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Everything defies belief
 A
version of this piece was published in the Independent
on the 23rd June 2001, under the headline ‘The
survival of magic in a technological age’.
For several weeks I have been haunted by a song by Buffy
Sainte-Marie, which starts as an incantation (‘God
is alive; magic is afoot/God is afoot; magic is alive/Alive
is afoot… /Magic never died’) and ends like
a riddle: ‘And mind itself is magic/Coursing through
the flesh/And flesh itself is magic/Dancing on a clock/And
time itself the magic length of God.’
Two champions of magic (of a sort) have recently materialised
in our disbelieving culture: Harry Potter, the fictional
wizard whose hocus pocus enchants grown-ups as much
as children, and David Blaine, the fake whose illusions
on the street are so disturbingly convincing they can
make you doubt your sanity.
Officially, of course, science has banished magic from
the world by demystifying nature: the rainbow is just
diffracted light, and even the loudest thunder is only
the crackle of static electricity. Yet it is one of
the ironies of our age that, while theology has been
steadily backing away from the idea of the miraculous
and the mystical, science has been sidling over towards
it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘strangeness’
and ‘charm’ have entered the vocabulary of
nuclear physics.
Relativity and quantum theory are the outstanding examples
of the overthrow of the obvious, but science has for
centuries been counter-intuitive – ever since Copernicus
confirmed the ancient suspicion that the Earth –
this immense, unmoving mass beneath our feet –
in fact is spinning round that small, bright object
in the sky. Western science is built on observation,
and yet it shows that almost everything is not as it
appears. The sky is not blue. Up and down are not absolutes.
The solidest object is largely empty space.
Yet these are just the wrinkles on the surface of much
deeper mysteries. We now know that at some levels the
behaviour of the material world is random (in the sense
that it shows no rhyme or reason we can discern); yet
the extraordinary thing is that generally it is not.
In fact, the behaviour of everything from atoms to galaxies
is so consistent that we say they are obeying laws.
Of course, that is a metaphor – but even scientists
forget this, and forget that science cannot fathom why
unconscious matter shows such constancy.
Then again, at some levels its behaviour is chaotic,
which is to say that, though it appears to obey laws,
it is so complex and contingent that it is beyond our
powers to predict it. Yet the extraordinary thing is
that so much of the world is amenable to our analysis
and calculation. We can land a spacecraft on a moon
of Jupiter 400 million miles away. And therein lies
another kind of magic. For centuries, technology has
been conjuring a stream of wonders from its hat, latterly
so thick and fast we hesitate to buy this year’s
new marvel because we know how soon it will be superseded.
Of course, familiarity takes everything for granted.
Holography, which Einstein himself declared was beyond
his wit to understand, is now as common as a credit
card.
Yet which, after all, is more improbable? That the
basic values of the material world – the speed
of light, the charge on the electron and so on – are (unchangingly) precisely what was necessary to allow
the evolution of a universe in which life could emerge?
Or that that universe should produce a lifeform so intelligent
that it can ask this question? Or that it should prove
possible to make the small computer on which the question
has been written? (Not that it is only high technology
that seems fantastical: I find it stretches my credulity
merely that a human being can balance on a bicycle.)
The usual response to this of theism is that the universe
is logical because it is the product of a logical Mind,
and it is comprehensible to us because that Mind intended
us to understand it. But does that answer of itself
drain all the mystery from the world? Today, most Christians
would say yes. It seems a long time since G K Chesterton
liked to think that there were fairies at the bottom
of his garden and C S Lewis hinged That Hideous Strength,
his dark foreboding of the future, on the reawakening
of Merlin. Generally, Christians seem now to accept the world that
scientific materialism has presented to us, a vast mechanism,
drained of magic – but superimpose on it another,
‘supernatural’ world, which is the source
of everything that seems not to submit to rational explanation.
There is, however, another, more authentic Christian
view, which sees the whole creation as the product of
an infinite Imagination. Which brings me back to David
Blaine. Like Harry Houdini before him, he insists that
what he does is all a trick, which plays on the susceptibility
of the human mind and body. But also, like Houdini,
he finds it necessary to demonstrate the extraordinary
capabilities of that mind and body – most recently
in his 60-hour incarceration in a block of ice. In the
end, perhaps, distinctions blur between what is normal
and what is exceptional, what is magic and what is not.
The universe is not a machine in which marvels may or
may not occasionally be done. The whole creation is
a wonder, through and through.
© The Independent 2001
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