Excellent article about HP magic vs. science (does mention Christianity)

[taradiane]

http://antithesis.com/reviews/potter.html

My dad sent me this article earlier today and I thought it was 
excellent.  It makes some wonderful points regarding science versus 
magic - here's an excerpt:

The place to begin is to invoke one of the great achievements of 
twentieth-century historical scholarship: the eight volumes Lynn 
Thorridike published between 1929 and 1941 under the collective title 
'A History of Magic and Experimental Science', and it is primarily 
the 
title that I wish to reflect upon here. In the thinking of most 
modern people there should be two histories here. After all, are not 
magic and experimental science opposites? Is not magic governed by 
superstition, ignorance, and wishful thinking, while experimental 
science is rigorous, self-critical, and methodological? While the two 
paths have indeed diverged to the point that they no longer have any 
point of contact, for much of their existence — and this is 
Thorridike's chief point — they constituted a single path with a 
single history, for both magic and experimental science are means of 
controlling and directing our natural environment (and people, 
insofar as they are part of that environment). Lewis has made the 
same assertion:

[Francis Bacon's] endeavour is no doubt contrasted in our minds with 
that of the magicians: but contrasted only in the light of the event, 
only because we know that science succeeded and magic failed. That 
event was then still uncertain. Stripping off our knowledge of it, we 
see at once that Bacon and the magicians have the closest possible 
affinity.... Nor would Bacon himself deny the affinity: he thought 
the aim of the magicians was "noble."

It was not obvious in advance that science would succeed and magic 
fail. In fact, several centuries of dedicated scientific experiment 
would have to pass before it was clear to anyone that 
the "scientific" physician could do more to cure illness than the old 
woman of the village with her herbs and potions and muttered charms. 
Similarly, in the Renaissance alchemists were divided between those 
who sought to solve problems — the achievement of the
philosopher's 
stone, for example (or should I say the sorcerer's stone?) — 
primarily through the use of what we would call mixtures of chemicals 
and those who relied more heavily on incantations, the drawing of 
mystical patterns, and the invocation of spirits. At least it seems 
to us that the alchemists can be so divided, but that's because we 
know that one approach developed into chemistry while the other 
became pure magic. The division may not have been nearly so evident 
at the time, when (to adapt Weber's famous phrase) the world had not 
yet become disenchanted. As Keith Thomas has shown, it was "the 
triumph of the mechanical philosophy" of nature that "meant the end 
of the animistic conception of the universe which had constituted the 
basic rationale for magical thinking. " Even after the powerful work 
of mechanistic scientists like Gassendi the change was not easily 
completed. Isaac Newton, whose name is associated more than any other 
with physical mechanics, was continually absorbed by alchemical 
research, as John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, learned when, 
in 1936, he bought Newton's alchemical manuscripts at auction. A 
stunned Keynes wrote a paper in which he revealed that Newton, far 
from being "the first and greatest ... rationalist," was instead "the 
last of the magicians."

This history provides a key to understanding the role of magic in 
Joanne Rowling's books, for she begins by positing a counterfactual 
history, a history in which magic was not a false and incompetent 
discipline but rather a means of controlling the physical world at 
least as potent as experimental science. In Harry Potter's world, 
scientists think of magic in precisely the same way they do in our 
world, but they are wrong. The counterfactual "secondary world" that 
Rowling creates is one in which magic simply works, and works as 
reliably, in the hands of a trained wizard, as the technology that 
makes airplanes fly and refrigerators chill the air-those products of 
applied science being, by the way, sufficiently inscrutable to the 
people who use them that they might as well be the products of 
wizardry. As Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "Any smoothly functioning 
technology gives the appearance of magic. "

Okay, so that was a rather long excerpt, but you get the point.  

Tara, who didn't feel safe putting this on the main list, but felt 
okay about posting it here...
taradiane at yahoo.com