"Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in words - be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations imposed by language and 'linear' thinking. Modern physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate and necessarily inaccurate. They are the counterparts of the Eastern myths, symbols and poetic images, and it is at this level that I shall draw the parallels. The same idea about matter is conveyed, for example, to the Hindu by the cosmic dance of the god Shiva as to the physicist by certain aspects of quantum field theory. Both the dancing god and the physical theory are creations of the mind: models to describe their authors' intuition of reality." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)
"Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)
"The critical task of science is not complete and never will be, for it is the merest truism that we do not abandon mythologies and superstitions, but merely substitute new variants for old."
"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defied and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that’s the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work." (Victor J Stenger, "Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses", 1990)
"The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth." (Eric Lerner, "The Big Bang Never Happened", 1991)
"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)
"Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it." (Karen Armstrong, "A Short History Of Myth", 2004)
"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)
"Intellectual inquiry begins with myth, religion and philosophy. Originally, philosophy (or perhaps theology or metaphysics) is the queen of the sciences, other intellectual disciplines having only a highly subservient, specialized role to play within philosophy. [...] Instead of being the queen of the sciences, overarching all other sciences, philosophy has been transformed into a highly specialized, technical, somewhat meagre enterprise, concerned not with improving our knowledge and understanding of the world - for that is the business of the empirical sciences - but rather with clarifying concepts and solving conceptual problems." (Nicholas Maxwell, "Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment", 2017)
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