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Myth may help people come to terms with events like natural disasters by attributing them to some cause - angry gods or misbehaving humans. In some societies it de-mystifies the cyclical patterns in everyday life, night and day, for example, or the seasons, by endowing 'natural phenomena' like the sun with personality and behaviour. Myth bound disparate people into a society through shared fears and values.
The word 'myth' is sometimes used to mean 'a lie'. Here, myth means a popular explanatory narrative that describes the world and mankind without recourse to analytic argument. Religion is included in this context, judged neither true nor false, but in its storytelling capacity. Myth is quite different from science; it can be more ambitious. It has poetic appeal, sometimes religious or spiritual connotations and is not restricted by the need to be testable. Good science offers itself as a series of approximations, to be improved upon by successive generations.
There is beauty and comfort in a picture of the world which has kindness inscribed in its beginning and a fixed place for mankind. Science and myth have different strengths. While science is clearly beautiful to its practitioners, the richness and poetry offered by myth is available to anyone. Its beauty is not reserved for those who have the capacity to admire an elegant equation. Myth answers 'why' (because God or Old Spider said 'let it be so'). Science has less facility with 'why', preferring 'what', 'when' and sometimes 'how'.
It is misguided to say 'science is right and myth is wrong' or the other way around. They are alternative ways of describing the world; both rich and beautiful, they complement each other. Today few people take the stories literally. They usually indicate a yearning for intelligibility and harmony in a complex world. Most children ask the question, 'Where do I come from?' Sadly the sagacity of the answer rarely matches the curiosity of the question.
Each human is unique. Nonetheless we live within an intricate assembly of shared cultural assumptions. Our 'mental furniture' is housed within a framework of shared understanding; walled in by re-cycled ideas, misconceptions, historical accident. We are warmed by the flickering fire of common language and perceptions. We might well use similar silks but we clearly embroider different firescreens. Our shared intellectual and cultural environment does not erase individuality, but should make us wary of rash judgements of our forebears who used different explanatory methods to describe their world.
Science is one modern way of describing phenomena. Whereas myth can accomplish a total account of the universe, science might never offer a complete explanation. There have been such claims for science but they are usually followed by some devastating crisis, sending the bold expert ignominiously back to the drawing board. In 1894 Albert Michelson, a great physicist, predicted confidently, ‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote’. This proved to be a little premature.
Good science is falsifiable. It should be both testable and predictive, allowing accurate and repeatable forecasts about the nature of the world. Science may in this way seem conservative and theories sometimes take decades to arrive at this stage but it is the way rigour is built into the scientific enterprise. It is salutary to remember that science is part of culture; thus laced with assumptions which, like the web of Old Spider, hang from the corners of our mental landscapes ready to trap unsuspecting passers-by.
Many people think science and religion are in conflict but they are not inherently exclusive of one another. Religious belief has been central to the work of many profoundly gifted scientists. The quest to find unifying principles within the laws of nature was predicated upon the view that God created the world from a simple and harmonious scheme. Scientific knowledge about the world would gradually reveal this scheme. This sounds simple but it is not trivial. Science is often wrongly thought of as being objective and descriptive. Historically it seems that science is a torch which illuminates that which it shines upon. Yet the direction of the light almost always decided by the conceptual framework of the torch bearer. If a cultural imperative dictates that there is an underlying order, one will be looked for. If one expects harmony, simplicity or elegance to be a fundamental property of the world, then unity will become an aim within research programmes.
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