The above cartoon, very appropriately named Abracademia, appeared on PZ Myers' blog where he comments:
It makes a good point, that magic isn’t an explanation for much of anything — you need some chain of causality and evidence, with some mechanism at each step. You don’t just get to say “it’s magic” or “it’s a miracle.”
Bonus, the comic pokes fun at
that absurd ad hoc magic system in the Harry Potter books that is nothing but
lazy plot gimmicks.
I know that PZ Myers has got a downer on JK Rowling and that explains some of his aversion to H. Potter, but I ask myself this: Do I agree with him? Sort of, but I'll have to qualify.
Firstly, the cartoon starts off with a chair that is actually being levitated by, well, "magic". So in this context, whatever "magic" is within this cartoon world, it is predicated as a real phenomenon. So given that this so-called magic is real our young heroine in the cartoon does have a point: The curious have every right to usefully ask: "How's it done?" By smoke and mirrors? By thin wire suspension? By a newly discovered anti-gravity ray? Or by something even more exotic (like psychokinesis) of which we know nothing? I assume that when Myers tells us there's need for some explanatory chain of causation along with its accompanying evidence, he's asking for a closer linked cause and effect connection than the utterance of "Floatularis" and the wave of the wand; otherwise, there is a big gap there!
In our world cause-and-effect entails the transmission of the energy & information from A to B. So where's the energy & information coming from to lift that chair? But then this question presumes that the energy/signal transfer paradigm is the correct one to use. Perhaps it doesn't work like that at all when we are dealing with so-called "magic"! But assuming that the cause-and-effect paradigm applies here by what mysterious ways does energy get from A to B? Cause-and-effect "explanations" fill in some of the "in-between" details and often in ways that allows those details to be predicted using those succinct laws of physics to generate those details. But apart from this clever mathematical trickery I have to confess that's as far as our understanding goes and just why those physical algorithms work is as good as "magic"! As I would contend, this kind of science is, in the final analysis, mere description, albeit clever description that comes out of asking the kind of questions our heroin above, at risk of her life, is asking. Of course, it may be possible to further improve on the elegance and comprehensiveness of the laws of physics in hand but in an absolute sense the descriptive role of science's physical "algorithms" means that ultimately it leaves us with wall of explanatory incompleteness, what is in fact an explanatory silence. It's ironic that as science fills in the gaps with more descriptive details, we zoom in only to find just more finely spaced gaps!
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So, is it all magic & mystery? No, it's not magic and the mystery is better described as the miraculous, an idea pregnant with meaning which stimulates curiosity and prompts further questions. Contrast that with a purely secular take on the cosmic perspective which posits the organization of the universe as either a meaningless brute fact or proposes that the apparent selective contingency of cosmic organization is a human perspective effect on the infinite sea of randomness in a multiverse. It goes to show that a magical paradigm is not the only way of thinking which stifles curiosity. Do you hear "multiverse" and just stop asking questions?
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