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Authors

George French

Abstract

C. S. Lewis tells us that science and magic are “twins.” “They were born,” he says “of the same impulse”3 of man to master the natural world. We think of them very differently because science has succeeded where magic has failed, but that should not make us blind to their “strong family likeness.”4 Science and magic are intertwined for much of their history, and it is in the Enlightenment that the two begin to separate. While magic died and science survived, Lewis thinks that modern applied science still retains much of the “family likeness.” Unfortunately, not all of the family traits it retained are healthy. Lewis distinguishes between good and bad magic. There is magic that works with nature (magia) and there is magic that works against nature (goeteia). Magia (i.e., “high magic”) is an acceptable form of mastery of nature because it accords with the Tao, 5 but it is harder in practice because it involves respecting boundaries which are transgressed by goeteia: this is why Doctor Cornelius is only a “very minor magician”6 while the White Witch has the power to cast all of Narnia into perpetual winter. He describes magia as a sort of “coaxing” out of natures “spiritual qualities,” whereas goeteia views nature as “a machine to be worked.”7 Lewis worries that the development of science has been most heavily influenced by the latter way of thinking. This means that, at its worst, science sees nature as something only to be used for selfish ends, never enjoyed for its own sake. This has allowed the various physical sciences, otherwise “good and innocent in themselves,”8 to be co-opted for malicious ends such as the exploitation of natural resources and the development of weapons of mass destruction.

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