From: cf594@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jon C. Gilliam)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Science is better than Magick
Date: 9 Dec 1993 15:02:51 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: nextsun.ins.cwru.edu


   Magick is something you do intentionally, and to do something intentionally
implies that you have a reason for doing it.  Whatever you think magick may
be, there's a reason you do that at 9:00 Friday evening rather than ironing
shirts or ice skating (provided you don't consider these magickal acts).  This
implies that a person doing magick must justify to themselves why magick is
something they should do rather than not.

   Now that you politely agree with me that one necessarily must provide some
justification to oneself as to why magick is something to do rather than not,
I'm going to rudely suggest that there is nothing that magick can do that
science cannot do better.  Not only that, but with the height of hubris I'm
going to tell you that whatever benefit, reward, progress, enlightenment, or
other tangible or intangible result you receive from magick is less in degree
to that which could be received employing science.

  Here's a list of what magick can do for you, and why science can do it
better:

(1) Magick can bring you power and allow you to have personal control over
    your world and people in your world, even without their knowing it.

    Science has a huge advantage here -- not only can science bring you
    physical power through a mechanistic understanding of the physics of the
    world, its principles are repeatable and reliable.  What worked yesterday
    will work today -- for sure.  It's why you trust your car to start in the
    mornings, provided it's in good operating condition.  And why people who
    jump out of buildings fall to the ground.

    Not only physics is helpful here, but with appropriate application of
    psychology and sociology, you can also come to have power over other people
    and especially groups of people without their even suspecting you're
    using scientific principles.  Furthermore, with political science thrown
    into the mix, you can strengthen your power even further.

(2) Magick can provide a set of intrinsically valuable rituals and practices
    that can orient your being with something greater than yourself, which
    at the same time is yourself.

    And who would deny that science is not largely ritualistic?  How many
    endless experiments are done whose results are almost assured?  But don't
    these rituals also bring you in touch with something greater than
    yourself -- with the forces of nature (gravitational, electrical, nuclear,
    etc.) of which yet you yourself are constructed of?  Moreover, these
    rituals and practices can reliably keep you employed and earning a salary
    which will feed your tummy and keep you warm on cold nights -- and who
    can doubt that these are desirable things to have?

(3) Magick provides the basis for secretive societies that allow members to
    bolster their egos to enormous heights with the ultimate purpose of
    giving them the opportunity to observe how absurd that ego is in the face
    of their being nothing intrinsically valuable to accomplish.

    Science is superb at creating secretive societies -- they have their own
    language that the general populace cannot understand, and they produce
    scientists whose egos are inflated to unimaginable porportions.  Many
    scientists, too, when they reach the heights of their careers, do come
    to a realization of how building their careers and reputations have not
    made them satisfied in life, and this happens frequently and produces
    enlightenment -- witness Einstein's later social and political writings
    concerning the use of nuclear energy.  At the same time, their
    accomplishments have had some value to increasing the power of humanity
    as a whole to overcome the hardships of nature, while magick often may
    inflate the ego without any benefit to humanity's power over nature.

    Future scientists reap the rewards of the understanding of means to
    power left by their predecessors, while future mages must work out their
    own means to power with uncertainty and ambiguity.

(4) Magick provides a tool applicable to a world that may or may not be
    assayable by human reason and human expectations of understandability.
    Magick reaches beyond reason and purpose to activity for its own sake,
    and to an understanding of the world that is unquestionable, personal,
    and at the same time universal.

    Science also deals with a chaotic universe, and produces meta-principles
    for dealing with uncertainty -- that's what the scientific method is.
    To the extent that science is now dealing with chaos, it is even more
    directly addressing problems with uncertainty.

    To the extent that the world is understandable it is assayable to reason --
    that's what reasonable means, is that we can understand it.  When faced
    with a situation that we can't understand, still attempting to understand
    it with the scientific method is as good a means of coping as is magick,
    and in fact even better since if it does turn out to be comprehensible
    (and you can't know for certain that it is not) science will make progress
    towards that end.

    Although science's understanding of the world is never unquestionable,
    that gives it it's strength, as something unquestionable is either a
    human power structure preventing questioning, or tautological in the sense
    that it adds none to your power in the world.  Science aims at
    universality as it is flexible to include all new observations about the
    world, and it is personal in the sense that you yourself can do the
    experiments and convince yourself of its correctness.

So, the challenge to you, Sir, is to provide to me one reason or justification
or comprehensible discourse that shows any way in which magick is superior to
science, or applies in a area where science cannot apply in such a manner as
to justify why to do it rather than not.

:jon