Alchemists have been promising us they are on the verge of creating life from nothing, then granting mankind immortality since long before the word alchemy existed. Even today scientists, as we call modern alchemists, insist the Singularity is about to merge us all with the machine for the rest of eternity. Or perhaps we’ll clone ourselves into immortality. Perhaps no salvation will come to our generation but our children can be genehacked into perfection and all suffering on Earth after they take over will be averted.

Regardless of whether it’s the promise of immortality, the power to see the future or control over the forces of nature magic has always been the promise of control over things mankind previously thought we could not control. Miracles, in contrast, represent an intervention into the natural order by something transcendent. They are the opposite of magic in that they represent things moving even further out of control. The transcendent does not just move beyond the material it also surpasses human understanding and control, after all.

Thus these two forces, magic and miracles, often stand in stark contrast.

A brief aside. In fantasy fiction there is a spectrum known as the hard magic-soft magic spectrum, which is used to assess how well the audience understands the functioning of the supernatural power system in the fiction. Hard magic has clear rules. The characters and readers should understand what it can do, what it can’t and what it costs. Soft magic is mysterious. Its function is hard to understand and dealing with it is extremely dangerous in no small part because it is so poorly understood. It’s generally understood that hard magic exists to build stakes while soft magic exists to build wonder or fear.

For the purposes of our discussion this distinction is irrelevant. It is tempting to map miracles onto soft magic and magic as a source of control onto hard magic. However that ignores what I actually want to get at today.

As you may have already gathered from the opening paragraph, for the purposes of this discussion science counts as a kind of magic. Most scientific principles started as bits of occult knowledge. Chemistry? First it was alchemy. Medicine? Partly the herblore of witches and shaman, partly learned by heretics who cut up dead bodies.

Now it’s true that as the Church gathered the writings of the Greek philosophers many members of the clergy gained an interest in science and started discovering its principles themselves. Eventually the Church would conclude that nothing human reason discovered contradicted God’s ability to intervene in the world as He chose. However, be it the ordered realms of science or the wild fetishes of the witch doctor the tension is the same. Magic seeks to seize control of the world. Miracles take the control of the world away from mortals and places it in the hands of the transcendent.

Reconciling these two things is one of the roles of religious belief. Not every religion will reach the same balance point as Christians did and some will reject any compromise in favor of one extreme or the other. But sooner or later they will find some point of balance – that’s the point of systematic theology.

Thus, when writing a system of belief what is less important is the hard or soft nature of your magic system and more how a person of belief feels about the control magic seeks. Continuing with our starting metaphor, the religions of Star Trek, this is one area where they all seem to agree. Both the Vulcans and Klingons have a strong emphasis on wielding science as a way to gain the control needed to pursue their transcendent goals. The Bajorans largely accept science as a part of understanding the world. They often insist that the Prophets can work outside the bounds of science but very few Bajorans disregard science entirely. In fact, in doing research for this post, I could not find any reference to their rejecting science on religious grounds at all.

Granted, I did not have time to go back and rewatch Deep Space Nine while writing this post. Don’t consider this definitive.

The point is, by and large, there is little tension between the forces of magic and miracles in Bajoran thought. While the miracles the Prophets create, namely creating a wormhole and predicting the future, are interesting to the Federation rarely do people question their scientific interest in them. The Bajorans see the Prophets themselves as divine whether their gifts are understood or not.

I don’t have a personal problem with that perspective but I know there are many people who would and have very clear reasons for why they do. The notion that scientific understanding is a method for controlling our world that is granted to us by the divine order isn’t new. But it is very specific. A quick study of Greek myth, for example, shows us a strong belief in mankind’s actions being controlled by fate rather than by men. Those who challenge the Fates or the Gods suffer for it. Their efforts never see success. There are beings that use “magic” in their mythology but they descendants of gods, at the very least, and their powers are extensions of the divine and transcendent rather than magic for the purpose of this discussion.

In short, magic in Greek myth is transgressing on the divine and inviting punishment.

There’s a lot of middle ground between the Greek view of magic and the Star Trek view of magic. Some religions might see magic as valid in some areas and invalid in others. Many smaller religious sects in modern America reject medical intervention because they view it as an attempt to usurp the power to choose when people live and when they die. In more paganistic belief systems farming techniques might be seen in usurping the harvest.

So, for the storyteller the first real question of miracles and magic is, what can people do to take control of their circumstances without transgressing their beliefs?

One aspect of miracles and magic that the modern storyteller does do quiet well is grapple with people confronting the miraculous. Most horror stories have that element to them. A film like It Follows presents us with a force beyond human understanding that can’t be reasoned with, only appeased for a time. These chilling tales tackle the second question of miracles and magic. Namely, what will people do when confronting the transcendent tells them that they will never have control of some part of their lives?

Many tales that involve magic and religion often put these two forces at odds but few of these tales get down to the reasons that cause the division. Of course you can call many things “magic” or “religion” and create a coherent tale. But the separation we’ve put between the old ideas we called magic and the modern conception of science conceals many of the old threads that put religion and magic in tension. In fairness not every story needs to engage with the themes of control and transcendence. The thematic power is there, though, and I find the restriction of this idea to the horror genre a little sad. Hopefully we’ll see the rich vein of ideas come back into the limelight in the future.