Constructed Myths and Man's Purpose: Religion in Society

Introduction: Nietzsche, Science, and the Death of God

Since Nietzsche declared that God was dead, science and mankind have embarked on a twofold search. Nietzsche's declaration asserted that the need for God in society's constructed identity no longer existed. The understanding of the era was that the scientific method could break down any problem into its components and uncover both the purpose and the source of all of mankind's desires, tangible and intangible alike. The accompanying hopes for a utopian society would also be ushered in by modern thought. Modern, logical, and rational thinking would be able to replace the oppressive superstition, religion, and myth of ignorant and uneducated people who had used religious beliefs to explain those elements of life that previously could not be understood. Since the publication of Nietzsche's work, along with Jung, Kant, and a myriad of others, the social sciences have searched to identify the purpose of religious life within the context of community.

The ongoing survival of religion in cultures around the world — long after God's widely reported death — has created a problem for sociologists and theologians alike. Sociologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss have correctly identified that myth — the scientifically defined synonym for religious thought and belief — has continued across all cultures. But in their efforts to define the purpose of myth and how it gives real and concrete meaning to individuals and communities, sociologists are at something of a loss.

If God is dead, why do individuals and collective cultures still seek to identify a religious system of beliefs and integrate those beliefs into daily life? Why is it that atheist societies have failed, and those cultures which identify themselves with a strong religious ethic have remained a dominant influence in the history of the world? Why does mankind's experience show that the only communities and cultures lacking an active religious or mythological system are those which have been ruled under military law? When a socially accepted myth is absent and replaced by military dictatorship, citizens faced the penalty of death if they surrendered to their nature and followed a religious or mythological order. Nietzsche claimed that God was dead. Perhaps his assertion is the myth, and the persistence of religious thought and life in diverse cultures is the proof of his error.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche's statement rests on two postulations: first, that the development of human knowledge has brought mankind to a point at which belief in God is no longer rational; and second, that without belief in God, the concepts of objective truth, order, and morality must also be relinquished.

Nietzsche's assertions have left the world struggling under the search for individual and social identity. Without God, atheism's alternatives to replace God's place in belief systems draw from a variety of sources, but none have produced a stable and lasting social order. One such source is the rapid advancement of geological and biological sciences, through whose lens all the mysteries of the universe could supposedly be explained. According to this view, the purpose of God in the social construct disappeared along with mystery itself.

In the wake of his teaching, sociologists have been left with two unanswered questions. First, if God is dead and the need for a god-identity no longer exists, what are the mechanisms by which religious beliefs — now termed "myths" — have been developed within the construct of community life? Second, if God is dead, why does fervent religious belief continue in cultures across the globe, and even in modern Western society, still remain a vital part of social conscious identity?

In response to the scientific mindset that swept Western culture in the nineteenth century, clergy and epistemological leaders attempted to build a case for God on a similar rational foundation. Surely if science declared that God was no longer needed on the basis of scientific reasoning, then through rational thought, God's existence should also be supportable. Their failure to prove God's existence culminated in Hume's declaration that the existence of God cannot be proved or even given much rational support. While the appearance of design or order in the world around us suggests the possibility of an intelligent creator, this similarity does not offer unequivocal proof for the existence of God or his involvement in mankind's daily affairs.

As a consequence of the failure of religious leaders to adapt an argument for God's existence in scientific terms, mankind's continued desire to connect with a "higher being" was reduced to the idea of myth. The construction of myth has therefore absorbed much of sociologists' activities for the last half century. How and why mankind creates belief systems for something that is not real poses a problem to the scientific mind. If God does not exist, then within mankind there must be internal desires which create the longing and psychological need for attachment to an ethical system or moral compass. Another hypothesis is that within the social construct of a community, there exists a collective need for the group to find identity with a "higher order."

Lévi-Strauss's Conundrum Regarding Myth

In his book Structural Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss (CLS) begins to create order out of the chaos and conflict which the devolving arguments of the modern age have left behind in the area of sociological myth identification. In his chapter on the structure of myth, CLS begins by discussing how those now engaging the arguments regarding myth are doing so from the broken remnants of theories developed over the prior two decades. CLS puts it this way:

"Despite some recent attempts to renew them, it seems that during the past twenty years anthropology has increasingly turned from studies in the field of religion. At the same time, and precisely because the interest of professional anthropologists has withdrawn from primitive religion, all kinds of amateurs who claim to belong to other disciplines have seized this opportunity to move in, thereby turning into their private playground what we had left as a wasteland. The prospects for the scientific study of religion have thus been undermined." (Jacobson and Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 215)

For CLS, maintaining current outlooks on the expanding study of myth is imperative to arriving at an accurate understanding of the process of myth creation. Accurately identifying the structural aspects of myth creation must be rooted in discarding theories that have been found faulty and replacing them with new ones that have not yet been found faulty. For CLS, those who labored in the wasteland that anthropologists had deserted were figures such as Frazer or Durkheim, who approached the subject of myth creation from a psychologically oriented position.

CLS disagrees with this approach because of the inherent contradiction it leaves in the theory. A psychological approach to myth creation is ultimately anchored in the personal experiences of the individual. Trying to build a structural understanding of myth creation from a psychological basis creates an inherent weakness in the structure. CLS quotes Hocart, who profoundly noted in his introduction to a posthumous book (Hocart, 1915) that psychological interpretations had been withdrawn from the intellectual field. Hocart added that "the inherent defects of the psychological school... is the mistake of deriving clear-cut ideas... from vague emotions." A psychological interpretation of myth creation had to be rooted in the experiences of individual people or groups. Thus one could expect that, depending on the experiences of the group, the myth would differ significantly across different cultures. And herein lies the problem: according to CLS, myths across cultures are significantly similar. When one studies a number of myths across a wide spectrum of cultures, times, and global regions, one finds striking similarities rather than stark differences. CLS insists, therefore, that a psychological approach to myth creation works counterproductively against the developing field. "Instead of trying to enlarge the framework of our logic to include processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the same kind of intellectual operation, a naive attempt was made to reduce them to inarticulate emotional drives, which resulted only in hampering our studies." (Jacobson and Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 217)

CLS continues this theme in his book Myth and Meaning. He argues that the ongoing debate regarding mind versus experience is an inadequate means by which to build a structuralist perspective on myth creation. The elements of mind and personal experience do not yield a uniform code or a similar set of construction components from which to develop a structuralist point of view (CLS, 1979, p. 8). CLS reflects on his education first as a scientist and then as a graphic artist: his goal was to develop theories and designs from basic building blocks well understood within their respective fields, identifying the components of proper design and communicating them in replicable form.

He approaches the idea of myth and meaning in the same way. He believes that the substance of the structure which builds similar myths across a wide spectrum of cultures cannot be based in experience or feeling. For CLS, the structural components of myth creation must rest somewhere between experience and mind. He writes: "this whole problem of experience vs. mind seems to have a solution in the structure of the nervous system, not in the structure of the mind or in experience, but somewhere between mind and experience in the way our nervous system is built and in the way it mediates between mind and experience." (CLS, 1979, p. 8)

Boyer's Neurological Account of Religious Belief

Renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer has pursued research aimed at understanding the need for myth in human beings from a biological frame of reference. Boyer has engaged the discussion at a time when anthropology is casting off traditional constraints and looking, like CLS, for reasons rooted in a universal constant that exists across cultures.

The idea that moral values, religions, or myths have an absolute foundation in a God who is essentially "other" than ourselves — to whom we are ultimately responsible — has been replaced in the minds of this generation by the treatise of relative values: that each person is responsible to, and the progenitor of, their own sets of morals and ethics. So for Boyer, as for CLS, the continued existence of organized religions presents a distinct sociological problem. If there is no God, what is the continued source of religious beliefs? According to Boyer, "culturally successful religious concepts are the outcome of selective processes that make some concepts more likely than others to be easily acquired, stored and transmitted. Among the constructs of human imagination, some connect to intuitive ontological principles in such a way that they constitute a small catalogue of culturally successful supernatural concepts." (Boyer, 2000, p. 2)

Tradition is therefore a central concept in these social sciences. Boyer combined much of his research about social traditions with physiological research into the form and function of the brain in order to identify the structuralist support behind the transmission of religious beliefs. For Boyer, religious beliefs are the vehicle by which oral traditions are transferred and contribute to social order — the serum which delivers the vaccine, religious beliefs being the serum and oral traditions being the valuable agent that inoculates society against fragmentation and meaninglessness.

Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition for its constitution. His work Tradition as Truth and Communication seeks to answer the question of the origin of myth and religious concepts. He states that "previously intractable questions are now a matter of empirical, experimental inquiry. What brought about this remarkable change is substantial progress in our understanding of how human minds work. This allows a naturalistic account of cultural representations that describes how evolved conceptual dispositions make humans likely to acquire certain concepts more easily than others." (Boyer, 2000, p. 4; Tooby and Cosmides, 1990)

According to Boyer, "there is no instinct for transcendence in human beings, since the most frequent religious beings are ancestors who are assumed to be as real as the living, only more elusive. You cannot explain religion as moral coercion combined with promised rewards, since in many places the soul needs no salvation and will in due time become an ancestor." (Bray and Thompson, 2002, p. 1) Backed by other researchers, Boyer seeks to replace the inherited-versus-acquired framework for religious constructs in the human mind with a structuralist or systems approach. Susan Oyama described this approach eloquently in her book The Ontogeny of Information: "it is not that genes and environment are necessary for all characteristics, inherited or acquired (the usual enlightened position), but that there is no intelligible distinction between inherited (biological, genetically based) and acquired (environmentally mediated) characteristics." (Oyama, 2000, p. 1)

When the idea of instinct is set aside, researchers are free to argue that some myths and religious concepts — particularly those in well-developed contemplative traditions — may need to be explained in relation to a human striving for transcendence that can be culturally maintained and transmitted from generation to generation (Donaldson, 1991). But Boyer and CLS disagree with Donaldson. For these researchers, religious beliefs are neither inherited nor genetic.

Boyer insists that myth is the result of natural brain functions, just as CLS hypothesized twenty years prior. The human mind is not a single system designed to produce an accurate representation of the world; rather, the mind is composed of multiple systems geared to representing and predicting various parts of the environment, or guiding action in different domains according to overlapping principles. None of these evolved systems is about religion per se — but some of them may be activated in such a way that concepts of religious agents and precepts have a high probability of transmission (Boyer, 2000).

Humans are greatly dependent upon cooperation and information, and possess a set of strategic capacities that handle these challenges. Some supernatural concepts are represented in such a way that they activate strategic mental and social capacities. As a result, these trigger events are more likely to generate high commitment within the group, and other psychological and social effects typical of religion and religious concepts of intuitive ontology (Boyer, 2000).

In other words, mankind is made for — and perfectly designed at a genetic or neurological level for — the development of myths and religious ontological beliefs. "Moral rules are easily acquired by human minds because of a host of computational predispositions, as a consequence of our dependence upon others' cooperation." (Boyer, 2000) As CLS mused, Boyer has confirmed that mankind needs oral traditions in order to make social connections with other humans. Mankind needs myth in order to build social and anthropological communities, and myth — religious ontology — is best suited to the transmission of these social traditions. Boyer cited research supporting mankind's advanced ability to build religious ontological constructs by remembering short narratives involving heroic deeds and the struggle of good against evil (Barrett, 1996; Barrett and Keil, 1996).

Conclusion

The evolution of science and knowledge was supposed to bring about a utopian civilization. Knowledge, in the words of Eliade, "no longer consisted in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but as a means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person." (Eliade, 1963) Gods were no longer needed, because the sociological need for God had been replaced with knowledge, the scientific method, and personal enlightenment.

However, in the wake of mankind's self-enlightenment, the striving for knowledge has left behind an unexplained vacuum in the minds and hearts of men — a continuing connection to myth-based belief systems. The expectation that modern thought would usher in a utopian existence in which all men live together in harmony has only created a new level of discontent within social structure. The current postmodern mindset is a reaction against that modern expectancy. In the wake of expected unity, the modern scientific method has created disunity. Since the moral, mythical, and religious cultural boundaries that were a part of society have been slowly dissolved in the stream of rhetoric and theory, modern man's social consciousness has not become more utopian but more self-centered, and often self-destructive.

So, in conclusion, we find ourselves back at Nietzsche's argument, which left certain ideas as presumptions that have not been adequately dispelled. These ideas are common across cultures that engage in myth construction as an integral part of their collective identity.

The first is God as ground: in connection with moral truth, the concept of God embodies the idea of objective truth and moral order in the universe. The idea of objective truth represents the world as having a particular, identifiable nature independent of human subjectivity. Within this construct, objective truth is "what God knows" — that is, the way the world is, independent of human concerns, interests, wishes, and perspectives. The concept of an objective order created and given to mankind adds to this the notion of man's purpose in the cosmos. Within this construct, everything that exists does so for a reason, although mankind may not be capable of discovering that reason.

The second is loss of ground: some of Nietzsche's writings characterize the change in worldview influenced by the advance of atheism. But without a foundation for truth and order — without that myth most commonly understood as God — the world is suddenly formless.

The third is God's long shadow: the concepts of objective order and truth, however, still persist. In the societies of the West, whose cultures have long been influenced by Christian and Jewish myth, and in the East, which has developed Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist myth, the concept of an objective order created by some force outside of human existence has created a safer, more secure-feeling within the community. The absence of this ordering myth, as the history of atheistic political regimes demonstrates, leaves a vacuum that neither science nor ideology has yet been able to fill.