original myth.
Every other detail of the story, apart from its bare prediction that winter happens once a year, is just as easily variable. So, although the myth was created to explain the seasons, it is only superficially adapted to that purpose. When its author was wondering what could possibly make a goddess do something once a year, he did not shout, ‘Eureka! It must have been a marriage contract enforced by a magic seed.’ He made that choice – and all his substantive choices as author – for cultural and artistic reasons, and not because of the attributes of winter at all. He may also have been trying to explain aspects of human nature metaphorically – but here I am concerned with the myth only in its capacity as an explanation of seasons, and in that respect even its author could not have denied that the role of all the details could be played equally well by countless other things.
The Persephone and Freyr myths assert radically incompatible things about what is happening in reality to cause seasons. Yet no one, I guess, has ever adopted either myth as a result of comparing it on its merits with the other, because there is no way of distinguishing between them. If we ignore all the parts of both myths whose role could be easily replaced, we are left with the same core explanation in both cases: the gods did it. Although Freyr is a very different god of spring from Persephone, and his battles very different events from her conjugal visits, none of those differing attributes has any function in the myths’ respective accounts of why seasons happen. Hence none of them provides any reason for choosing one explanation over the other.
The reason those myths are so easily variable is that their details are barely connected to the details of the phenomena. Nothing in the problem of why winter happens is addressed by postulating specifically a marriage contract or a magic seed, or the gods Persephone, Hades and Demeter – or Freyr. Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.
That freedom to make drastic changes in those mythical explanations of seasons is the fundamental flaw in them. It is the reason that mythmaking in general is not an effective way to understand the world. And that is so whether the myths are testable or not, for whenever it is easy to vary an explanation without changing its predictions, one could just as easily vary it to make different predictions if they were needed. For example, if the ancient Greeks had discovered that the seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres are out of phase, they would have had a choice of countless slight variants of the myth that would be consistent with that observation. One would be that when Demeter is sad she banishes warmth from her vicinity, and it has to go elsewhere – into the southern hemisphere. Similarly, slight variants of the Persephone explanation could account just as well for seasons that were marked by green rainbows, or seasons that happened once a week, or sporadically, or not at all. Likewise for the superstitious gambler or the end-of-the-world prophet: when their theory is refuted by experience, they do indeed switch to a new one; but, because their underlying explanations are bad, they can easily accommodate the new experience without changing the substance of the explanation. Without a good explanatory theory, they can simply reinterpret the omens, pick a new date, and make essentially the same prediction. In such cases, testing one’s theory and abandoning it when it is refuted constitutes no progress towards understanding the world. If an explanation could easily explain anything in the given field, then it actually explains nothing.
In general, when theories are easily variable in the sense I have described, experimental testing is almost useless for correcting their errors. I call such theories bad explanations. Being proved wrong by experiment, and changing the theories to other bad explanations, does not get their holders one jot closer to the truth.
Because explanation plays this central role in science, and because testability is of little use in the case of bad explanations, I myself prefer to call myths, superstitions and similar theories unscientific even when they make testable predictions. But it does not matter