Harry wrote:it is a serious mistake to think of ideas of the supernatural mainly as "flawed perception" (or, as I like to put it, "bad science") when in fact they have evolved far beyond that to "stories about the meaning of things, including life choices."
Interbane wrote:I don't think the supernatural evolved into such stories(meaning, it became them). Rather, it's included as a piece of background or as a storytelling device. A small distinction, but one that makes you wonder if the same stories, including the same meanings, could be told without the supernatural elements.
There is virtually nothing in the story of Samson which could not have really occured, with his immense strength being psychosomatically controlled by his belief that it was the result of a vow not to cut his hair. Apparently it gives content to work on for the climax of the story, in which he knows that Delilah is trying to betray him but gives in anyway ("I knew the bed was on fire when I lay down on it"). What we are really meant to think about is why Samson would do such a thing. Indeed, why do men hand over so much power to women they know are bad for them, and vice versa? (Is it the holy, or the broken, "Alleluia"? to borrow Leonard Cohen's rendition).
Many other important Bible stories share the same quality - the feeding of the five thousand, for example, or even Joseph's redemption in the court of Pharaoh. To that extent I agree with you that the supernatural is often just a device, or even just a background element.
But Jesus' parables often get right to the heart of the sociology of his society, as do many stories about him such as Zacchaeus, the healing on the Sabbath, the woman taken in adultery, the overturning of the moneychangers' tables and his own crucifixion and resurrection. To subtract out the discussion of the divine would be to subtract out the element of ultimate meaning, because that is how it was discussed in those days.
Interbane wrote: Can you think of a story or piece of wisdom that it's impossible to do this with? To naturalize?
Tillich and Bultmann did not simply snip out the supernatural, Jefferson style. Rather they worked in terms of what Tillich called "broken" myths - that is, myths whose mythical status is acknowledged. Rather than try to "figure out" how the thing "might really have happened" one simply acknowledges that it might not have happened in precisely the way that is represented, but takes the transcendent significance to be as expressed.
An obvious example is the appearance to Paul on the Damascus Road. It may be that not a single thing occurred as the story is told in the book of Acts, but we know that Paul believed Jesus appeared to him, and that important truth was communicated that way, so it might as well have happened like the Damascus Road story said. Something changed Paul from a fire-breathing persecutor of the church into its foremost advocate and evangelist. Why does it matter exactly how it happened?
Remember that "mythos" is a category about subconscious significance - archetypal connections between powerful psychological forces and the stories which come to symbolize them.
Consider the following true story. Nobel Laureate Christopher Sims, when he was at the University of Minnesota and the editor of Econometrica, the most prestigious journal in economics, said, "that is the first time I have seen econometric results which were not Keynesian." (The results turned out to be an artifact of erroneous estimation procedure, by the way, as did the famous "neutrality of money" results.) So I asked him why he was not a Keynesian. He explained that rational expectations is a higher standard to hold modeling to, because if you take Keynesian theory to be a mechanical description of reality, it is subject to failure by the attempt to exploit it.
The statistical results back up Keynesian theory. (Everything about the economic environment of the Great Recession supports Keynesian theory - whole schools of thought have been repudiated in the last 10 years). But it contains a subtle flaw which does not allow it to be used as described. The flaw is in the assumptions about how people process policy expectations.
Keynesian theory, in a time of more or less full employment, can be evidenced but not used. Equilibrium theory can be used but not evidenced. It is mythos. Over the last ten years I have seen otherwise rational economists so wedded to the mythos of equilibrium theory that they could not accept the plain evidence that it had broken down in the recession.
My contention is that at some point we may have the ability to explain how any particular piece of mythos works, but until then it is entirely sensible if people use it without fully understanding it. Harrison's book seems to me to be a good example. He makes the case fairly effectively that there are significant misuses of our lives based on poor thinking - based on our eagerness to have some control, for example, to the point where straws are grasped and people's gullibility exploited.
But he is far from fully cognizant of how good thinking works. He seems to think that only fully evidenced conclusions should be trusted, for example, but as Robert pointed out, he does not follow this himself. He is following some mythos as well.
yeah!, next you'll be telling us that it doesn't really matter if we dont have a bird in our hands, ...but how will be able to tell if it's worth two in the bush?!?!?
