Nature is Magic, Science is Dumb

By -

Reading Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous made me think about the way I consider nature itself to be magic. I see the sixth sense as any sensation that cannot be explained by the other five senses, which includes all magical and supernatural experiences. While I see the supernatural as unexplainable the same way I do magic, I see magic as something that is unexplainable but inherently natural. The ways plants, and all other living things communicate with each other and work together to create the world in all its beauty is magic to me. And yes I know most of that can be explained by science, but I feel like science is just a means to explain things that are known to be magic. I don’t want to be that guy, but I think science is kind of dumb. I see the benefits of science in every aspect of it, but I also think it’s kind of unnecessary; we don’t have to have an explanation for everything. While this goal to be able to explain everything has led to some incredible discoveries, it has also led to countless occasions of humans doing way too much and exploiting nature, not seeing it as a living breathing thing. Trying to understand better ways to interact with our environments seems much more important than trying to explain the way our environment works together separately from humans. I think if people looked at nature from the standpoint of seeing it as magic rather than something to be examined and explained, we would all begin to interact with nature in healthier ways. And maybe if we allow things to be and just work to have a reciprocal relationship with nature, we would get some of the explanations we want without having to do intrusive examinations on the earth.

Comments

  1. Dana WoychowskiMay 13, 2022 at 7:17 PM

    I will take your argument one step further and ask, why can't we see the magic in scientific processes? If nature is so magical, is it because it is a world so unexplored by us, so unknown? Or is it magical because of the various scientific processes that make all things behave in a specific way, for a specific purpose, with so much diversity? As someone who studies natural science, I believe there is magic not only in the natural world of which we know so little, but also in the fact that nature has the ability to make different living things so complex, while at the same time connecting to each other through their relationships and mutualisms. It seems magical to me that nature creates these different aspects all for a reason, even when humans have yet to understand it,

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more