The question that now presses is unavoidable:
What place does myth have in a world shaped by scientific explanation?
This question is often asked as if science and myth compete for the same role.
They do not.
The scientific transformation of explanation
Science has been extraordinarily successful at reorganising explanation.
It has displaced local narratives with generalisable models, replaced situated causes with systemic relations, and rendered many phenomena manipulable rather than merely intelligible.
But this success concerns explanation, not orientation.
Science changes what can be explained.
It does not, by itself, determine what matters.
When explanation colonises orientation
Trouble arises when explanatory success is mistaken for orientational sufficiency.
When science is tacitly asked to do the work of myth — to tell us who we are, what counts as a life, what futures are worth pursuing — it cannot help but fail.
The failure is then misattributed to myth itself.
This produces the familiar story: myth is obsolete, science has replaced it.
What has actually happened is a category error.
Scientific myths
A scientific world does not eliminate myth.
It produces new ones.
Stories of progress, inevitability, optimisation, neutrality, or total explanation function mythically even when they borrow scientific language.
They orient attention, stabilise expectations, and delimit possibility.
Their power lies not in their accuracy, but in their orientational force.
Myth alongside science
To recognise myth in a scientific world is not to subordinate science to myth, or myth to science.
It is to recognise that they do different kinds of work.
Science reorganises how phenomena can be intervened upon.
Myth orients how such interventions are situated within a life and a world.
Neither can replace the other.
Responsibility without illusion
A scientific world intensifies the stakes of myth.
Because science expands what can be done, orientation increasingly shapes what will be done.
Mythic responsibility does not lie in providing answers, but in holding possibility in ways that do not collapse into domination, inevitability, or despair.
Orientation after representation
In a world saturated with representations, models, and explanations, myth does not retreat.
It shifts.
It becomes less about describing origins and more about sustaining orientation amid unprecedented capability.
This is not a return to the past.
It is a task of the present.
What remains
Myth in a scientific world is neither relic nor rival.
It is the ongoing work of making a world inhabitable when explanation alone cannot tell us how to live within it.
This series has not argued for a revival of myth, nor for its critique, but for its recognition as an irreducible practice of orientation — one that persists precisely because representation is no longer doing the work we once asked of it.
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