Epicureanism, the scriptures, and being human

A passage from N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018), 197:

The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world.  The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus.  Its atoms (this view goes back to the fifth-century BC Democritus) move to and fro, “swerving” this way and that and thereby colliding with one another and producing different effects, different evolving life-forms.  Everything in the world and human life thus has “natural” causes, and at death the constituent atoms are dispersed beyond recall and the entire human person ceases to exist.  This worldview remained the opinion of a small minority right up until the eighteenth century.  Since then, it has become the dominant one in modern Western culture.  Many imagine it to be a modern “discovery.”

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A frequent commenter on this blog, an evangelizing atheist, believes that the only genuine kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that religion is nothing more than failed science.  He is, in other words, a textbook specimen of the weird worldview that I and others call “scientism.”

In any event, these two passages from Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), seem relevant to his position:

[T]he great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive.  Thus, they did not concern themseles with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act. . . .  [O]ur ancestors portrayed the world as a stage — a drama — instead of a place of objects. . . .  [I have] come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.  (xxvii)

[T]hose who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.  (34)

I think that what Jordan Peterson says here can easily be pushed too far — and that he himself has probably pushed it too far — but there is a very real element of truth to it.

I’m reminded of a famous comment from Galileo:

In Italian, it reads La Bibbia ci insegna la via per andare in cielo, non come il cielo sia fatto, which should probably be rendered (given the double meaning of cielo) as “The Bible teaches us the path to go to heaven, not how the sky is made.”  But it has been improved in English to read “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

And that’s quite right.