How To Be An Agnostic
improved methods of transport revolutionised the lives of
Western people for the better. But logos had never been able
to provide human beings with the sense of signifi cance that
they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given
structure and meaning to life, but as modernisation pro-
gressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythol-
ogy was increasingly discredited. As early as the sixteenth
century, we see more evidence of a numbing despair, a creep-
ing mental paralysis, and a sense of impotence and rage as
the old mythical way of thought crumbled and nothing new
appeared to take its place. We are seeing a similar anomie
today in developing countries that are still in the earlier
stages of modernisation.So the relationship between logos and myth is not a matter of
choice – as if for certain parts of life one can resort to the scien-
tifi c, and for other parts one can turn back to myth. Because sci-
entifi c logos compromises the potency of myth, modern people
in search of meaning appear to be presented with a zero-sum
game with a lust for certainty winning out.
Myth, though, holds many things that remain unputdown-
able for us – an aesthetic, an openness to that which is beyond
us, a response to the vicissitudes of life, a communal or ethnic
identity, an expanded remembrance of historical events, as well
as a set of stories. Individual myths of a virgin birth, or of blood
and a cross, may lose force, but the human need for myth does
not. They’re too good at speaking to us of the more, and science
itself is no mean generator of cosmic religious myths, as we’ve
seen.
This means that there is good news and bad news for the
believer. The good news is that, when logos gains the upper hand,
it does not bring Christianity to an end: challenging the power
of myth is not the knock-out blow that the atheist may hope
because Christianity has plenty of other raisons d’être, not least its
unique abilities as a response to life and as a provider of identity.
It is for this reason that it continues to be a major force in the