Myth and Science
The scientific method has produced more changes within a shorter span of time than any other development in human history. This fact alone is proof of its effectiveness, and of its validity as a tool for understanding our world. Many of these changes have proven beneficial, but at the same time our rapidly increasing technical know-how has made it possible for us to create a range of threats to our own survival that the human race never faced before. We’ve become almost limitlessly clever without becoming much wiser, and we’ve endangered our own existence and that of every other species on the planet in the process.
Despite the ominous results of this development, some people seem convinced that the death of the mythic is the key to a new utopia. That the future world we’re creating could very well be uninhabitable, or at the very least inhospitable, does not deter them. To the materialist, the spiritual is an illusion, a harmful relic of primitive superstition, and the source of war and social oppression.
In the global struggles of the 20th century, countless millions of people died in the name of explicitly materialist ideologies. This would seem to suggest that it is not our spiritual aspirations which are to blame for human evil. Nevertheless the debate continues, pitting the rational against the spiritual in a false dichotomy.
What is needed is neither the rejection of science nor the rejection of myth, but an understanding of life and the world that is broad enough and deep enough to encompass both viewpoints. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century would seem to have agreed. According to Wolfgang Pauli, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1945:
I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age.
Similar ideas were expressed by Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Sir James Jeans, Max Planck and Sir Arthur Eddington. In their letters and their published writings, these great physicists expressed not only a wide-ranging familiarity with mysticism and philosophy, but a rejection of any antagonism between science and mysticism.
It is important, however, that no superficial attempt be made to combine the two viewpoints. The Catholic Church in the medieval period tied its doctrines to the science of Aristotle, with a stultifying effect on scientific development. When science finally broke free of these constraints it rejected not only the ancient science, but the religious insights with which it was associated. Attempts to explain quantum mechanics in terms of Eastern mysticism, or Eastern mysticism in terms of quantum mechanics, run the risk of making the same mistake.
It is not that the discoveries of science have no philosophical or spiritual implications, but rather that the nature of the mythic experience is not susceptible to any fully rational understanding. The great mystics of all traditions use a language of paradox and ambiguity to evoke what cannot be said. The great mythic stories do something much the same. The divine mysteries are exactly that, and if they could be fully understood through the scientific process or any other process they wouldn’t be what they are. Myth isn’t something to be dissected, experimented on, explained or proven, but to be lived and experienced.
That’s why a person can be totally comfortable with both science and myth, treating the first one as a way of toward fact and the second as a way toward
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