Do You Believe In Magic?
Magic. Miracles. What do you think? Are they real? Figments of wild imagination? White flags when we fail to explain something? In any case, our attitude about the things we don't understand has a profound effect upon our outlook, decision-making, and thus our personal power. In today's episode, we look into magic and miracles.
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Do You Believe In Magic?
Do you believe in magic? Nearly everywhere and in every place in human history, people have believed in magic. Why do you suppose that might be? What is magic anyway? It's the supernatural, right? It's the observation of effects that defy rational explanation. There are good reasons to believe in it. Many amazing mind-numbing things happen in this world. The best professional magicians can make us believe. Watch Shin Lim or Oz Pearlman perform if you doubt it.
Talented artists with acts designed to amaze and baffle us are just the beginning. We experience all manner of phenomena that seem beyond mundane explanation, like when you think of someone you haven't spoken with in a long time and they call you, things like that happen so frequently. We have names for them. Sometimes we call them coincidences, but often that's not a sufficient word. I like to call them glitches in the matrix.
Another way to think about the supernatural is to substitute miracle for the word magic. We think of miracles as God's intervention in our world outside of the established natural processes. Examples of those happen all the time, like the story of Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro who survived 45 minutes with no pulse and suffered no lasting brain damage or ill effects, or the reportedly dozens of examples of the remains of saints not decaying, at least not in the same way as other cadavers.
Suffice it to say, whether we believe in the supernatural or not, some strange stuff happens and we explain them the best we know how. When phenomena remain out of reach, we use words like magic and miracles. Here's the deal with all of it. The world is so complicated relative to our powers of perception that there is no shortage of examples. A sense of wonder and humility in realizing that what we don't know dwarfs what we do, helping build an attitude that enhances our power. It helps us connect to our curiosity and steer clear of restrictive dogma. It gives us a wonderful ability to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in new ways to look at things, but as with everything, it has its upside and its downside.
Whether we believe in the supernatural or not, some strange things happen, and we explain them the best we know how.
As a kid, I used to love watching Western television shows and movies. An occasional recurring motif is the traveling snake oil salesman. They would roll into frontier towns equipped with exotic ointments and elixirs, which would promise miracle cures for nearly any malady. I remember wondering how people could be so foolish to believe them, but then we learned about the efficacy of supplements. Unless you have a deficiency, they don't appear to do much. Now, it's a $152 billion business. That's a lot of horse-drawn carts with clinking bottles. Full disclosure, I take supplements because I don't know that they don't help. Maybe they do provide some measure of the claved benefits.
The truth is when it comes to how our bodies function, there's still a lot to learn. What would be foolish is to fall into a trap, something like thinking we can eat poor quality diets and somehow have good health simply by easily taking the right pills. The real task is in our thinking. The thousands of daily decisions that either take us in the direction of our health and our power or away from it. When someone tries to sell us with claims of uncanny, ease, convenience, or speed, it's time for skepticism.
Skepticism only gets us so far because belief is not optional. We can't know the totality of the world, so we use models as proxies. These models help us with our decision-making. The higher the quality of our models, the higher the quality of our decision-making. We believe our models will guide us through, but the path to wisdom requires us to surmount a few obstacles, some of which are universal. One such obstacle happens with fundamentalist or dogmatic beliefs. In such cases, we mistake the map for the territory. The problem with this is it leaves us resistant to learning, thus improving our model.
Skepticism only gets us so far because belief is not optional.
It's a delicate balance because some such models, systems, and beliefs have been worked through over long periods of time, and they pay real dividends. Otherwise, they wouldn't persist. We don't have the bandwidth to build models from the ground up, so we choose the ones we're exposed to make the most sense to us. Maybe the biggest innovation that helps to continually refine our models is the scientific method. It's a marvelous thing. One we tend to take for granted.
The scientific method is an approach, a discipline, and a way of thinking. We gather data. We make observations about that data and propose hypotheses. We control for variables. We then test the hypotheses as empirically as we can. It’s logical, but that's not how people, including many scientists actually think. Scientists like all other humans rely on belief. It turned out to be belief in God that led to the possibility of the scientific method and all of the innovations that created the modern world.
I'll explain it. Prior to the spread of the Judeo-Christian worldview, as the Roman Empire became Catholic, the world was primarily pagan and its belief systems. Nearly everyone believed in magic. Prior to a deeper understanding of the physical world, much of nature seemed mystical. Natural processes were ascribed to gods. The gods were appeased by appropriate behavior. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. This worldview was not friendly to a scientific view because it left little space for wonder to search for a better explanation.
Sudden Onset
Conditions changed with belief in God, not any God, but a God who made us in his image and entrusted us with the world in which we live. Storms, droughts, and diseases became natural events. Ones that sufficient acumen we could explain. Such belief led to the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the Age of Modernity ever since, all fueled by the application of the scientific method.
The main theme in Sudden Onset, a novel I wrote with my brother, Chris, is an exploration of the intersection between science and faith. In the story, we take the position that we need both lenses because neither is adequate without the other. I suppose that's the point I'm making with this whole magic thing. It's tempting to be reductionistic and materialistic, and declare science the winner or the sole arbiter of how we should best navigate our world. We're learning so much. We've come so far and it seems like we can explain everything.
It reminds me of teenagers who are enamored with how much they know compared with themselves five years earlier, imagine they're near the end of the story. They, like we, don't even know what the real story is. If magic and miracles make sense to us and they allow us to think about the world and ourselves and the world in an empowered way, then so be it. The path to our power requires us to remain open, humble, curious, and willing to listen and learn. Beliefs that restrict those qualities limit us. Beliefs that build them empower us. You know that's what we're about here. Let's go.