God Magic

Hands performing a magic trick

I use the word “magic” when I talk about God, and I know how that sounds.

To a believer it sounds like mockery, like I’m comparing the Atonement to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Please, don’t be afraid of me. That isn’t what I mean. I chose the word on purpose, and by the end of this page I hope you’ll see why it’s actually the more honest and more respectful word, not the less.

Here is my definition. “Magic” is a practical, sensible word that suggests mystery and unknownness, without the coercive sacredness that religion attaches to its own claims. I call it God magic.

Say it plainly

Try an experiment. Take a few things Latter-day Saints believe, and describe them in ordinary words, the way you’d describe another religion’s beliefs to a friend.

  • Magical beings made two adult humans, Adam and Eve, and they were the first of their kind, at least on this planet.
  • Before a baby is born, a spirit is waiting to join its body. The spirit can’t be seen, touched or measured, and it existed before the body did.
  • The universe is populated by exalted beings, gods who were once humans like us and now have the power to make worlds of their own.
  • Our planet was made by that power, which we call the priesthood.

Over all of it sits one broad belief: that magical beings are intervening, acting on their will, to make things happen.

None of that is a misrepresentation. It’s what we taught. It just sounds different without the reverent vocabulary. Words like “ordinance,” “priesthood power” and “the Spirit” carry a weight that discourages the question, how, exactly? Asking it feels disrespectful. That’s what I mean by coercive sacredness. “Magic” strips that off so we can look at the claim itself.

The believer’s best answer

Here’s the faithful response, and it’s a thoughtful one. Many Latter-day Saints will tell you God isn’t doing magic at all. He works through laws, higher laws we don’t understand yet. A miracle is just physics we haven’t learned.

I actually like that answer, because it agrees with me more than it seems to. If a miracle is a process we don’t understand, by a being we can’t observe, using a power we can’t measure, then “mystery and unknownness” is exactly the right description. That is what I mean by magic. The only difference is whether we let ourselves say so.

And the “higher law” answer has a problem. Every time we do learn the law, God turns out not to be needed for it.

If God is only to be left to the gaps in our knowledge, where shall we be when these gaps are filled up?

— Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man (1894)

That warning didn’t come from a skeptic. Drummond was a Scottish evangelist who embraced evolution, and he was scolding Christians who kept hiding God in whatever science hadn’t explained yet. We now call that move the God of the gaps. Thunder used to be in the gap. Disease was in the gap. The origin of species was in the gap. The gaps keep closing. A God who lives only in them keeps getting smaller.

The tornado in the junkyard

The most famous gap argument against evolution goes something like this: the odds of life arising by chance are like the odds of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. The astronomer Fred Hoyle popularized the comparison, and it still gets repeated today.

It’s a straw man. Evolution isn’t a tornado. It isn’t one random event that produces something complex all at once. It’s countless small changes, each one kept or lost, over enormous spans of time. If you want to argue about the probability of life evolving, you have to include the gradual steps and the time scale that the theory actually describes.

Turn it around and you’ll feel the unfairness. Suppose I said that Jesus walking on water is like rabbits flying through the air spitting fireballs, and then laughed at how silly that is. A believer would rightly say, that isn’t what we believe at all. Exactly. You can’t refute an idea by refuting a cartoon of it.

So I’ll try not to draw cartoons either. When I say “God magic,” I’m not saying believers are silly. I’m describing the structure of the claim: an unseen agent, acting by an unknown means, to produce a result. That’s the claim, stated fairly.

What changes when you call it magic

Once you see the supernatural as magic, a few things shift.

You stop expecting it in the ordinary places. I believe personal revelation is ordinary and unremarkable, and I’ve come to think God, if there is one, is not generally an interventionist. Life without God looks an awful lot like, well, just life. The sun comes up. The car breaks down. People get sick and get better, or don’t.

You get to say “I don’t know.” That phrase is the bedrock of science and discovery. Scientists are, in my experience, less afraid of it than religious people are. Magic is just “I don’t know” with a name and a robe on.

You stay humble in both directions. I’m not anti-God. I leave open the possibility of a supreme being, just as I leave open the possibility of many worlds. I just don’t know of any evidence for either. If I died tomorrow and woke up somewhere else, I’d be surprised, but happy.

Wonder without a magician

Remember the rabbit and the hat, the mockery I said I wasn’t aiming for? Here’s where it lands.

A magic trick is fun because you don’t know how it works. Once you know, the wonder drains away. That’s how many believers fear the universe will feel without God: like a trick explained.

It hasn’t been that way for me. Knowing that the elements in my body were forged in stars hasn’t drained the wonder. It has given me more of it. And I still have experiences I can only call spiritual: moments of awe, coincidences that feel arranged, strength I didn’t know I had. Miracles do happen, and we can embrace them without having to explain them, interpret them, or fit them into a story about who caused them. There is just meaning.

That’s the difference between God magic and wonder. One needs a magician behind the curtain. The other is content to stand in front of the mystery and say, I don’t know, and it’s beautiful.

For the evidence that changed how I see creation, read In the Beginning. For how I hold my spiritual experiences today, read the letter to my family.