As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. A theological conception of the world, Homeric or otherwise, has the capacity to yield explanations of experience that are qualitatively different from those yielded by materialist conceptions.
Gods can rationalize where material objects can only causally explain.
On the other hand, this material is more pliable that is commonly assumed . We can tell many interesting stories . We cannot explain, however, how the chosen approach is related to the world and why it is successful, in terms of the world.