Science: Just Another Word for Mythology?
Mythos is a Greek word, meaning story, or legend. And, every culture has stories, or myths or legends, attempting to explain the forming of the Earth, and animals and man. Science attempts the same thing. Does it not follow that science, then, is myth?
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April 29th, 2007 in
Blatherings
Myth has the connotation of not having any qualification in fact. Science may be part of our mythos, but myth is any explanation - whether or not it’s provable by empirical observation.
Uhhh… No.
Science is based on evidence, trial and error. Myth was just based on evidence.
Okay, then, what is the “test” for evolution? So far, we have nothing more than observation. What is the test for the myriad of explanations Science gives us as to how the galaxy formed?
hmm…I think that test is still running. While it certainly seems that an element of faith is needed / inherent in the scientific process (i.e. that humans have the ability to understand whatever it is that they’re trying to understand and that scientific protocols are sufficient to bring that understanding about) science, at it’s start, set out to be different than myth. Myth had the “everybody says so” argument going for it before science came along and “didn’t care what anybody said” Personally, I keep thinking that humans need some kind of blend, or third way in order to fully understand our world…but I’m probably in the minority.
There’s a specific name for that fallacy - Appeal to Ignorance. Summary: “Because we do not know everything about X, we cannot know anything about X,” or “Because you can’t prove every aspect of theory X, you can prove nothing about X.”
Which is just absurd. Observation is the root of the argument. Myth provides explanations without observable evidence.
Evolution - we have a genetic record that empiracly establishes relationships between species over time. We see organisms change and adapt to their environments. In simple organisms, this happens rapidly and is readily observable (antibiotic resistance in bacterium, pesticide resistance in insects, for example), in more complex organisms with longer life cycles and multiple adaptive mechanisms, evolutionary change can take generations.
Cosmological origins - we don’t know. We have some good ideas, and at this point all we can say is that which is observable is consistent with a given set of origin theories. That does not mean, however, that we know nothing about the processes that formed the cosmos as we see it today.