physical law as an alternative to God. But religious people don't' understand it that way. Nature did not just pop up out of nothing, God created it. Of course we will observe nature seeming to run on its own because God created it to be that way; in fact Newton advanced that notion with his theory of comets. Thus, that is all we would see. We should not expect to see anything but natural laws at work in the world becasue they are made to work autonomously. But such laws are a dead give away that there has to be a mind running the universe at some level, see my 3d God argument, "fire in the equations."

The last two points he makes do present some challenge and are moving in the direction of valid reasons for unbelief. They are not really justifications for unbelief, but the thing is I can hear my old inner atheist saying "unbelief needs no justification." I am not sure that's true I think it depends upon one's level of education. The more one has been exposed to good reason to believe the more accountable one is for unbelief short of valid justifications. Obviously what I said above holds, that "A person is logically justified in not believing something if that person truly has no reason to believe it." In the sense that no reason means one is a priori without reason to believe that state of being requires no justification but is self justifying. On the other hand, how any atheists who post on message boards or read blogs are truly without exposure to any good reason fro belief? I would venture none really. This is where atheist incredulity kicks in. Most atheists are opposed to the concept of belief regardless of evidence so for most atheists there can be no such thing as "good reason" to believe. Moreover, this is the clash of paradigms. For those still live and work in a paradigm based upon natural law as the basis of reality and no God, there can be no such thing as 'reason to believe.' For those who live in a believer's world (by virtue of their paradigm) no justification is needed. It's only where the two agree to meet and trade view points and do mutual learning that a common ground is created upon which a discussion can place. Only on that ground can a "good reason" or a justification matter.

Brap says:

6. Humans have wondered about the origins of the earth, the sun, the stars, and themselves for a long time. Many creation myths were developed in ancient times in an attempt to explain these origins, and these creation myths are easily proven to be untrue given the current state of scientific knowledge. The account of creation in the book of Genesis appears to be another easily disproven creation myth.

This is interesting because he takes at face value the creation myth as the point of departure for justification. This is baggage from the assumptions atheist make in transiting form religious world to secular world, and the kind of thing atheists get stuck on as a quasi justification for their view. It demonstrates an inability to take the religious world at face value and refuses to think of religious thought as modern thought but insists upon rooting it in ancinet outlooks that apply to any modern  believer. It also makes makes several root assumptions of which Brap has probably not even though of (not to sell the guy short, but I doubt that many atheists think about these things).

(1) it assumes that the reason for belief in modern world is the same as the reason for the existence of religion in the ancient world.

(2) it assumes that religion exists in order to explain where we came from,as though that's the only major question that really concenred ancinet man (which if you think about it is based upon an hidden assumption that all of human knowledge and development turns upon some ancient desire to do scinece).

(3) since they assume science is the only form of knowledge they assume that scinece must be the origin of all human thought.

(4) it assumes creation myths are the actual accretion of ancient religious wisdom

Modern religious people are modern people. Many of them may be less educated in certain area, although there is no shortage of religious people in the sciences and in other areas of higher education. A Gallop poll in the 90s found that taking all fields into account the percentages of modern professors in universities and their religious beliefs reflect that of the general population. The study that finds only 5% of NAS people who believe God is based upon a strict fundamentalist definition of God and confined to a self selecting body. Another study found that 45% of all people with scientific degrees bleieve in God. The point is that modern religious people are modern people. Their beliefs are not based upon ancinet creation myths, their belief systems include a harmonization of scinece and faith in a modern sense. I doubt that anyone actually believes in God because of the Genesis creation myth. Science is not the origin of religion. Religion did not evolve because people wanted to explain physical things. Religious evolved out of the human contact with the sense of the numinous.

Mystical experince at the root of all religions

Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integrationm (unpublished paper 1992 by Jayne Gackenback http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

Quotes:

"The experience of pure consciousness is typically called "mystical". The essence of the mystical experience has been debated for years (Horne, 1982). It is often held that "mysticism is a manifestation of something which is at the root of all religions (p. 16; Happold, 1963)." The empirical assessment of the mystical experience in psychology has occurred to a limited extent."

a). Core of Organized Religion

The Mystical Core of Organized Religion

David Steindl-Rast http://www.csp.org/experience/docs/steindl-mystical.html

Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B., is a monk of Mount Savior Monastery in the Finger Lake Region of New York State and a member of the board of the Council on Spiritual Practices. He holds a Ph.D. from the Psychological Institute at the University of Vienna and has practiced Zen with Buddhist masters. His most recent book is Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984).

"If the religious pursuit is essentially the human quest for meaning, then these most meaningful moments of human existence must certainly be called "religious." They are, in fact, quickly recognized as the very heart of religion, especially by people who have the good fortune of feeling at home in a religious tradition."

b)What all Religions hold in Common.

Cross currents

Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio

http://www.crosscurrents.org/whatisreligion.htm

Quote:

"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."

Smith considers transcendence to be the one dimension common to all peoples of religious faith: "what they have in common lies not in the tradition that introduces them to transcendence, [not in their faith by which they personally respond, but] in that to which they respond, the transcendent itself..."(11)

Creation myths as we know them are late inventions. The Cosmogony became a form of literature and is based upon thousands of variations and re tellings and old old camp fire fare long before anyone ever wrote them down. Thus they are not reasons fro belief. They are something much different than reasons to believe.  They are not even really explainations. Creation myths as we know them are mythology and mythology is about archetypes, it's a form  of communication that speaks to the psyche it's not a naive simple transition of factual data. A mythology is a symbolic transmission of unconscious understanding. It's about the psyche not about history.


Brap's final statement:

7. I have read “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and I can’t think of anything in that book I disagree with.

I have not read that book, but I'd be willing to bet that he got it wrong. If what Brap is saying is an accurate reflection I would assume that Sagan makes the same fallacious assumptions that Brap does. I suggest one read Joseph Campbell (The Hero With A Thousand Faces) as an introduction to mythology. That book is too anti-Christian but it will give one a much better understanding of mythology than will Carl Sagan! Ancient studies were not even his field. I'm betting me mad all sort of outmoded assumptions about religion, probalby nineteenth century assumptions, most atheists are stuck in the nineteenth century when it comes to understanding religion.

The French revolution was not far behind and most of what scinece assumed about religion was conditioned by Laplace and the reason for that was becuase the French Philosophes set the tone for ant-clerical thinking due to the enormous influence that the Catholic chruch wielded in relation to the french Monarchy. The Monarchy used priests as enforcers of the educational system and other things that created a lot of enmity with the people. Fighting against the Monarchy in the revolution and opposing the Church became one and the same thing. That set in motion the anti-clerical thinking of Europe which dominated the development of scinece in the nineteenth century. Social scinece were just getting started, sociology developed out of France with August Compt  and thus it took the form of seeking to explain why religious belief began and to set it apart from modern thought, as a means of justifying the existence of the new scinece. Though most social scientists don't make a habit of running down religion as the hallmark of their disciplines in those days they did, because that was the basic origin of sociology.

We need to move beyond the simplistic understanding of the world that seeks to set "scientifically proved" "facts" as the foundation of the world view off against all other forms of knowledge. This is the hall mark of the atheist ideology, to create the pretense that scinece is the only form of knowledge, that atheism is scientific (it's really anti-scientific becuase it refuses to accept any scientific facts that back religion while claiming to be totally scientific in its outlook and the falling back on the ideolgoical slogan "atheism is just the lack of a bleief, nothing else"). Thus we need to shed this  delimiting crutch that only "scientific proof" counts as a valid reason to believe something and move toward a global understanding of knowledge in general.