Mack, you illustrate the two positions very clearly.

There are people who have been for years laboring to bring the spiritual and the scientific-secular closer together, particularly when it comes to environmental issues. For one thing, as you point out, the Story is a major method of conveying information in all cultures, and scientists haven't generally felt it possible to reduce their work into story form, or to break it into manageable chapters. This is why the the religious "opiate of the masses" is successful--it uses storytelling as its major tool and stories break down into nice sound bites, as it were.

At the same time, philosophers recognize that when one goes back to the earliest roots of many religions, one finds "early science"--environmental components that teach how to live in a place. This means in a manner that, while I hate to use the hackneyed term "balance," doesn't strip the environmental resources from a place (over use the water, over hunt the game, etc.) This goes back to the autochthonous nature of religions--that pesky term that Guest finds too ponderous--teaching a way to live on a particular chunk of real estate that has specific types of soil, amounts of water, types of wildlife, etc. Philosophers look at religious creation and allegorical didactic stories as mythic material meant to teach a culture about itself and as a concerted way to manage the behavior of the members of that culture who share the same beliefs.

Within those cultures, the storytellers were priviledged figures who both taught and entertained. This is a crucial factor in getting your larger points across to a lot of people. A particular example of this philosphical approach to religion as a way to teach good science and environmental attitudes is to resurect those old and often forgotten environmental storied bits of established religions. There is no way to "create a new myth"--that idea flies in the face of the very term "myth." When you can see 'the man behind the curtain' the magic doesn't work. You need the authorless collective unconscious behind the stories to make them work today--in other words, the tools needed to merge the early science with modern science are still there, the older bits of modern religions, waiting to be revived by today's theologians. This approach is illustrated by Max Oelschlaeger in his book Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis.

That last paragraph of McLaren's article that so confused Guest gets at the heart of what you said and what I'm saying. Read it again:

Our cultural training about the dangers of the intellect makes it nearly impossible for us to utilize science properly - or to identify your intellectual rigor as anything but an unhealthy overuse of the mind. I know that sounds silly, but think of the way you view our capacity to dive deeply into matters of spiritual or religious study. You don't often treat our rigor as scholarship, per se (though it takes quite an intellect to understand and organize the often screamingly inconsistent sacred canon) - instead you tend to treat our work as an overabundance of credulity or perhaps even a stubborn refusal to listen to sense.

This is why daylia and I are always at loggerheads on these topics. I refuse to accept her sweeping annecdotes without credible evidence and her response is to call names and dismiss the scholarly approach to any given question being discussed as too intellectually rarified.

I doubt Max Oelschlaeger is interested in joining Mudcat to mediate, so list members will no doubt continue to duke it out. But Wolfgang brought a very good article to our attention when he started this thread.

SRS