These two poems constitute (almost) everything you need to know about science and society :-)
Belief
We do not know
if there be fairies now
Or no.
But why should we ourselves involve
In questions which we cannot solve.
O let's pretend it's so
And then perhaps if we are good
Some day we'll see them in the wood.
(W. H. Auden)
The History of Science
All fables of adventure stress
The need for courtesy and kindness:
Without the Helpers none can win
The flaxen-haired Princess.
They look the ones in need of aid,
Yet, thanks to them, the gentle-hearted
Third Brother beds the woken Queen,
While seniors who made
Cantankerous replies to crones
And dogs who begged to share their rations,
Must expiate their pride as daws
Or wind-swept bachelor stones
Few of a sequel, though, have heard:
Uneasy pedagogues have censored
All written reference to a brother
Younger than the Third.
Soft-spoken as New Moon this Fourth,
A Sun of gifts to all he met with,
But when advised 'Go South a while !',
Smiled 'Thank You !' and turned North,
Trusting some map in his own head,
So never reached the goal intended
(His map, of course, was out) but blundered
On a wonderful instead,
A tower not circular but square,
A treasure not of gold but silver:
He kissed a shorter Sleeper's hand
And stroked her raven hair,
Dare sound Authority confess
That one can err his way to riches,
Win glory by mistake, his dear
Through sheer wrong-headedness?
W. H. Auden, 1966, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, London: Faber & Faber, p 305
The second poem is allegorical. The title, History of Science, is possibly for the benefit of literal minded sciencey people like me who might otherwise miss the point and think the poem is a fairy story. In fact it's a brilliant account of how science is epistemologically and socially distinct from other human activities. (I particularly like the bit about blundering on a 'wonderful instead'.)
In the first poem, the title Belief is a clue that Auden may be talking about more than just fairies. He may have chosen fairies to give a sense of lightness to otherwise big and unwieldy questions of theology. But actually no! Unlike The History of Science, I think this one should be taken at face-value; it really is about fairies.
I can't claim to have seen a fairy myself, but often when I'm walking in the woods I can sense them all around. Now, the problem with science is that everything has to fit with everything else, which leaves no room for fairies. Quite apart from being subject to Occam's Razor fairies would cause all sorts of inconsistencies between different branches of science. What people often don't realise though is that many, many things have no natural home in science - not just fanciful entities like fairies and deities but more prosaic things like beer and love. Science has something to say about most things but there is usually much more to be said once the scientific account is exhausted. Science has something to say, for instance, about how it feels to walk in the woods, but not very much, and on the interesting and important stuff it's mute.
People who are tempted to think of science as the alpha and the omega - to think that beer is 'just' fermented barley or love is just a 'brain-state' - do science a dis-service. Indeed, the instinct to see science as the explanation for everything, to conflate 'science' with 'nature' and to blinker oneself from anything that doesn't appear to fall within the remit of science is the same instinct that leads to religion. Science is just one way we humans make sense of the world; there are others.
But let's be clear about this, because it's easy to get it wrong: just because there are many ways of making sense of the world, it doesn't mean that competing conceptions can ignore science. Here's how it works: for most human activity, if science has something to contribute, you don't have to listen because whatever it is that science has to say, does not demand a response. (Science can tell us about the experience of walking in the woods, but so what?) For some human activities and beliefs that is not the case - you can't merely shrug off the contribution of science and tell yourself you are on a parallel path, working within a different belief system, or whatever. For instance, biology, geology and cosmology all have something to say to creationists that demands a response - creationism and cosmology clash. Similarly, scientific medicine often clashes with alternative medicine in a way that can't be ignored (especially when alternative medicines dress themselves up as a pastiche of science).
Nevertheless, it is still the case that science is just one way to engage with the world (a particularly human way) and not the only way. Do I believe in fairies? Of course not, that would be daft. What makes a walk in the woods so special? Fairies. Like Walt Whitman, I am large, I contain multitudes. So, although there is no room for fairies in science, I'm not going to let that stop me finding them in the woods.