Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By

In Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By: Chapter One, he first describes a situation in which a young boy writes a scientific paper about the evolution of man. However, both the boy’s teacher and mother discredited the paper and claimed that man’s first parents were Adam and Eve. Campbell thought this was absurd--especially for a “twentieth century child!” (3). He then compares the very different beliefs of the shape of the earth in the Middle Ages with the ancient Greek ideas. Although the ancient Greeks were more accurate in their thinking, he later brings up the unfortunate fact that the Greek’s ideas were ignored and left out of the bible. This put scientific advancement more than a thousand years behind what it could have been. He continues