Ellis Washington, a former staff editor of the Michigan Law Review and an adjunct professor at the National Paralegal College where he teaches Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, Contracts and Advanced Legal Writing explains why for C.S. Lewis science was more closely related to ancient magic:
“Conventional thinking by the progressive left treats science as something innovative, original and modern, however, for C.S. Lewis science was more closely related to ancient magic. Lewis characterized science and magic as analogous emphasizing 3 different ways that science and magic are similar – (1) Science/magic as the ability to function as religion demanding absolute obedience, devotion and worship; (2) Science/magic as credulity commands Groupthink and ironically promotes a lack of skepticism, and (3) Science/magic as power over the world in order to dominate society and triumph over nature and the universe.
Science as religion
Science has the capacity to induce worship to the same degree as any religion; her prophets are scientists and professors, their decrees infallible! Indeed, doesn’t a magical view of the world beguile one with a sense of awe that surely life is more than our humdrum daily lives? This sense grandeur of the universe gives us a sense of meaning and purpose that transcends the physical world entering the realm of the metaphysical world. Even for those people who aren’t religious, this magical view of the world can in fact be more compelling, because science-as-religion substitutes God (religion) for scientism (magic, politics). Therefore, in reality since Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” (1859), modern science has indeed devolved into a pseudo-religion; a racist, diabolical cult and a servile slave to socialist politics and government funding.
In this essential documentary on the legendary writings of C.S. Lewis titled, “The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism,” the narrator puts into historical perspective Lewis’s heroic battles upholding truth against the cult of Darwin:
...During Lewis’s own time, there were people like H. G. Wells, who turned Darwin’s theory of evolution into this cosmic theory of life developing in this long struggle in the human universe, and then human life develops in this heroic character fighting against nature, and then, eventually, man evolves, and evolves himself through eugenics into a wave of demigods. This epic cosmic struggle of evolution was really an alternate religion for H. G. Wells, and you see that same thing today, whether it be Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins who says that “Darwin has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Read more: C.S. Lewis: when science becomes magic, Part 2
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/washington/130831
Thanks so much for the ping to the essays of Ellis Washington! This man is one of America’s great thinkers. I’ve read his essays without realizing who he is. The collected essays will be entering my library asap.
Indeed, the peer review process particularly outside the hard sciences (physics and chemistry) has become increasingly an enforcement of orthodoxy.
And of course the worst are the historical sciences (anthropology, archeology, Egyptology, evolution biology) because in those disciplines "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" whereas in the hard sciences the reverse is true "the absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
It may be argued that because the historical record is spotty at best, the historical scientists are doing they best they can to reconstruct history. But ultimately, it is still story telling - and when the story becomes dogma as it is in evolution biology, the insult to professional ethics is too great. Indeed, at least in some of the other historical science theories - e.g. archeology - the minds are not closed to alternative explanations for the historical record.
Lewis' analogy of science and magic as equivalent at some level in terms of operational principles — expressing outcomes (1), (2), and (3), as seen through Ellis Washington's eyes — definitely seems plausible, and thus worth pursuing. Yet of the three instances given, (1) and (2) are descriptive; (3) is what worries me. For it refers to the active principle that informs and explains (1) and (2).
On the other hand, there are still plenty of honest scientists out there. And science historically is one of the highest achievements of the human mind and spirit. We can't throw out the baby with the bathwater....
Still to note, alchemy and magic are practices of man that date back to the Neolithicum. They are not identical, but siblings that share a common heritage — the spirit of ignorance and/or revolt against the constituted order (kosmos) of Reality, which boils down to a revolt against human nature and the human condition itself. Both alchemy and magic abhor God because His very existence places a Limit on man and what he can see and achieve and become by his own efforts.
Alchemy purports to be the science of transmutation of base metals into gold. Magic is a far more wide-ranging proposition, in that it would be the "general theory" of alchemy's "special theory."
As Ms. Kimball astutely notes in the present writing (and others before), man is attracted by the idea that, if dissatisfied with the world and his place in it, he can simply change the world — into something to his better liking — IF he has access to the deep hidden truths of nature which, if known (via gnosis) will allow him to successfully counter all the bad things he dislikes about human existence. The alchemists often were gnostics or Hermeticists, claiming to tap into some "deeper" or "higher" truth about reality than the hoi polloi could ever grasp. Their goal was to triumph over the material limits of Reality because material Reality was "evil" by their definition. But man could escape to the "good" non-material Reality if he had the requisite "gnosis," or knowledge of effective procedures to counteract and transmute the "bad" into the "good." By and large, this implies an effort in self-divinization.
But at least the alchemists kept fairly quiet, in that their main enterprise was to get Reality to cough up gold for their personal direct enrichment, out of base (less worthy) metals. They claimed they had the requisite "gnosis" to do this. So why would they not want to keep this knowledge to themselves? In short, one does not hear of the cultivation of disciples to receive and carry on their "sacred knowledge."
Not so with the magicians. Though they share certain key moral commitments with the alchemists, their sphere of operation is society at large. And it seems to me they are the worst offenders against any idea of Truth in Reality. For they are in outright revolt against Reality, not just trying to compromise it from time to time into compliance with human wishes for immediate personal gain.
But I have to say that it's not the scientists who come across to me as the main "magicians" these days. (Though it is true that some part of their community is enchanted by the instrumentalization of Nature to produce human "goods" in contradistinction to the search for the Truth of natural Reality for its own sake.) It's mainly the philosophers who have given free scope to the further deformation and deterioration of the human person and society at large. But then they've been "aping" the "methodological" natural sciences in so many respects since the so-called Enlightenment that it looks like they may have lost their ancient intellectual mooring in divine Truth....
After which the very roots of Western culture and society have come under incessant attack. This has largely been conducted by stoking the "public unconscious" into the belief that human history does not matter, so why bother to learn it? That all "spiritual" ramifications of Reality — which human beings actually directly experience — are "illusions."
And if illusions, then they can be manipulated into "better" illusions by virtue of "magic words" [Hegels' Zauberworte] and "magical practices" [Hegel's Zauberkraft]. For at both the beginning and the end of Hegel's "story" as told in Phénoménologie is the premise, promise, and fulfillment of the self-divinization of man, preeminently the self-divinization of Hegel, the New Christ....
The magician has if anything even more faith than the alchemist in his ability to transform the structure of Reality, which for our purposes here will be denoted First Reality. First Reality is, among other things, the culmination — so far — of human experience of this world over the whole sum of human historical time. It accounts for the order that constitutes the Whole of which human beings are parts and participants. Its mission is to illuminate the great hierarchy of Being, God–Man–World–Society. [It should be noted that both classical philosophy and Christian theology are completely devoted to these issues.] Of course, in this work Hegel is a self-admitted "magician." He is involved in the process of transmuting First Reality into a Second Reality more to his personal liking. This "second reality" is one which recognizes Hegel's world-representative status as a Great Thinker who was able to subsume "philosophy" — love of wisdom — under his new complete system of science — which is not just some puny love of wisdom, but the actual possession of complete knowledge. Thus our man — admittedly by magical means — bootstraps himself into the status of the New Christ, who comes to abolish history and instantiate a new order of Reality over which Hegel will preside as the New Christ.
I wouldn't bother to mention him except for the profound influence Hegel has had on the constructors of Second Realities down to our time (eminently Marx, and a whole bunch of savage totalitarians who took heart and encouragement from both Hegel and Marx). His "system to end all systems" is what modern progressivist ideologies of every stripe take courage from, in the prosecution of their own sociopolitical ends. ("If Hegel can 'stuff all of (objective) Reality' into his own head, and perform 'truthful operations' on it, then why can't we?")
We see such operations daily in the words and deeds of our POTUS. Mr. Obama seems definitely to be operating under the assumption that "rhetoric" can actually "change the constitution" of objective Reality. It seems he would agree with Mao Zhedong's observation, "Tell a lie 100 times, and people will believe it is true." And it thus follows: If people believe it, then it must be true.
In conclusion, any Second Reality is the attempt to supplant First Reality. Second Reality's mission is to correct God: If God did not hand over a "perfect" world, then man must try to carry on and "perfect" what God made.
Actually, it's best just to leave off with all this "God" stuff. Man doesn't need it — he can just perfect his own world without any divine assistance, thank you very much.
Well, such a man as Obama can shout out this epiphany into the public until he is hoarse. But I don't believe anything in Reality will change much, except for the poor human beings who buy his lies.... People who have the nose to sniff them out already know that no good end can come from them.
Mental cases do not have the ability to tell the truth. But the truth is, mental cases have extraordinary influence in shaping the cultural and social reality in which we all live. And if mental cases are the majority in public discussion, then we cannot (it seems to me) expect a "happy ending" respecting any socio/political matter. (One cannot understand/conduct Reality by means of a public-opinion poll in principle.)
At the same time I am reminded by the Holy Scriptures that the ululations of mental cases amount to so much "sound and fury, signifying nothing."
And yet they are there, sources of disorder to persons and societies.
Man does not realize how frail, how needful he is of God just in order to make sense of the World of which he is a part and participant....
Lose God, you will lose your humanity. Or as Baudelaire put it:
A man who does not accept the conditions of life, sells his soul....More to say, but maybe later or never. Must close for now.
Thank you so much, dear spirited, my sister in Christ, for your astute observations!