RDFRS US:
The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.
The Magic of Reality
for the iPad
Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
The complaint makes no sense. The supernatural, or magic, is supposedly beyond the reach of science. So it makes no sense to insist that a scientific theory should take into account something that is by definition beyond its reach.
There is no magic. It is impossible. There isn't an property called 'magical' that makes anything other than poetic sense. There isn't a property of being forever beyond the reach of any scientific investigation that can be applied to anything, because the whole idea of the natural and the supernatural is an irrelevance and confuses things. There are phenomena that happen and that's it. There is no possible test to see if a phenomenon is supernatural, or not, magical, or not. We can only try and explore what happens and see if we can find what looks like useful and meaningful explanations.
Permalink Mon, 30 Jul 2012 03:02:56 UTC | #950301