Religion: Why We Need to Regain a Mythos

This post was co-authored by Ken Baskin.

As we described in a previous post, the concept of Religion¹ can refer to a wide variety of practices and beliefs. Many in the West think of Religion in terms of believing in a supernatural God. A better term for this is theism, and we do not think it is wise to equate the concept of Religion to theism. Instead, we see Religion in broader terms: It provides a mythos for a culture or group.

What is mythos?

To understand what we mean by mythos, we need to examine how the human brain organizes conscious experience around a symbolic order. Terrence Deacon² calls this ordering the “defining attribute of human beings.” That symbolic order enables people in any community to interpret their world so that they can cooperate in meeting the deepest challenges to their survival. As a result, culture creates a shared virtual reality. The beliefs and values of any community emerge from their symbolic order, and, especially in pre-literate societies, that order is communicated in its mythos.

For instance, survival in Ancient Egypt depended upon the annual flooding of the Nile and the agricultural abundance it produced from the relatively small strips of fertile land on either side of the river. As a result, its symbolic order was the cycle of birth-death-and-rebirth that produced this abundance. We can see this order in the myth of the sun god Ra, driving his sun chariot through the sky during the day and into the underworld during the night, to reappear in the morning. Similarly, the god Horus, the protector of the Nile’s abundance, is in a continuing battle with his uncle Seth, who represents the chaos of the desert. Horus also represents the Pharaoh.

Because people in any society are repeatedly exposed to their mythos and the rituals that celebrate it, they learn to think in the terms of their symbolic order and build institutions that reflect it.

Justification systems

The centrality of any society’s symbolic order is the key reason that Religion is such a central justification system, as UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, notes. UTOK's Justification Systems Theory posits that there was an important tipping point in human evolution when our ancestors started talking in sentences. Sentences, in the form of propositions, carry meanings that can be questioned. This “question-answer dynamic” reinforces the process by which humans form networks of beliefs and values. UTOK calls these networks “justification systems” because they link together to develop a coordinated sense among people of what is and what ought to be the case. As such, they provide the structure for legitimizing how people think about the world and how they should behave.

In more concrete terms, people need a structure of understanding to explain both why things are the way they are and what is the right way to live, which are implied in their symbolic orders. As a result, they face at least two fundamental challenges—justifying what is the case and justifying what ought to be the case. We can call the first the problem of facts and the second the problem of values.

In the context of “normal” human lived experience, these two problems are bound up together. That is, to live adaptively, an individual or group must constantly be assessing what is the case and acting on what ought to be the case. If we consider animals, they have sensory and perceptual systems for detecting what is the case, and they have motivational and emotional systems that drive them toward valued outcomes (i.e., what ought to be). These elements are bound together to guide coordinated action.

As primates, humans exist as embodied creatures that live in the world via perceptions, motivations, and emotions that are bound together. Humans also are cultured persons who can self-reflect and justify their actions. As justification systems have evolved and become more refined, they have divided into different domains.

Modern science

One of the most obvious divisions emerged with the advent of modern science. Modern science is a sophisticated justification system for deciphering what is the case. That is, modern science can be framed as a kind of knowledge technology that works to divide out human values and subjective experiences to determine the most logical claims about reality that can be objectively defended.

By understanding science as the systematic justification of what is the case, we can now explain how religion functions. Extending the argument from our first post, we contend that, to a significant extent, religion acts as a central human justification system, determining what ought to be. That is, we can frame religion in terms of the belief-value networks that emerge from our symbolic orders and shape how we see and experience value in the universe, in our collective groups, and in our personal lives. It relates to what binds us together in a story, what gives meaningful shape to the cosmos, and what places us in a network with others that enables us to determine what is sacred or transcendent.

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What Is Religion?

The Indus Valley Civilization: An Ancient Utopia?

This analysis allows us to see clearly why we are facing something of a meaning crisis, especially in the West. In concrete terms, the Christian justification system that emerged in Europe developed both a theistic Religion and a natural philosophy. However, as the natural philosophy grew into natural science, it generated a justification system that undermined a theistic worldview and its dual worlds of heaven and earth. Instead, what we were left with via science was a fairly cold description of “what is,” and essentially no justification system for what ought to be.

We believe that humans need to have coherent justifications for both what is the case and what ought to be the case. We can see through the Greek terms “logos” and “mythos” that these are two different kinds of justifications, but we need them both³. Science has given us a good way to develop our logos. However, it has not been framed in a way that also is conducive to cultivating a mythos that gives us a shared narrative for how we ought to live in the world. We believe this is one of the great tasks of this century.