Otherwise: of course there is no magic! All just mumbojumbo… :>

One word, short answer, complete thought: SEMIOTICS

And what about the “reasoned and well-informed medical practitioner” who believes in miracles? The practitioner cannot determine the exact causes of the caner’s remission and it is only by faith in the assumptions of science that one can dismiss it. What, exactly, is the proof for the assumptions that make miracles improbable or impossible? What experiment (or, if you will, set of experiments) finally laid bare the impossibility of belief in God? I would wager that it is the mere assumptions of many scientists that make that belief impossible, not any determinate data or experiment.

The word “magic” refers to a concept or to an idea, not necessarily to a reality or an object. Like the word “Unicorn”. We need words for things that do not exist.

What ever happed to tolerance? What is with amercain Science these days that they need to hit anyone with faith in some God?

Its not like that here in the EU.

This looks like magic to me !

One might reverse the microscope. Suppose several of my liver cells began wondering if they were part of a huge organism that had mysterious motivations that were beyond their understanding. I dare say that the more scientific liver cells would express disbelief in my existence, but would instead assume some sort of mechanical universe, too big to understand, but with no free will.

In short, if I assume that I have free will, it becomes impossible for me to refute the assumption that things much larger than me, i.e. the universe as a whole, also has free will. The free will of the universe would be expressed in modifications of the laws of physics as subtle for me to observe, as the subtle coincidences that my liver cells would have difficulty observing.

On the other hand, if I assume that I do not have free will, then why should I expect to increase my understanding of myself by studying physics. And if I assume that everyone else is just a bag of chemicals, then why shouldn’t I use them at my convenience.

Then how can what is at present thought of as “magic” be dismissed out of hand?

Who knows what we will discover in the future.

The only difference I see between religion and your run of the mill superstition is that a whole lot of people got behind it and pushed, and aggrandized it, and institutionalized it for various reasons. Such as ignorance, fear, greed, power, appeasement, tradition, and probably many others.

Magic is yellow gold euphoria. By definition it is elusive and short lived. The proof? – written on the faces of the majority of passengers on the return flight from Las Vegas. Your wallet is the most potent check on the reality. The casino industry run away with it unless you can strategically bring down the house, and that is not a magic.

But I have to admit, a hole in one does seem like a MAGIC! From so far away, into a tiny hole…..

If you mean that we cannot by will or by hocus-pocus work around a natural law, then, yes, there is no magic.

If you mean non-intuitive, wonderful, surprising, etc., then the universe is magical.

E.g., we know of it by long experience, and we have the mathematical laws that describe it, but I would still say it is magical that a slender copper wire can transport energy for miles and miles with no visible change to itself. This “common-place” thing is magical.

Is a remission of a particular cancer a miracle or is it simply a physiological process through which a body regenerates healthy cells, destroys unhealthy ones, and engages in systematic and prolonged improved immune responses??? Well, a person of a certain faith would leap up and scream miracle, while a reasoned and well-informed medical practitioner would describe it as a remission. Completely different sets of semioticities grounded in divergent epistemological constructs, but each describing the same natural phenomena. Hence, one says magical and divine, the other not magical nor divine. Are both correct? No, because that would create a relativism that the magic believers find abhorrent. Can’t quite have it both ways now, can we??