Cosmology - Myth or Science

Three or four millenia of cosmological speculation have yielded essentially three different types of approach to the central questions of this science: (1) the scientific approach, which stresses experimentation and observation; (2) the agnostic attitude, which rejects the possibility and the value of caring about problems so far removed from ordinary experience; and (3) the mythological approach, which emphasizes a priori speculation to the exclusion of experimentation and observation and finds its contemporary expression in the virtually Pythagorean importance of mathematics in general relativity and Big Bang cosmology. It is noted that while the scientific approach leads to basically infinite models, myths can more often be seen to result in finite universe models involving creation at a certain instant.