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Myth, Religion, and Philosophy
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Early in the 20th century, many scholars, intellectuals, and
philosophers looked on the relationship of religion, philosophy, and
science as an evolutionary one in which the more sophisticated ways of
looking at the world simply replaced the older ways. Religion itself
was often thought to arise from magic, and so schemes illustrating the
development of human thought might look like this:

Only science, mathematics, and logic would deserve to continue. Since
these scholars thought of magic as a set of naive beliefs about how to
manipulate nature, they thought that science ultimately fulfilled this
promise by actually manipulating nature in the ways that magic had
promised. Especially associated with this evolutionary scheme was
James George Frazer, whose classic The Golden Bough [1890, 1900,
1906-1915] was an extended argument and illustration of it.

This all, of course, dismissed any other possible contents of religion
or philosophy as so much window dressing or misdirection. Some
philosophers have simply decided that philosophy also should simply
end (e.g. [1]Karl Marx, Richard Rorty). Others found some inoffensive
thing for philosophy to do, like clarify language, or identify itself
with logic (e.g. Logical Positivism, [2]Ludwig Wittgenstein).

While plenty of intellectuals retain a broad hostility towards
religion, this kind of evolutionary scheme is now generally
discredited in actual philosophy or history of religion scholarship.
Ancient religions did not grow out of magic, and science does not
address many, or most, of the concerns that have actually been central
in traditional religion and philosophy. It is possible to go to the
opposite extreme and reject any evolutionary sense of the development
of human thought, saying that all forms of thought, in all places and
at all times, are simply different; but this does not address the
dynamic of real changes that take place in the same places and to the
same traditions. It is not much of a leap to say that those
traditions, in their later forms involve levels of sophistication
above what occurred earlier.

If we can see philosophy growing out of [3]mythic thought in Greek
history, the difficulty arises about just how we are to then
distinguish philosophy from religion, as the two later coexist but are
distinguished from each other. Socrates talks about the gods all the
time, and it is not clear why he should not be regarded as a religious
figure rather than a secular philosopher. As it happens, the
relatively easy distinction between religion and philosophy in Western
history occurs because of the historical accident that the religion of
people like Socrates and Plato later ceased to exist. The old gods of
the Greeks, Egyptian, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Romans, Celts,
Germans, Slavs, etc. were later entirely replaced by one old religion,
Judaism, and two new ones from the same tradition, Christianity and
Islam. It is now possible to say "religion" and mean one of those and
to say "philosophy" and simply mean "that Greek stuff" (falsafah in
Arabic), where the religious side of Greek thought just need not be
taken seriously.

The historical circumstances that allow for that simple pattern of
distinction does not occur in India or China. A book like the
[4]Bhagavad Gita is a profoundly important religious document for
Hinduism, yet it is also one of the fundamental documents of Indian
philosophy. Indeed, the Gita appears to have been produced by Indian
philosophy, the Sankhya and Yoga [5]Schools, then been transformed
into a religious document, and finally used for both religious and
philosophical (by Vedânta) purposes later on. This kind of thing makes
distinctions between religion and philosophy very difficult in the
Indian tradition.

Similar difficulties exist for Chinese thought but also for Mediaeval
Western thought, where philosophers are easily classified as
Christian, Jewish, or Moslem. If philosophy had nothing to do with
religion, then presumably it would be superfluous to identify Moses
Maimonides (1135-1204) as Jewish or Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) as
Moslem. It is not, and this was a question that many such philosophers
had to face at the time. The way that one of the greatest Christian
philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), dealt with it was to
identify different sources of authority: he distinguished "natural
theology," which is based on reason alone, from "dogmatic theology,"
which is based on revelation. Jewish and Moslem philosophers had made
similar distinctions, and some of them had even thought, which St.
Thomas didn't, that reason could ultimately justify everything in
religion.

Definitions for religion and philosophy must involve similar
distinctions, where the original context of all thought is mythic.
Since myth does not argue, but philosophy does, a rule of thumb for
religion is that it mixes in philosophic elements but always retains
an authoritative link to a mythic context. The most important thing
about that mythic context, however, is not always that it exerts a
dogmatic authority, but that it is historical. Philosophy cannot
conjure up historical particulars out of pure reason, but religion
always relates its truth to historical particulars, the actual source
of the religion or its received tradition. Furthermore, contrary to
the earlier evolutionary schemes about human thought, it must be
accepted that mythic thought, and so religion, cannot be replaced by
philosophy, or by science. An evolutionary pattern thus could look
like this:

The only ongoing traditions whose worth we might fundamentally
question would be those of magic, astrology, and other occult "arts,"
although there is no doubt that serious forms of some of these
continue to exist. None of the traditions really continue
independently after their origin. Religion, philosophy, and even
science exert influences on each other. Only theology and philosophy
are shown connected below their origins because it is hard to know
what to call someone like St. Thomas Aquinas, primarily a philosopher
or primarily a theologian.What philosophy contains that science cannot
are real questions about Being and Value. Science must assume the
reality of its objects, so it cannot have a critical metaphysical
attitude; nor can it make any judgments at all about value, since some
principles of value must be assumed in order to judge in some
predictive or experimental way the value consequences of a scientific
theory. What religion contains that philosophy cannot is the actual
value embodied in large interpretative structures concerning life, the
world, etc.: philosophy is only descriptive and has difficulty
justifying any first principles that it might identify. Where
Aristotle and mediaeval philosophy relied on self-evident principles,
recent philosophers often assume an attitude of "this is the way we
are going to do it" (Cf. A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic). That
neither justifies nor even persuades; but such talk continues in the
language of philosophers like Richard Rorty ("deconstructionism" or
"post-modernism"), that "truth" consists of the "decisions that we
make." Why you and I should care about the "decisions" that Rorty
makes is a good question.
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Copyright (c) 1996, 1999, 2002 [8]Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All [9]Rights
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References

1. http://www.friesian.com/marx.htm
2. http://www.friesian.com/wittgen.htm
3. http://www.friesian.com/greek.htm
4. http://www.friesian.com/gita.htm
5. http://www.friesian.com/six.htm
6. http://www.friesian.com/religion.htm
7. http://www.friesian.com/#contents
8. http://www.friesian.com/ross/
9. http://www.friesian.com/#ross