On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Oren Harman, chair of the graduate program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar-Ilan University and senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute, where he hosts the public series “Talking About Science in the 21st Century.” Harman’s interested in telling the story of the universe and life on earth, from the creation of the solar system to the birth of language and consciousness. This interest led Harman to explore a deep, philosophical connection between mythological and scientific thinking. Harman explores these themes in his newest book,“Evolutions: 15 Myths That Explain Our World,” an exquisite chronicling of the mythic origins of science and the scientific process. As Harman writes, “Science pretends to be a replacement for mythology but in reality it’s driven by the same hunger for understanding that brought us the gods and the afterlife.”
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Together, we discuss defining features of myths and of science, the former dealing with questions that don’t have solutions, and the latter directed towards questions that do. However, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that science, too, is a form of storytelling through methods of definition and narrative based hypothesis.
But if these seemingly disparate methods of thought are, in fact, closely related, why has this been viewed as a war: war on science and war on religion? Harman argues that there are pretensions within science that “the only questions that are really worthwhile, that are really meaningful are the kinds of questions that have solutions. And by doing so, we confuse between knowledge on the one hand and wisdom on the other. And we also confuse between comfort and happiness.” Harman claims that this leads to confusion about what science can and can’t do, and that we shouldn’t expect science to bring us existential deliverance.
