Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Magic Is Just Science We Haven’t Explained Yet

I’ve always liked the idea that magic is just science we haven’t explained yet.

Think about that for a moment. There was a time when lightning was terrifying. Thunder was the voice of gods. An eclipse was an omen. Disease was punishment. A woman who knew which plants could heal you might be considered a witch. A person who understood something the rest of the village didn’t could very easily be accused of possessing supernatural powers.

Why?

Because we have a deeply human need to explain things.

When we don’t understand something, we don’t like leaving the question unanswered. So we fill in the blank.

And historically, the explanation was often magic.

Today, we call that process science.

The difference is that science is willing to say, “I don’t know yet.”

That may actually be one of the most important differences between science and religion.

Science doesn’t require us to have an answer before we have the evidence. It starts with a question: What happened? How did this happen? What evidence can we gather? Can we test it? Can somebody else reproduce the result? And if we’re wrong, what would prove us wrong?

The Big Bang theory is a perfect example.

The Big Bang doesn’t say, “A magical explosion happened because science says so.”

It is an explanation, based on enormous amounts of evidence, for how the universe evolved from an extremely hot, dense early state. We can observe galaxies moving apart. We can detect the cosmic microwave background. We can measure the abundance of elements. We can observe the large-scale structure of the universe.

And after all of that, scientists still have the intellectual humility to say:

We don’t know everything.

We don’t know exactly what, if anything, preceded the earliest moment we can currently describe. We don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. We don’t have a complete explanation for the nature of dark matter or dark energy.

And that’s okay.

Because “I don’t know” isn’t a failure of science.

It’s an invitation.

Religion often approaches the same unanswered questions differently.

Where science says, “We don’t know yet,” religion can say, “God did it.”

And for some people, that’s enough.

The universe exists?

God created it.

Life exists?

God created it.

Humans exist?

God created them.

We don’t understand something?

God works in mysterious ways.

It’s an extraordinarily convenient answer because it cannot really be disproven. Whatever remains unexplained becomes another place for God to live.

And that’s where I have trouble with the argument that the universe must have been created exactly as described in an ancient religious text because we don’t yet understand every detail of its origin.

That’s essentially saying:

“I don’t understand this, therefore my preferred supernatural explanation must be correct.”

But that’s not an explanation.

That’s an assumption wearing an explanation’s clothes.

The irony is that humanity has been doing this forever.

The ancient Greeks attributed lightning to Zeus.

Norse mythology gave us Thor and his hammer.

People once believed illness could be caused by demons, curses, or supernatural punishment. People were executed for witchcraft because their neighbors couldn’t explain why crops failed, why someone became sick, or why something terrible happened.

Then we learned about electricity.

We learned about bacteria and viruses.

We learned about weather systems.

We learned about genetics.

We learned about chemistry.

The magic didn’t disappear.

Our understanding did.

That woman who knew which herbs could treat an illness wasn’t necessarily a witch. She may have simply understood something about plants that the people around her didn’t.

The person who could predict an eclipse wasn’t necessarily communicating with the gods. They understood astronomy.

The person who could navigate by the stars wasn’t performing magic. They understood the sky.

The phenomenon didn’t change.

Our explanation changed.

And that’s the part that fascinates me about the argument between creationism and science.

Creationism often seems to demand that we stop at the mystery.

Science says, keep going.

There is something almost beautiful about admitting that the universe is vastly more complicated than we are.

We’re a species that has existed for a microscopic fraction of cosmic history, sitting on one little planet orbiting one ordinary star, trying to understand an observable universe containing billions of galaxies.

And somehow we occasionally arrive at the conclusion that because we can’t explain everything, we must already have the answer.

Apparently the universe needs a celestial landlord with a white beard.

And somehow we’ve decided we know his personality, his preferences, what makes him angry, what he wants us to eat, who he’s disappointed in, what clothes he approves of, who he’s going to punish, and exactly what he thinks about human sexuality.

That’s quite a leap from “I wonder how the universe began.”

There’s nothing wrong with faith. People are entitled to believe whatever gives their lives meaning. Faith can provide comfort, community, morality, tradition and a sense of purpose.

But faith and evidence aren’t the same thing.

And saying “science can’t explain everything” is not an argument against science.

Science has never claimed to explain everything.

In fact, science is built around the realization that we don’t know everything.

Every answer creates another question.

Every discovery opens another door.

That’s not a weakness.

That’s the whole fucking point.

The history of humanity is, in many ways, the history of turning magic into knowledge.

Lightning became electricity.

Stars became nuclear furnaces.

Disease became biology.

Inheritance became genetics.

The movement of planets became physics.

And perhaps someday, questions that currently seem almost incomprehensible will become ordinary knowledge.

Maybe we’ll understand exactly what happened at the beginning of our universe.

Maybe we’ll understand what came before the earliest moment we can currently observe.

Maybe we’ll discover something so strange that our current understanding of reality will look primitive.

And when that happens, I’d rather be the person saying:

“Holy shit. That’s amazing. How does it work?”

than the person saying:

“Don’t investigate it. I already have the answer.”

Because maybe magic really is just science we haven’t explained yet.

And perhaps the greatest mistake humanity can make isn’t believing in magic.

It’s deciding that we’ve already explained it.