"Science, in one aspect, is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology." (John D Bernal, "Science in History", 1957)
"Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life." (Carl G Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1963)
"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)
"Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices." (Karl Popper, "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge", 1963)
"For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world." (Stanisław Lem, "Highcastle: A Remembrance", 1965)
"A scientist can not be measured quantitatively by the number of degrees or the accumulation of information. A true scientist should have a measure of courage to correct error and seek truth - no matter how painful. The alternative is more painful. To build error upon error is to drift into dogmas, metaphysics, science fiction, and mythology." (Alexander Wilf, "Origin and Destiny of the Moral Species", 1969)
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1969)
"Both the myths of religion and the laws of science, it is now becoming apparent, are not so much descriptions of facts as symbolic expressions of cosmic truths." (René J Dubos, "A God Within", 1972)
"Science never starts from scratch; it can never be described as free from assumptions; for at every instant it presupposes a horizon of expectations - yesterday’s horizon of expectations, as it were. Today’s science is built upon yesterday's science (and so it is the result of yesterday’s searchlight); and yesterday’s science, in turn, is based on the science of the day before. And the oldest scientific theories are built on pre-scientific myths, and these, in their turn, on still older expectations." (Karl R Popper, "Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach", 1972)
"[…] science is not sacrosanct. The restrictions it imposes (and there are many such restrictions though it is not easy to spell them out) are not necessary in order to have general coherent and successful views about the world. There are myths, there are the dogmas of theology, there is metaphysics, and there are many other ways of constructing a worldview. It is clear that a fruitful exchange between science and such ‘nonscientific’ world-views will be in even greater need of anarchism than is science itself. Thus, anarchism is not only possible, it is necessary both for the internal progress of science and for the development of our culture as a whole." (Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method", 1975)
"In the ultimate analysis science is born of myth and religion, all three being expressions of the ordering spirit of the human mind." (Lancelot L Whyte, "The Unconscious Before Freud", 1978)
"To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science." (Hannes Alfven, 1978)
"The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is canceled out when the large picture is put together." (Ruth Hubbard, "Women Look at Biology Looking at Women", 1979)
"However, for most of us, science functions like myth in that we have no personal experience in the matter. We put our trust in the scientific view given us by our culture and enshrined in its myths. If asked why leaves are green, most of us would probably mutter something about 'chlorophyll'. But unless we were specialists, we would simply be repeating the story of someone else’s experience." (Wallace B Clift, "Jung and Christianity", 1982)
"Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)
"The critical task of science is not complete and never will be, for it is the merest truism that we do not abandon mythologies and superstitions, but merely substitute new variants for old."
"It is important that we, as working scientists, combat these myths of our profession as something superior and apart. The myths may serve us well in the short and narrow as rationale for a lobbying strategy - give us the funding and leave us alone, for we know what we’re doing and you don’t understand anyway. But science can only be harmed in the long run by its self-proclaimed separation as a priesthood guarding a sacred rite called the scientific method." (Stephen J Gould, "Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time", 1987)
"Myths are errors that result [both from] scientists bringing societal preconceptions into science and […] scientists feeding society ideas that masquerade as science." (MN Mahadeva, "From Misinterpretations to Myths", Science Teacher Vol. 56 (4), 1989)
"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defied and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that’s the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work." (Victor J Stenger, "Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses", 1990)
"The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth." (Eric Lerner, "The Big Bang Never Happened", 1991)
"There is no good reason to discard the scientific method as an ideal; rather, there is good reason to keep it so. Myths, after all, even if not literally true, are stories that embody moral truths." (Henry H Bauer, "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method", 1992)
"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)
"Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it." (Karen Armstrong, "A Short History Of Myth", 2004)
"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)
"Intellectual inquiry begins with myth, religion and philosophy. Originally, philosophy (or perhaps theology or metaphysics) is the queen of the sciences, other intellectual disciplines having only a highly subservient, specialized role to play within philosophy. [...] Instead of being the queen of the sciences, overarching all other sciences, philosophy has been transformed into a highly specialized, technical, somewhat meagre enterprise, concerned not with improving our knowledge and understanding of the world - for that is the business of the empirical sciences - but rather with clarifying concepts and solving conceptual problems." (Nicholas Maxwell, "Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment", 2017)
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