Robert Tulip wrote: The concept of the supernatural is incoherent and incompatible with scientific knowledge.

I am not sure I agree with either of those, but I am not inclined to quibble. I think the concept of the supernatural cannot be investigated, either by experiment or by introspection, and only works as a kind of "insider-speak" among people who have agreed on some set of beliefs about it. Thus to evoke it is automatically to trip the wire of "insider vs. outsider" dynamics, and only a very robust commitment to peace is capable of overcoming that.

Since we are getting into very choppy waters with this material, let me say two things at the outset of my response. First, in the post I am responding to you exhibit a richer and more nuanced version of your views than I was seeing before, and I thank you for the helpful background perspectives.

Second, I would re-cast Carrier's talk of "error" and "allegory" as follows: beliefs about the supernatural are primarily propagated when they provide a useful "revelation." A revelation is a gestalt - a configuration of interpretations which fit together to provide an overall picture. In the case of religion, this gestalt necessarily has in it both normative content (tells us what to do, or how to find fulfillment) and factual content (tells us how things are, on some less-than-obvious level).

The difference between religious revelation and a "philosophy" such as Stoicism is vital. Stoicism and other philosophical systems take the nature of things as given, try to provide an account of what we want and why, and then try to provide advice explaining why particular strategies will be successful in providing what we really seek. Religious revelation, by contrast, claims to provide an explanation of the purpose of life in "unseen things". The goals are not discerned by reflection, they are revealed by seeing how particular goals fit with an account of these "unseen things." I am not a proponent of either approach - I think each has its weaknesses. I suspect there needs to be a dialogue between them - that religious revelation arrives, in part, as a result of reflective reasoning about what our true values should be. But "should" will not ever be derivable by speculative logic, and it will always be necessary to appropriate "should" from the inside, which means an element of revelation, of irreducible gestalt fitting "should" with "is", will always be present in a viable and replicated social system.

Robert Tulip wrote: But what we must do is recognise that the authors were trying to say something in code, and look beneath the fantastic veneer to find the engine beneath.

As long as you recognize that the "code" is no more than a fit obtained between some aspect of what "should be" and some aspect of what "is".

Robert Tulip wrote: defining this dividing line is more complex than saying modern accumulation of knowledge can simply replace what humans did in the past by believing in the supernatural. Belief in God will continue, and that is a good thing at the popular level, since the atheist assertion that God does not exist is highly complex and difficult to understand.

Modernistic Christianity provides a system for thinking about how assertions about God, at first seemingly uninvestigable, can be seen as revelations about a fit between is and ought. If there is both a credible interpretation of what is "really" meant by "God" and a set of values which both fits this interpretation and fits with the traditional spiritual insights, one is able to assess propositions about God systematically.

Robert Tulip wrote:What is required in scientific terms is analysis of how popular belief articulates into a scientifically credible theoretical framework. As our interpretation of myth changes under the power of scientific reason, new readings will find meanings that mesh with objectives and values supported by knowledge, and belief will evolve to harmonise better with knowledge.

Well, you just said what I just said.

I am afraid I will have to make this "Part I". I must run. But I should be able to get to Part II this afternoon, my time.

Robert Tulip wrote:What is required in scientific terms is analysis of how popular belief articulates into a scientifically credible theoretical framework. As our interpretation of myth changes under the power of scientific reason, new readings will find meanings that mesh with objectives and values supported by knowledge, and belief will evolve to harmonise better with knowledge.

I am fine with some re-interpretation of myth based on science and obscure astronomical phenomena, but I insist that it must always be reinterpreted from the inside, that is, by someone who has some internal sense of why it matches "is" with "ought". If the myth doesn't speak to me, as myths of tearing apart the royal "horned god" (as represented in "The King Must Die" and "Mists of Avalon") do not speak to me, then I should not be trying to re-interpret or re-construct them.

Robert Tulip wrote:even these dreams, considered insane by some modern theories of rationality, hold their own reasonableness, providing a durable and robust framework for hope and identity for their holders.

Now that strikes me as appropriate criteria.

Robert Tulip wrote:By contrast, what you aptly term ‘monotheistic intellectual imperialism’ is based on imposing a modus vivendi for clashing cultures, a set of beliefs suitable for political stability. These imperial beliefs evolve under cultural pressure, co-opting elements that serve the ruler’s purpose and needs.
Nomad clans in the stone age had no great need to hold or promulgate false beliefs, except out of sheer ignorance, whereas teaching a lie can be supremely useful for a monotheist empire as part of its security and stability strategic agenda.

I think "teaching a lie" is entirely too simplistic. Suppose we accept, for the moment, the thesis that Constantine wanted a single orthodox version of Christianity primarily because he wanted a unified Roman Empire and a single religion to promulgate within it. He still had to select from perspectives which actually existed, and he could not have created a "there is only one true Christianity" version from whole cloth if all sides had agreed that "we don't know if Christ was divine or human or both, even though some of us believe one and others believe another."
In the same way, a given view of the workings of the supernatural had to make sense to someone at some point, because it told them the basis for what "should be done" in a way that made sense. (For example, We are all God's children, so we treat all humans equally.)

Robert Tulip wrote:
Culture is by nature heavily repressive, censuring activity outside narrow norms.

Kind of a new thought for me. I will consider it further.

Robert Tulip wrote:Mythology sought to encode allegory, and to present an emotionally appealing story which held a deep symbolic meaning. The encoding of allegory was necessary because the dominant culture was repressive towards the encoded material, and would not countenance it appearing in public,

There was an incredible variety of mythologies in the world of the Greeks and Romans. I have trouble believing that every time someone resorted to supernatural entities there was some evasion of repression going on.

Robert Tulip wrote:The supernatural error that became enshrined in church dogma arose more as a social response to mythic coding of nature, not strictly because of that coding as an evolution from it.

I fear I did not follow that. What is the distinction being made?

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: The "true explanation" of what we observe does not have to be a view that was true originally and can still be considered true today. The true explanation can be that there were errors in the past, and we face the challenge of separating useful myths of meaning from the erroneous way they were expressed in the past.

Yes, you are rightly clarifying the unclarity in my suggestion that myth can be seen as inherently natural in its genetic origin. Myth arises from the transcendental imagination, a capacity of mind that is inherently linguistic, governed by concept, and therefore central to spiritual belief and practice, imagining how ideas persist through time by embodiment as entity.

Interesting. This does strike me as useful, and valid to at least some degree.

Harry Marks wrote: And yet even spiritual belief is natural in a larger sense, even where its content is imaginary and literally false, since it responds to natural evolutionary drivers of cultural selection.

Okay, but that does not mean Anansi or Narcissus have anything to do with the seasons or the moon or the precession of the equinoxes.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: This offers the advantage of flexibility - we do not have to cherry-pick observations which support a monolithic "true explanation" as an alternative, but can go wherever the evidence leads.

Evidence only leads us where an organising theory looks for it. Falsification of an organising theory can look for challenges and difficulties, while the proponent of theory will focus on the strongest supporting evidence.

Wait, wait. Again you have imposed a false dichotomy. An organising theory does not have to be a single unified theory. It can be a simple notion such as "heavier things have a stronger desire to fall, so they fall faster than lighter things."

Many disciplines have begun with chaotic observations which gradually gathered evidence, and the organising theories tended to arise because there actually was an organising principle at work. Kepler's Laws are apparently unconnected observations, gathered from Brahe's data. Newton used Galilean mechanics to put together an overall account of their common structure because he was analyzing the real phenomenon of gravity which actually explained them. It remains to be shown whether there is such a single natural structure which can make sense of all use of supernatural talk. As I have said, I rather doubt it.

Robert Tulip wrote: rationality has not yet provided a higher quality of myth.

Harry Marks wrote:Why would you think rationality is at all suited for providing such a framework of meaning?

Because irrationality involves believing contradictions, whereas rationality is committed to coherence, bringing all data into an encompassing explanation. Based on science, a theory of everything that addresses social formation as well as physics would provide a powerful framework of meaning.

As I suggested before, for this to provide meaning, it must be experienced by some people as meaningful. Simply stating that "someone must collect the garbage" is not the same as seeing "ah, yes, collecting the garbage is what I am meant to do."

Robert Tulip wrote:I think modern rationality is a long way from supplying such a framework of meaning that addresses the concerns addressed by religion. Atheism often fails to understand the social value of religion, the moral values of conservative societies, and its own religious mythic structure. As I mentioned before, Carl Jung’s analysis of the relation between reason and symbol explores unconscious factors that would have to be brought out explicitly for rationality to become suitable as a framework of meaning.

Humanistic psychology, as represented by Maslow and Frankl, have gone a long way toward providing a useable framework without the supernatural. Those two were wise enough not to engage the issue of the supernatural, but have a lot to say about the relationship between facts and ultimate sources of meaning. Making the unconscious conscious is a less promising path, in my view, because, like Tillich's "broken myth" it presupposes some internal perspective which is outside the perspective which finds meaning in the old connections. I think terms like "unconscious" are going to have to be replaced by more explicit propositions such as "instinctive" or "repressed" or "raw perception".

Robert Tulip wrote:That is an interesting hypothetical situation, but common interests, for example planetary survival, are more important than individual interests that clash with the common interest, as we see in the 1.5 degree warming target agreed last year in Paris. Global evolution is towards interconnectedness, and part of the religious agenda is naturally how liberty can be protected even while regulation becomes more entwined.

I did not mean to get caught up in arguing about individual vs. group priorities. Common interests are not always more important than individual interests, as the common interest in simplicity of gender assignment shows. I will back away from my assertion that rationality is automatically fragmented, but I think my deeper point is true, that people's motivations are not primarily modified by means of reason.

A narrative about how "the way things are" fits with "what we are meant to do" will tap into a sense people already have about what makes life worth living, and will make sense of the behavior they have seen modeled and the experiences they have had of it. Thus we are in a chicken-and-egg cyclicality between culture making sense of fitting purposes in life, on one pole, and the actual behavior of the people within that culture. The fragmentation brought by modernity's lack of structure is the child of the fragmentation brought by the violence of the pre-modern world, and the denial of the value of that violence by its major religions.

Robert Tulip wrote: Reason examines evidence, consequences and accountability, with self-correcting mechanisms. The problem though, as encapsulated in the enthronement of Supreme Reason in Notre Dame during the French Revolution, is that our theories of reason remain, as you say, fragmented and incomplete.

Explaining why it is worth living a life of empathy when the aggressive prosper is not a matter of sufficient exercise of self-correction by evidence.

Robert Tulip wrote:We are very irrational.

Can't disagree with that.

Robert Tulip wrote:Detachment gives time and freedom to contemplate deep meaning, often leading to results that are compatible with scientific reason,

Christianity is compatible with scientific reason, even in its literal, supernaturalist forms. I think you are a bit side-tracked if you are thinking that the "error" of attachment to material things is the same in kind as the "error" in believing phlogiston is responsible for combustion.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote:This is about values, not about mechanical cause and effect. If we are attached to comfort, wealth, social position and security the anxiety that results is likely to lead us to be unhappy and to take actions which make others more unhappy than they already are.

Your anxiety theory looks causal,

Well spotted. From long habit, I explain values in terms that are as naturalistic as possible. I think when asking people to consider a different frame of reference it is helpful to explain as much as possible within their own frame of reference. The point remains that "detachment" is not about overcoming error by more careful science, it is about what we should value. The "why" is where the revelation comes in.

Robert Tulip wrote:Only by having some people free from attachment can the society maintain a conversation about values that come from deep contemplation.

A somewhat different "why" and one that, I might add, is much more sympathetic to a Brahman social hierarchy practice (e.g. caste system) than mine was.

Robert Tulip wrote: Overcoming anxiety requires that facts be explained as part of a story that provides hope and meaning.

Or maybe it requires discarding polygamy, slavery and large families, so that everyone can afford the time to be contemplative. The fit between "is" and "should" is not independent of the material conditions.

Robert Tulip wrote: The guide that I suggest is provided by astronomy is a simple matter of seeing culture as part of nature.

I don't think it is a sufficiently comprehensive guide to the incredibly complex matter of how culture fits with nature. Astronomy has nothing useful to say about managing aggression, the problem of adultery (cuckolding) for child-rearing, the enforcement of reciprocity in altruism, or the relationship between integrity and enforcement. Sociobiology seems to me to have its questions in more or less the right place, even if it is committed to too restricted a set of methods for answering them.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: The concept of the supernatural is incoherent and incompatible with scientific knowledge.

I am not sure I agree with either of those, but I am not inclined to quibble. I think the concept of the supernatural cannot be investigated, either by experiment or by introspection, and only works as a kind of "insider-speak" among people who have agreed on some set of beliefs about it. Thus to evoke it is automatically to trip the wire of "insider vs. outsider" dynamics, and only a very robust commitment to peace is capable of overcoming that.

The last clause caught my eye. Would you be able to say more about that? Thanks.

Harry wrote:Christianity is compatible with scientific reason, even in its literal, supernaturalist forms.

oh really

"Satan is a fallen angel who rules the world" is compatible with scientific reason?

you might have to break it down for me Harry, because i am having trouble putting it together.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: The concept of the supernatural is incoherent and incompatible with scientific knowledge.

I am not sure I agree with either of those, but I am not inclined to quibble. I think the concept of the supernatural cannot be investigated, either by experiment or by introspection, and only works as a kind of "insider-speak" among people who have agreed on some set of beliefs about it. Thus to evoke it is automatically to trip the wire of "insider vs. outsider" dynamics, and only a very robust commitment to peace is capable of overcoming that.

Hi Harry, I am pleased that you have joined us at booktalk.org, since comments like the one here open some challenging and interesting and important philosophical questions. Despite your stated intent not to quibble regarding whether the supernatural is compatible with knowledge, that seems to be what you do in the comment questioned by youkrst, but I will get to that in order, since it is entirely a legitimate debate. I share DWill’s interest in the meaning of your comment about a robust commitment to peace, and this was something I alluded to in my recent comment in The Sower thread about Jesus as ironic and irenic, words whose meaning has taken a while to sink in for me.

Robust discussion has to be respectful, although my sense is that many adherents of supernatural myths are incapable of robust discussion. For example there are Muslims who cling to geocentrism on Koranic authority, a viewpoint that is difficult to engage in any respectful way for anyone who sees evidence as at all valuable in principle. Christian belief in the Historical Jesus has no more evidentiary status than geocentrism.

Christian supernaturalism is more nuanced than gross error like geocentrism and creationism, but it stands on a continuum regarding reliability and accuracy, with science and sound logic at one end and obvious error at the other end. Belief in a supernatural God is somehow midway on this divided line of belief and knowledge (cf Plato). Understanding the value of supernatural belief is not easy, and certainly not something to be dismissed out of hand.

Harry Marks wrote: I would re-cast Carrier's talk of "error" and "allegory" as follows: beliefs about the supernatural are primarily propagated when they provide a useful "revelation." A revelation is a gestalt - a configuration of interpretations which fit together to provide an overall picture. In the case of religion, this gestalt necessarily has in it both normative content (tells us what to do, or how to find fulfillment) and factual content (tells us how things are, on some less-than-obvious level).

That sounds to me like you are saying alleged divine revelations are just myths that get social traction, often for unconscious reasons. The reasons for this traction are deeply political, addressing social values and mobilisation. In evolutionary terms, the beliefs that survive are precisely and only those which obtain traction, proving themselves socially adaptive. The factual content may be completely different from the overt myth. For example the factual content of the Jesus Myth may be as allegory for the sun, not as an actual man in history.

Harry Marks wrote: religious revelation arrives, in part, as a result of reflective reasoning about what our true values should be. But "should" will not ever be derivable by speculative logic, and it will always be necessary to appropriate "should" from the inside, which means an element of revelation, of irreducible gestalt fitting "should" with "is", will always be present in a viable and replicated social system.

The term ‘revelation’ has a very bad reputation because of its use to mean claiming divine authority for baseless speculation, as in Paul’s claims for the source of his claims about Jesus. The use of revelation as a basis for values is similarly fraught. I like to pare this values question back to the foundations, for example with the assertion that human flourishing is good. To say this is obviously true would make a category mistake between facts and values, since any assertion that anything is good is an expression of personal sentiment rather than an empirical observation. And yet to doubt that flourishing is good seems to fall into a pit of nihilism, so people want emotionally to say this is more than arbitrary and subjective. Therefore revelation enters the picture, with God allegedly telling us that flourishing is good. The natural interest we have in validating our existence means that such claims of revelation can find a ready audience with political traction, from this simplest moral axiom up to more complex and detailed ideas.

Your description of such revelation as “irreducible gestalt fitting "should" with "is"” is central to understanding the relation between faith and reason. Wiki says “The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies.” That is a perfect definition of faith. Unfortunately, such imaginative wholistic thinking is unreliable, based on hope rather than fact. Faith thinks in the gestalt whole that is needed for social myths, whereas reason demands that claims be supported by evidence. Despite this epistemic weakness, faith has the political and evolutionary advantage over reason of a focus on how to build what you have termed ‘a viable and replicated social system.’ Social success requires a level of belief that goes beyond what science alone can justify.

Harry Marks wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:The supernatural error that became enshrined in church dogma arose more as a social response to mythic coding of nature, not strictly because of that coding as an evolution from it.

I fear I did not follow that. What is the distinction being made?

The question here is the relation between supernatural error and encoding of cosmic description of nature. I was responding to your paraphrase of my views, where you suggested I was saying “the supernatural error arose because of the use of mythology to express this view of nature, then was installed in power by authoritarian literalism.”

My point was that the errors of Christian myth did not evolve directly from the Gnostic coding of nature, but arose as an ignorant misunderstanding of Gnostic philosophy. The ignorant church wished to use the Christ Myth as the basis for a mass movement, so felt free to distort the original cosmic ideas against their own populist agenda, including through the Big Lie that Jesus really lived.

Harry Marks wrote: An organising theory does not have to be a single unified theory. It can be a simple notion such as "heavier things have a stronger desire to fall, so they fall faster than lighter things."

This discussion opens up the comparison between religion and science in terms of paradigm theory. You are citing here the obsolete false paradigm of Aristotle as an organising theory for why things fall. While the idea you cited may seem simple, it is untrue, and so generates false predictions.

The same thing happens in religion where people incorrectly believe that mythical fantasies are historically true. There are serious ethical consequences of religious error, such as people believing that going to heaven means it is okay to destroy the earth, not to mention the connections between Islamic ideas on jihad and terrorism.

Harry Marks wrote: Many disciplines have begun with chaotic observations which gradually gathered evidence, and the organising theories tended to arise because there actually was an organising principle at work.

But as with Aristotle’s false theory of motion, his organising theory arose because he lacked method and interest to test his assumptions. The same thing happens in religion, where people find a theory to be emotionally comforting so lack interest to check its truth.

The actual organising principle is political and emotional comfort, not the truth of the mythical claims. When we apply scientific organising principles, the rationale behind false beliefs emerges as very different from what their adherents think.

Harry Marks wrote: Kepler's Laws are apparently unconnected observations, gathered from Brahe's data. Newton used Galilean mechanics to put together an overall account of their common structure because he was analyzing the real phenomenon of gravity which actually explained them.

How the modern scientific paradigm of orbital motion evolved is a fascinating case study. Kepler had not theorised the inverse square law which provides such a comprehensive and elegant explanation of planetary motion in the theory of gravity, but what he did have was a rigorous focus on evidence and coherence, such that his laws of elliptical motion were able to accurately predict planetary positions, providing a distinct improvement from Copernicus who stuck to the ancient theory of circular motion.

We are seeing a similar paradigm shift occurring regarding the facts and implications around Christian origins. We are now at something of a Kepler-like stage, with books such as those of Carrier and Doherty cataloging the severe incoherence of the belief that Jesus was historical, and preparing the way for a new overall account of the common structure, much as Kepler did for Newton. My view is that astronomy is central to this emerging overall explanation of ancient religious cultural evolution, and the neglect of astronomy in the analysis explains why a compelling explanation has not yet emerged that proves broadly persuasive.

Harry Marks wrote: It remains to be shown whether there is such a single natural structure which can make sense of all use of supernatural talk. As I have said, I rather doubt it.

Astronomy does not explain all use of supernatural talk, given that much superstition has other local causes. However, I think there is a compelling argument that astronomy explains Christian eschatology, which in turn provides the intellectual framework for all Christian mythology.

Harry Marks wrote: Humanistic psychology, as represented by Maslow and Frankl, have gone a long way toward providing a useable framework without the supernatural. Those two were wise enough not to engage the issue of the supernatural, but have a lot to say about the relationship between facts and ultimate sources of meaning.

My reading on the relation between facts and meaning has been more in Rollo May (The Cry for Myth) and Carl Jung (Man and his Symbols). Their work is a line of thinking that does engage the supernatural from a scientific perspective, interpreting mythical claims in a psychological framework.

Harry Marks wrote: Making the unconscious conscious is a less promising path, in my view, because, like Tillich's "broken myth" it presupposes some internal perspective which is outside the perspective which finds meaning in the old connections.

Theorising a new perspective is exactly what occurs with a paradigm shift, and does always involve bringing material to consciousness which previously was unknown and therefore unconscious. Where the ‘old connections’ as you put it are entirely unreal and mythical, such as for example the virgin birth, or Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, bringing the underlying meaning of these myths to conscious awareness is a highly promising path for better explanation.

Harry Marks wrote: I think terms like "unconscious" are going to have to be replaced by more explicit propositions such as "instinctive" or "repressed" or "raw perception".

Unconscious is a perfectly explicit term. For Aristotle and Kepler, the facts of the law of gravity as discovered by Newton were unconscious, even though Newton’s formula operated in the universe before he made it conscious. The same principle applies in paradigm shift in religion, with new analysis able to explain the underlying real drivers of ideation in ways that were previously unknown.

Harry Marks wrote: The fragmentation brought by modernity's lack of structure is the child of the fragmentation brought by the violence of the pre-modern world, and the denial of the value of that violence by its major religions.

This recognition of cultural trauma appears to be a good explanation of the high value that the modern theory of liberal tolerance places on cultural relativism, the idea that no single truth can reconcile or measure conflicting perceptions of truth. Put in those simple stark terms, relativism is absurd, since contradictory propositions cannot both be true, as proved in logic by the law of the excluded middle. However, relativism has strong cultural drivers from the historical reality that people have claimed access to truth in ways that have been false, so relativism is more a counsel of political humility than a statement of epistemic logic. As is typical with the formation of mythology, cultural relativism bleeds across into epistemic relativism, since advocates of tolerance wish to say that intolerance has no ethical or logical grounds.

Harry Marks wrote: Astronomy has nothing useful to say about managing aggression, the problem of adultery (cuckolding) for child-rearing, the enforcement of reciprocity in altruism, or the relationship between integrity and enforcement.

My view on this, which I am still gradually forming, is that the key theme in astronomy which is relevant to evolution, including the cultural evolution of values, is the orbital drivers of climate. This is a massive scientific topic which I consider provides the basis for the emerging paradigm shift around mythology. As we start to analyse real questions of how unconscious drivers operate at the level of the slow orbital causes of climate change, we can bring to explicit conscious awareness how these planetary cycles can and do in fact govern the overall instinctive direction of the formation of myth, including enframing our social ethical values.

youkrst wrote:

Harry wrote:Christianity is compatible with scientific reason, even in its literal, supernaturalist forms.

oh really
"Satan is a fallen angel who rules the world" is compatible with scientific reason?
you might have to break it down for me Harry, because i am having trouble putting it together.

Sure. Self-assertion and aggression are clearly pervasive, and one can make a good case that they "rule the world." That is why setting one power against another, in a system of checks and balances, is the only system which has managed to restrain the arrogance of power.
Satan embodies those forces. Even claiming that there is a literally real supernatural force behind their appearance and success is not a refutable hypothesis. It is not useful for science, but it is compatible with doing science, and believing in science as a viable process.
I would not argue that every fool thing ever said by a cleric is consistent with science, but the whole point of the "god of the gaps" observation is that there are still gaps. There are significant scientists who have also been Christians, and they have to let go of Biblical inerrancy, but that is still possible in a literalist framework.

Robert Tulip wrote:My point was that the errors of Christian myth did not evolve directly from the Gnostic coding of nature, but arose as an ignorant misunderstanding of Gnostic philosophy.

Okay thanks, I was able to follow you this time.

Robert Tulip wrote: You are citing here the obsolete false paradigm of Aristotle as an organising theory for why things fall. While the idea you cited may seem simple, it is untrue, and so generates false predictions.

Believe it or not, I knew that. My point was a response to your observation that we need a structure to ask questions and organize information. I am agreeing with you, but pointing out that the structure does not have to be unified or complete. Or, for that matter, correct.

Robert Tulip wrote:But as with Aristotle’s false theory of motion, his organising theory arose because he lacked method and interest to test his assumptions. The same thing happens in religion, where people find a theory to be emotionally comforting so lack interest to check its truth.

The phrase "emotionally comforting" is rather condescending here. Not that you in particular are guilty of this condescension: I hear it a lot from skeptics. "Giving a valid moral purpose to life" still falls under that category, but it evokes a totally different response, if you see what I mean. If I went around saying you believe in astrotheology because it makes you feel good to think you can replace religion with something ecologically oriented, that would be the same brand of condescension, if you see my point.

Robert Tulip wrote: The actual organising principle is political and emotional comfort, not the truth of the mythical claims. When we apply scientific organising principles, the rationale behind false beliefs emerges as very different from what their adherents think.

Right. That's what it means to say they are "mythical." It means they function - in my view they link understanding of fact to rationale for meaning and motivation. That may sound easy, but try it some time and you will see it isn't.

Robert Tulip wrote:We are seeing a similar paradigm shift occurring regarding the facts and implications around Christian origins. We are now at something of a Kepler-like stage, with books such as those of Carrier and Doherty cataloging the severe incoherence of the belief that Jesus was historical, and preparing the way for a new overall account of the common structure, much as Kepler did for Newton.

I don't think that is what we are witnessing. First, "severe incoherence" is not even close to an accurate description. Serious gaps, yes, but ask any historian about gaps and you will come to understand they are more likely than not. Incoherence happens when ad hoc modifications proliferate to explain facts which do not fit with the paradigm. That is not what you find for the work of scholars such as Crossan and Ehrman. They have had to clear out some of the underbrush of apologetics, but that is not the same as spinning ad hoc explanations which do not fit a historicist perspective.
Second, Carrier is scathing about Doherty (not that you don't find similar things between apologists and secularist historicists, or between one historicist and another) and similar inconsistencies breed like rabbits, because there is not a single causal structure just waiting to organize all the observations. By now there may be more theories of how a "Christ-myth" originated, or of apocalypticism in general, than there are theories of who the "historical Jesus" really was. The truth is that the gaps in our data and the complexity of the movements being studied make for a more-or-less impossible task of evidencing the true source of the Christian church.

Robert Tulip wrote:My reading on the relation between facts and meaning has been more in Rollo May (The Cry for Myth) and Carl Jung (Man and his Symbols) [than in Maslow, etc]. Their work is a line of thinking that does engage the supernatural from a scientific perspective, interpreting mythical claims in a psychological framework.

I haven't read either work, but I have read a lot of R. May and a fair bit of Jung, especially as quoted by Campbell and others, and I think both of them are first-rate interpreters of human seeking and the mysteries around it.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: Making the unconscious conscious is a less promising path, in my view, because, like Tillich's "broken myth" it presupposes some internal perspective which is outside the perspective which finds meaning in the old connections.

Theorising a new perspective is exactly what occurs with a paradigm shift, and does always involve bringing material to consciousness which previously was unknown and therefore unconscious. Where the ‘old connections’ as you put it are entirely unreal and mythical, such as for example the virgin birth, or Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, bringing the underlying meaning of these myths to conscious awareness is a highly promising path for better explanation.

Well, as I have been saying, time will tell. If you are going to include finding more facts as "making the unconscious conscious" then it is a somewhat shapeless category that tells us little. The point I was trying to make is that the forces at work in myth are not necessarily unconscious in the sense of Freud's libido or Jung's anima and animus.
Yes, if there is a connection to be made between seeing the world a certain way and doing the right thing, there are likely to be some unconscious processes that make it work or there would be no unpacking to do. But a very large share of those connections work consciously. Much of the raw material of religion is "sayings" (such as in the book of Proverbs). These work like Aesop's fables: capturing some useful truth about the world in a simple and memorable package.
And when we are not able to see "the mechanism," as it were, it may not be because of anything unconscious, but is apparent if you simply ask the question. Why did the Church latch onto the Virgin Birth? I doubt if it was an unconscious purity need - I think the urge to claim purity was as plain in that case as in the RCC "immaculate conception of Mary."
Recognizing psychological motivations needn't have anything to do with mysteries or over-arching invisible structures of archetype.

Robert Tulip wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: I think terms like "unconscious" are going to have to be replaced by more explicit propositions such as "instinctive" or "repressed" or "raw perception".

Unconscious is a perfectly explicit term.

Not in my view. Too many things get swept up into that bin. Yours is the first time I have seen an application claiming that scientific truths were present in the unconscious before being recognized, which gives it a fourth category of mechanism.

Robert Tulip wrote:This recognition of cultural trauma appears to be a good explanation of the high value that the modern theory of liberal tolerance places on cultural relativism, the idea that no single truth can reconcile or measure conflicting perceptions of truth.

Oh, my, now here I think you are seriously off track. Cultural relativism is a fact: driving on the right side of the road is criminal in the U.K. and required in the U.S. Whether it applies to the wide range of things claimed to be a matter of relative values is a more difficult question, but it does to at least some.

This is a general phenomenon about values - two contradictory values can both be correct. Driving on the left is the correct side - in one context. Driving on the left is the wrong side - in a different context.

You may hold out hope that we can someday spell out a complete system of when different values rankings are appropriate, but in the meantime tolerance and relativism are far from absurd. They are necessary! (In a world in which all contingencies are known with certainty, tolerance may be second-best to a system of exact specification of when to use particular values, but in a world in which these are not known, then tolerance is first-best. See how that works? "It depends" is a really useful phrase.)

I think relativism is frequently claimed to be absolute truth, which is not only self-contradictory but overdoes a good thing. But it is rather important that we all recognize that truth about values does not work the same way as truth about facts and causal relations.

Robert Tulip wrote:However, relativism has strong cultural drivers from the historical reality that people have claimed access to truth in ways that have been false, so relativism is more a counsel of political humility than a statement of epistemic logic.

I will settle for political humility.

Robert Tulip wrote:As is typical with the formation of mythology, cultural relativism bleeds across into epistemic relativism, since advocates of tolerance wish to say that intolerance has no ethical or logical grounds.

In general "harming others" is not tolerated in any ethical system. The problems are mostly about what we classify as "harm" and when the "others" somehow don't count (such as when they are themselves likely to harm someone.)

Robert Tulip wrote:My view on this, which I am still gradually forming, is that the key theme in astronomy which is relevant to evolution, including the cultural evolution of values, is the orbital drivers of climate.

I suggest you look instead at the factors which influence the relative value of reproduction with small broods vs. reproduction with large broods. Investment in culture is clearly what pushed humans over the entropy barrier to find lifelong mating, mutual self-restraint and co-operation to be worthwhile goals.

I'm enjoying following (or trying to--no fault of the presenters) the discussion. Just a minor point on Harry's last post. I have the impression that Richard Carrier credits Earl Doherty's Book Jesus, Neither God Nor Man with setting him off on his own quest to show that Christ came first, then Jesus.

DWill wrote:...Christ came first...

it's interesting (to me at least)

that Christ means

The Christ (/kraɪst/; Ancient Greek: Χριστός, Christós, meaning "anointed"

and krst a far earlier egyptian idea

Although KRST wasn’t a title in ancient Egypt meaning anointing, mummies were nevertheless anointed with the most expensive embalming oils. Even Jesus was anointed with these oils after his crucifixion by the women closely associated with him in life. Mark 16:1

not saying anything i've just posted proves anything.

it's just that i find it interesting in the context of the whole seemingly neverending body of material surrounding ancient mythologies.