Welcome to the Gnosis Mysterion Pages! This site explores what the Greeks would have called logos and muthos, the words from which we derive our modern ideas of science (the scientific "-ologies") and myth (religion, fable, and the like). To a great many people, science and myth are mutually exclusive with regard to human experience, but the author of these pages does not agree with that estimation, to wit:
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In every person, one can appreciate a certain "flavoring" from each of these ideals, which might manifest itself as skepticism, on the one hand, and as a high sense of morality, on the other, and these are simply not mutually exclusive from the human point of perception and experience.
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One can be easily compartmentalized from the other, so that each can operate in its field, as it were; hence, a research scientist can compartmentalize a belief in and sense of the divine so that it does not interfere in the scientific process, while he is actually doing science; and he can cordon off the scientific part, along with the common demand for explanations that accompanies it, so as to worship God in a spiritual and deeply meaningful sense.
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Myth, as such, was never thought by the Greeks to be something "untrue," but rather something which dealt with untangible and allegorical issues, such as greed and justice, love and sorrow, morality and evil; these things are very much a part of human experience, hence, not unreal, and yet all are non-physical (albeit driven by the physical, on a very minute scale, in this author's understanding), and as such, not as definitive as the reality which we can access with our five senses.
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Science is not inerrant nor absolute, and was never intended to be, and as such, it does not claim to have all the answers, nor even access to all the answers, which humanity seems to seek for continually; science must change when different data comes to light which discounts what was previously held to be true, so that even beliefs held by the entire world can be, in an honest and careful scientific paradigm, shattered.
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Scientific principles do not undo mythological concerns, because it cannot; it can, perhaps, break down the constituent parts into empirically understandable cause and effect, but it cannot take away the very drive within humanity to seek for that which cannot empirically be found.
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Likewise, mythology cannot make science of no import or value; it can design ethical boundaries around science, it can warn of the dangers of too much curiosity, it can even elevate the mind to a higher plane of thought where empirical facts become (paradigmatically) meaningless, but it cannot take away man's seemingly innate sense of curiosity and the discovery driven by it, nor the myriad benefits science has brought to bear on mankind.
It is this author's opinion that the tension between myth and science is not only unnecessary, but perhaps dangerous to the furtherance of all those things we consider to be signs of culture and civilization...not only with regard to technology, medicine and engineering marvels, but also art, music, and philosophy. It has long been that science and myth have stood in stark contrast and often violent opposition to one another, but the Greeks (to name the most notable and enduring) saw past that, and fathered a glorious civilization whose benefits we still appreciate today, on whichever side of the controversy we might stand. It's time to stop engendering division between these two "magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould called them (and believed they were to be kept separate and distinct from one another), and start appreciating the subtle ways in which each one affects and determines the course of the other. If we do not do this, and soon, we might find ourselves annhilating both, and ourselves along with it.
