Quantum Physicist David Deutsch forces us, in the video below, to reexplain the way we explain things, and explains why we can't just say "a wizard did it." There's a principle he calls "easy variability" especially in regard to mythology, which I'd like to hang on for a bit-- if the Ancient Greeks found out that it's not the entire world that gets chilly in winter but just the Northern Hemisphere, with ours and the Southern Hemisphere's seasons swapped, they could very easily change the Persephone myth to fit the new reality to observed science.
Saying "a wizard did it" is (also) called the God of the Gaps fallacy. Where does God operate in a universe that can be explained using science? Is there a place for Him? Some would say, the "gaps" of scientific knowledge, but even that doesn't work and in fact just might make the situation worse somehow. Orson Scott Card said somewhere, and you know that with that I'm totally gunna be paraphrasing but get a free pass to do so, "God" is unscientific; not because God's not real or anything, but because the moment you throw your hands up in the air and say, God must have done it, you stop making inquiries, and it's no longer science because you're no longer trying to figure out the how of anything.
Where does that leave God or gods, then? (Where is my mythology that this post is ostensibly about?) Gets even more problematic when scientists (who are, after all, still people too) fill in the gaps where God had been hiding, then throw their hands up in the air in the other direction and say there is no God because there's no room in the gaps any more. (I personally find this a bizarre move, claiming no God from a scientific perspective, since that's a decision really left to the philosophers and metaphysicists, but...)
Is mythology just a way to fill in the gaps? It may start out that way, but can it grow beyond that? Also, how annoying is it to have no other kinds of sentences than inquisitive? How am I going to end this post?
A WIZARD JUMPS OUT AND WRITES A SATISFYING ENDING TO THIS POST, WITH JUST ENOUGH LOOSE ENDS FOR A SEQUEL HOOK.
Oh.
Thank you, wizard.
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