Magical Thinking: The World Is Mystical To Its Core

SEE HERE I'm a scientist. What that means, among other things, is that I start out as an operational materialist. I assume first that everything has an explanation that can be adduced through understanding the characteristics of matter. But as everyone should know, although many seemingly don't, this is really not a very adequate stance if you want an explanation of everything. The world is at once too magnificent and too magical for such a mundane explanation to be wholly satisfactory. Nevertheless that is what scientists do and we tend to condemn "magical thinking."

I am also a fan of G.K. Chesterton and his two disciples C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who have plumbed deeper depths than the average scientist to find at the core of the world not matter but a magician, a mystical magician who has woven webs of mystery around all things. The mere fact that we can know beauty and goodness and truth is a marvel. That we can commune with nature and see in the mystery of a raindrop the design of the universe is all magical. Chesterton says it over and over and very well. "We have all forgotten what we really are." ... "All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork." ... "The thing is magic, ... I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it." (Orthodoxy isolated pickings from Chapter 4 Ethics of Elfland)