Some recent notes I took:
Culture comes apart when the predominant myths are no longer plausible because people can no longer communicate and cannot coordinate their actions. Culture need a story, a myth that people sign on to, that fosters personal wholeness and brings together cosmology and values. Metaphors, myths, do that better than scientific facts because they can effectively deal with qualitative values, whereas science deals only with things, with quantities. The problem with being “amythic” is that we no longer have an I-thou relation with reality, no means to guide and justify our behavior, and no personal relationship with what is undeniably real: time, nature and mystery. If we, as a species, relate to reality as an “it,” we will be the cause of our own extinction.
With one God (however that God may be conceived), we have one creator of the universe and one giver of moral order. God is therefore the ultimate explanation for reality and the ultimate justification of our behavior. When God loses its plausibility, when final explanations and justifications become too diversified, the moral order disintegrates and culture disintegrates. God as a person alongside other persons won't do, God as a computer won't do, and turtles all the way down won't do, either. And in the final analysis, turtles is all atheism has.