Mythos vs. Logos

Here is an interesting article titled Man vs. God, pitting religious thinker Karen Armstrong against noted atheist Richard Dawkins on the evolutionary role of God. Armstrong points out something rather important, that literal belief in God only dates back to the 17th century, and stresses the distinction between rational logos and narrative mythos as serving very different purposes in human development and culture:

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

Our challenge is that the mythic way of viewing the world has been almost entirely forgotten in the contemporary Western world. As I've been trying to articulate recently, science can not tell you what love feels like, hearing of Orpheus's descent into the underworld after Eurydice does. Or, science taught J. Oppenheimer how to build the atomic bomb, but only the Bhagavad Gita gave him the words to express how unleashing that much power feels. At this point in our collective evolution, it is I believe necessary to learn to re-express the world through both of these perspectives, though as of yet we are far from seeing how that worldview might look, or feel like.