Science and Magic

Magic is the way humans, from the start, explained agency. It was there eons before Science came along, the go-to explanation for events much longer than Science. 

Hardly surprising, then, that magic beats Science in the explanatory stakes still. What are quantum mechanics but the contemporary form of magic - there, but inexplicable? Invisible particles passing through walls. Effects without causes. Wonders ...

So magic has another advantage it will never lose as long as we are what we are.

It's all of a piece with the human capacity to imagine, to marvel, and in that respect, is useful and beautiful. It takes imagination to see humanity as moving out into the infinite Universe. It takes a flight of Magic that leaves Science limping dully behind.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER?

Look up a dictionary. Oh dear.

'Conformity to fact or actuality,' it says. 'Reality'. But today we're told there is no Reality. There's Nothing 'out there' or, if there is, it's virtual.

Alternatively, it's 'a statement proven to be or accepted as true.' In other words, the truth is what's true. How does that help?

Something else suggests itself.

There is no such thing as the truth.

The 'truth' is a word for the position or opinion each of us adopts on a subject and is therefore always contested by others who have a different view.

We're not, then, in some grand 'search' for something eternal. We're only in a permanent struggle to persuade one another in the moment.