Pagan Mythologies vs. Empirical Realities

I’ll start by asking two seemingly strange questions:

  1. Should we expect Heaven, the world of the resurrected, to be a magical world as in pagan myths of other worlds? Should we expect to spend time without end gallivanting around with all sorts of strange winged creatures and looking down into the Abyss of Hell — very occasionally?
  2. Should we expect Heaven, the world of the resurrected, to be a world like this one, a world which is an empirical reality which increasingly seems to be bereft of angels and demons and soul-stuff?

I might even ask:

Should we not speak of Creation and the Creator in terms He has given us through the empirical knowledge we can gain from exploring the universe and contemplating its meaning?

Science itself, and arguably philosophy, have moved beyond the dream-like language and concepts given to Plato and Aristotle by the likes of Homer. Physics and mathematics and biology have learned a more objective language, capable of encapsulating tightly focused or higher-level views of reality, and that objective language is not some sort of free-standing language drawn from a realm of Platonic ideals. It is a language drawn from this phase of God’s Creation which we know as our universe.

There are ultimately only two sorts of knowledge:

  1. knowledge about God in His divine nature — which lies beyond our perceptions and our thinking abilities though God has revealed a few, very important facts about Himself; and
  2. knowledge about God in His freely chosen decisions as Creator.

Knowledge of the nature of gravity is part of the same unified body of knowledge as knowledge as to why and how God made us men and women with an appropriate morality. God didn’t make a stage over which His creatures would pass. He made a world, unified and coherent and complete, yet, a world which is but a seed of a better world which will be the home of those destined to be the companions of the Son of God for time without end.

In any case, to say that we need to speak in terms of angels and demons, souls and spirits, is to say that the pagan dreams of Homer provide better tools for describing God’s Creation than modern empirical knowledge does. Physics speaks in terms of matter and energy and fields. Mathematics speaks in terms of formal entities and systems of thought which come out of our contemplations upon physical reality and the more abstract possibilities which are implied by, for example, the dynamics of Newtonian physics or the time-space structures of the general theory of relativity. Biology speaks of the stuff of human nature, tarantula nature, and virus nature and also speaks of the relationships between those sorts of entities — some of which relationships form the empirical realities of human morality. History and sociology and often literature speak of the sometimes brutal realities of the external events of human interactions over the centuries and also of the effects of the non-human world upon human societies.

The words and concepts of empirical knowledge aren’t some sort of means of corrupting us, a clever plot by Satan and all those scientists who work for him according to C. S. Lewis, that advocate of magical forms of thought. The words and concepts of empirical knowledge are drawn from the world created by God and morally ordered by God. If some scientists or philosophers or sociologistis misuse empirical knowledge to argue for various forms of amorality or atheism then our duty as Christians is to dig in, discipline our minds to the task of protecting the truths of God’s Creation. There will be plenty of scientists and philosophers and sociologists, even some non-believers, who will support the denial of scientistitic claims, that is, the sort of pseudo-science which is really ideology.

To answer the questions that opened this blog entry, grace completes nature and Heaven, the world of the resurrected, is a completion and a perfection of this phase of God’s Creation. We understand the possibilities of a perfected, resurrected human being by understanding the nature of a mortal man in this world. We understand the possibilities of the world of the resurrected by understanding this world to the best of our abilities. Empirical knowledge in any age is necessarily incomplete and defective relative to the truths of God’s Creation but we have a duty to do as well as possible and we don’t improve upon imperfect knowledge by using the imperfect knowledge of those who lived before the explosion of knowledge and of theory-forming capabilities in modern physics, biology, history, literary studies, and scripture studies.

One Comment

  1. Neville Salvetti

    Until you define magic it is difficult to comment. Magic implies the supernatural and Christianity is supenatural as it is based on God, who is supernatural, and His expression on earth either directly or through the workings of His people.

    The Term Magic covers many things so it can include the supernatural, lieght of hand and the demonic. Where The Authority of Jesus and demons are involve there is no such thing as magic but there is supernatural confrontation.

    Lke i say, until you define magic and the dimensions of it you want to comment on one cannot really comment

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