The Mythology of Science

Last week I started discussing the rather strange views that so many people seem to hold of science. I've left the big one for this week - the clash between science and the supernatural. Really, there are two separate ideas here. Some people view science and religion (or at least their religion) as incompatible, others view science as lacking a mystical or spiritual side. Today, I'm going to try to answer both criticisms, by trying to convince you that science can be viewed as a mythology in its own right, but one which is compatible with nearly every other religious belief.

Let me start by defining some terms. Many people, especially from an arts background, have only a vague idea about what science actually is; and little better idea about the supernatural. I'll begin by defining "god" with a deliberately small "g". I would argue that for a being to be described as a god, it must be capable of one of two tasks. It must have created the universe, or it must be able to break the laws of physics. Note that when I say "the laws of physics" I don't mean "our current understanding of the laws of physics"; I mean those underlying laws that science seeks to discover, codify, and understand. Otherwise, by the standard of a thousand years ago, we are all gods. We can watch television, drive cars, fire guns, surf the internet. When we break a "law of physics" it means our understanding is wrong - we work out the mistake, postulate new theorems, and move closer to that elusive, perfect understanding of the universe. A god, on the other hand, may be able to break the laws of physics in such a way that no new law can ever be postulated to explain the difference; and most importantly, the laws would be broken in such a way that cannot be duplicated by those who are not gods. In Christian mythology, such a breaking of the underlying laws of physics would be called a miracle.

"Christian mythology"? I can sense the outrage. Yes, mythology. I know some people think that "mythology" means "silly stories believed by idiots". I'm afraid you are wrong. A "myth" is a "story of cultural or religious significance". A "mythology" is a "collection of myths". If you do not believe that the bible has cultural or religious significance, this is not my fault.

So, a "god" could be someone who can break the laws of physics. Perform miracles. Alternatively, the "god" may be a creator of the universe, something that implies an existence outside the universe, and which is therefore impossible for a being trapped entirely within the universe. I would argue that, taken together, these two possibilities cover all possible meanings for "god", from the omnipotent God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, to the myriad minor deities of Ancient Greece and Egypt. Furthermore, if you remove the personification, the definition works equally well for pretty much all religious beliefs, from Buddhist Transcendence to all the varieties of the New Age Supernatural. All rely on creating the universe or breaking the laws of physics.

That's religion defined fairly well, but what of science? Is science everything else? Science is perhaps defined best by the process - observe, theorise, postulate, test. Observe the universe. Theorise about how the universe works, based on those observations. Postulate new observations that should be made if the theory is correct. Test to see if those observations do in fact occur. Repeat until enlightenment. Anything that cannot meet all four criteria is not science. It might be interesting, rationale, believable. But it is not science.

And therein lies the dichotomy between religion and science. A miracle cannot be theorised about, and we cannot observe what lies outside the universe. (The "universe" being everything which we can observe, directly or indirectly. I am well aware of the current fashion for "multiple universe" theories in popular science magazines. These vary from unscientific gobbledegook to simply extending what I term the universe into a larger number of dimensions than the traditional four.) If we cannot observe and/or theorise about a god, the god is not subject to science. Which means that combining religious and scientific beliefs is only a problem for those who insist on taking as absolute literal truth the badly mis-translated writings of people who had not been born when the events they described took place.

So much for the apparent incompatibility of science and religion. But does this mean that religion is necessary for the spiritual side of life? Not necessarily. This is, of course, a matter of personal belief, and I am in no way trying to stop anyone from following the religion of their choice. Indeed, a major motivation of the column this far has been my belief that science can enrich any life, without interfering in the least with whatever religious beliefs are already held. But I do not believe that another religion is necessary. I believe that science constitutes a rich, satisfying mythology all on its own; one that can compliment other mythologies, but need not necessarily do so.

What does it mean to say that science is a mythology? What is a mythology? Earlier, I defined a mythology as a "collection of stories of cultural or religious significance". Science certainly fulfils the first half of this - our culture is influenced enormously by our advances in computers, transportation, communication, medicine. But a myth is more than just something that influences society. It is a definition, a vehicle for understanding. It answers the questions that curious beings such as human beings ask. Why is this the way it is? How should I behave? What does this mean? Myth provides a means to understand the world, reducing complex, important, sometimes scary, phenomenon to a level which the human mind can grasp. And myth has the benefit that, for the believer, the myth is true, at least for some definition of "truth".

Science does exactly the same. Although many people get confused by this, there is no more literal truth to much of science than there is to a more traditional myth. Scientists talk of "genes", of electrons "orbiting" the nucleus in "clouds", of light as "waves" or as "particles", of magnets being surrounded by "lines of force". All of these are ideas imposed on nature by the human mind. They are all true to an extent - we can point to observations that match all these ideas, even the mutually contradictory ones. To take perhaps the most controversial, genes are not passed on during reproduction, segments of DNA are. We look at the resulting DNA and call the sections that do something useful "genes". During reproduction, sections of DNA may be split, miscopied, damaged, changed. That might damage a gene, changing it, destroying it, improving it. Such is pure random chance. There is a reasonable chance that a damaged gene will result in a new organism that cannot survive. If only those random events that don't destroy a gene result in the DNA being inherited, this gives the appearance that genes are selected for, but this is an illusion. It is like claiming that the rule for Langton's Ant (see last week) is to build a highway. Not true. The rule is to turn left and right, change square colours. The highway building is incidental, an emergent behaviour from the real rules. Similarly with genes - they are an emergence from the "real" rules of DNA copying. But by talking about reproduction selecting genes, ants building highways, or any of numerous others, we gain a deeper understanding than would be ours otherwise.

A scientific theory is a story, a model for understanding the universe. Its literal truth is unimportant. What does an electron look like? How many dimensions does the universe have? On a certain level, these questions aren't even meaningful, let alone answerable. What matters to science is whether answering these questions a certain way help explain the universe, allow us to ask new questions, and predict new behaviours. A scientific theory is a myth - it provides a vehicle for us to understand something otherwise too complex for us to grasp. This might involve mathematics, but the best theories, like the best myths, can be expressed to us on the level and in the language of poetry. Wave-particle duality, Schroedinger's Cat, the Twins Paradox. These are stories that we can all grasp, all discuss, ultimately all understand. Indeed, often lay people grasp the point better than so-called scientists. ("Surely the cat knows if it is alive or dead?")

Scientific mythology differs from more traditional mythologies only slightly. There are rules for a myth to be accepted - it must survive testing against observations of the real universe - and science admits its limits - of which the most important are probably those of Heisenberg and Goeddel. Like all mythologies, science can be misused to ill effect, but can also do great good. And like all mythologies, science is also vulnerable to abuse by its high priests, against whom a scientifically literate society is the best defence.

So why do so many people not see the spiritual element of science? The wonder I described last week, and the mythic, understanding level I've mentioned here could satisfy far more than they appear to. I suspect that the wonder of science is too common place. Yesterday I watched an aircraft take off from Edinburgh airport. Is there a greater magic than that? Think about it. The idea that such a huge chunk of metal could fly is ridiculous, unnatural, magical. Yet it happens everyday, and most of us could take a stab at explaining how. Instead, many people prefer the magic of the uncommon, the remote, the unknown. Science's failure is to make its myths too successful. Its magic is not the magic of the few and the special, but is available to all of us. Yet if we stop and seek the wonder, it is perhaps the greatest magic of all.

Graham Robinson. 9th April 2003.

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