The Magic of Reality Read Free

to be alive sense.
    Now I want to return to the idea of the supernatural and explain why it can never offer us a true explanation of the things we see in the world and universe around us. Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. Why do I say that? Because anything ‘supernatural’ must by definition be beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method that has been responsible for the huge advances in knowledge we have enjoyed over the last 400 years or so. To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say ‘We don’t understand it’ but to say ‘We will never understand it, so don’t even try.’
    Science takes exactly the opposite approach. Science thrives on its inability – so far – to explain everything, and uses that as the spur to go on asking questions, creating possible models and testing them, so that we make our way, inch by inch, closer to the truth. If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.
    What would you think of a detective who, baffled by a murder, was too lazy even to try to work at the problem and instead wrote the mystery off as ‘supernatural’? The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural – caused by gods (both happy and angry), demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells – actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not
yet
have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were.
    Of course, no one really believes that it would be possible to turn a frog into a prince (or was it a prince into a frog? I can never remember) or a pumpkin into a coach, but have you ever stopped to consider
why
such things would be impossible? There are various ways of explaining it. My favourite way is this.
    Frogs and coaches are complicated things, with lots of parts that need to be put together in a special way, in a special pattern that can’t just happen by accident (or by a wave of a wand). That’s what ‘complicated’ means. It is very difficult to make a complicated thing like a frog or a coach. To make a coach you need to bring all the parts together in just the right way. You need the skills of a carpenter and other craftsmen. Coaches don’t just happen by chance or by snapping your fingers and saying ‘Abracadabra’. A coach has structure, complexity, working parts: wheels and axles, windows and doors, springs and padded seats. It would be relatively easy to turn something complicated like a coach into something simple – like ash, for instance: the fairy godmother’s wand would just need a built-in blowtorch. It is easy to turn almost anything into ash. But no one could take a pile of ash – or a pumpkin – and turn it into a coach, because a coach is too complicated; and not just complicated, but complicated
in a useful direction
: in this case, useful for people to travel in.
    Let’s make it a bit easier for the fairy godmother by supposing that, instead of calling for a pumpkin, she had called for all the
parts
you need for assembling a coach, all jumbled together in a box: a sort of Ikea kit for a coach. The kit for making a coach consists of hundreds of planks of wood, panes of glass, rods and bars of iron, wads of padding and sheets of leather, along with nails, screws