Here's another quote that goes along with the flow of this conversation so far:
Now the characteristic of our biblical mythology is that all of its images ask you to believe in them as though they had happened physically—it is as though they were newspaper reports, chronicles of things that happened. And then when scholarship today finds that these things could not have happened, that indeed did not happen, what happens to the mythology? It is removed, it is discredited, so that the word “myth” today to most people means “a lie.”
And that is because our myths are, in a certain sense lies in that they ask us to believe factually, concretely what is not true. Now when this happens the mythology is taken away.
But the function of a mythology is to integrate one’s conscious life with the dynamics of one’s unconscious life. And with the mythological vocabulary taken away by which the consciousness communicated with the unconsciousness, we are, as it were, split apart. And a schizophrenic crackup is the result of a consciousness that has lost its grip in the conscious world because the energies that kept it there became involved and stuck in the unconscious, and there is no communication—the person slips down into the abyss.
A point I've argued many times in these forums is that the ethnic chauvinism of the biblical, Christian tradition has resulted in a solidly constructed 'conscious' model for the divine that is part of our cultural 'DNA' as it were, the rise of Christianity, in the first half of the first millennium, being the mutation. This model reflects, primarily, what Campbell has said: scripture as historical account.
So, Galileo has a hard time of it for contradicting the cosmological function. However, that cosmology wasn't really a biblical matter to begin with and the church had no problem, barring a little torture and a burning here and there to keep the pace of change to a manageable level, absorbing the new model that its own astronomers had validated anyway.
This was really the beginning of an ambivalent relationship between the Catholic Church and science, culminating where we are today with a kind of 'separate but equal' kind of attitude. Rome tends not to make a big deal over contradictory science unless it crosses some theological lines, like stem cell research.
How's this from Pope John Paul II:
[N]ew findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.
Darwin's work, however, was not and is not so kindly received elsewhere in Christendom. Rome is trying to make room in the model, which gets it a tally count in its favor, IMO. But for others, especially in America with its particular Protestant past, there was only one result if Darwin is right: God is
dead, the Bible, in its entirety, is
wrong and the foundation for civilization has been obliterated.
Because there is no other choice.
When faced with such an assault, one reflex is to circle the wagons and dig in. We see this right now in the fundamentalist attitude toward climate change. The Bible can't be wrong, so Darwin is wrong. If Darwin is wrong than science is always suspect. The Dark Side of Faith is free to express itself without any fear of contradiction. Climate change isn't the result of scientifically observed cause and effect: its god's will.
That's one demographic. Another demographic accepts the 'if that, than this' argument: if evolution, then no god. The model is flawed, discard it. There are no replacement models.
Another demographic gives us lost souls looking for another model. Enter the rise of Eastern philosophies, yoga, meditation, Wicca and others which serve the impulse nicely, and a whole slew of charlatans cashing in on the market, which also serves the impulse regardless of the charlatan's chicanery or lunacy.
It is very important to not forget what may be the largest demographic: those who couldn't care less about the argument and go to church every Sunday to whatever denomination on their own terms.
(*Then there's the Unitarians who have probably had it right all along.
)