Christianity as creative myth

Apparently the whole edifice of Christianity depends on such foundations, and with the development of the modern critical mind these foundations are clearly very fragile.

This is the nature of the apparently insuperable deadlock which many people have reached today. They feel the need for a faithor some vision of the future for mankind. And yet the most likely faith—that one which has been the traditional faith of European civilisation—appears to demand beliefs which are at best questionable and at worst untenable. The solution to this dilemma is the realisation that the realm of human values and meanings, of ends and purposes, it quite distinct from that of scientific observation and ought to be so. Belief in facts is a belief that something is true or exists; and because it is not knowledge it can by its very nature only be provisional and temporary. Belief in values is of a wholly different kind; so different indeed that the same word should not properly be used for both. Belief in a value means living as if it were absolutely true, with the conviction that it will thereby become true. It should more properly be called faith. Its truth depends not on any matter of fact, but on its being actively and continuously affirmed, and on its being in the positive direction of human development.

Dimitrije Mitrinovi¢, who was the founder of the New Atlantis, maintained that spiritual affirmation is wholly compatible with mental scepticism; the former belongs to the realm of ends, values and meanings, while the latter applies in the realm of philosophical and scientific thinking. The first person to realise this distinction fully was Immanuel Kant, when he distinguished the spheres of pure reason and practical reason and gave practical reason—or ethics—a standing of its own independently of pure reason. In his Critique of Pure Reason he not only refuted the existence of God and the independent and objective existence of ‘T, namely the subject of experience: he also demonstrated that the outer world of things cannot be credited with existence independently of the subject who perceives it. In other words, only our direct experience is real. Experience is not merely the reflection of some real existence beyond itself. It is itself the only reality.

Once it is accepted that the reality of human experience transcends the (so-called) ‘reality’ of scientific fact and theory, the

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