Over at Just Thomism, James Chastek has a nice post on scientific creation myth - in the sense of the stories that scientists tell themselves about the creation of the discipline and how it has apparently finally put paid to religious mythology as a source of truth. As he points out:
"Science in the popular imagination is idealized (science cannot explain everything or solve all our problems now, but just give it time!); and only its successes are seen as integral to it (i.e. vaccinations, space travel, and computers are seen as the direct and proper work of science while Hiroshima, Tuskegee, Mustard gas, scientific eugenics and sterilization programs, Josef Mengele, climate change, industrial pollution, etc. are never seen as the necessary products of “science”). IOW, this is obviously not a scientific view of science but one that makes it into an exalted, inerrant messiah that will set everything right if we only give it our total devotion. Ultimately, it’s not that we want to destroy creation myths with science but that we want to replace an ancient creation myth with a modern one."
This seems to me to be spot on. Anyone familiar with the history of the Galileo controversy cannot fail to appreciate how powerful the scientific creation myth has now become. despite being pretty much completely rejected by both historians and philosophers of science, it is nevertheless deeply embedded in the subconscious of almost all working scientists despite clear and historically compelling arguments to the contrary. (See the comments to this post on Geocentrism and the Galileo Affair by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus for a hilarious example of this.)
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