I was aware of them from a few years back, but since I’d never read anything of Terry Pratchet’s stuff before I had not felt an inclination to start on them.
Some of the “funny” fantasy novels are quite bad, such as the horrible Robert Lynn Asprin Myth series with the awful puns and not much else.
It was almost by accident that I picked up an audio book of Thud!
That was quite good, and then I picked up the audio book of The Wee Free Men.
After that I was not yet hooked, but was into them enough that I picked up Hogfather and Making Money to actually read.
I have just picked up four additional novels and Equal Rites is among them.
Yes more bad puns, but there is more to them than that.
In fact you could do away with the puns and still end up with some deep stuff.
It’s as deep as you want it to be.
Terry Pratchet is not just writing Fantasy, but there is a similarity and connection with Douglas Adams’ output.
Douglas Adams was inspired by Richard Dawkins, one of the proponents of the gene-centric view of evolution.
In essence this means that you do not need a supernatural explanation for what happens in nature.
Evolution by means of natural selection pretty much takes care of it.
Terry Pratchet also mentions the Strong Anthropic Principle in his novels.
The Anthropic Principle is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemical theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, has attained sapience.
The only kind of universe humans can occupy is one that is similar to the current one.
Yes, Douglas Adams was an admitted atheist, and it seems to me that Terry Pratchet is also one, taking the baton after
Therefore Terry Pratchet’s definition of magic is this: Magic is knowledge you have that others don’t.
No supernatural explanation there.
In the Discworld magic is a measurable force much as gravity or atomic energy are a force in ours.
And yet, there are two types of magic, one is the knowledge based one (witch/female magic,) and the other is the natural force magic (wizard/male magic.)
There is no need to go further into it than that, since I also want to mention other views of magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, co-author of 2001: A Space Odyssey (along with Stanley Kubrick,) is also a known atheist.
His definition is this: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This means that in, say, Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves, the magic door that opens to the words of “Open Sesame” is merely an automated door activated with voice recognition software.
The only problem for Ali-Baba is that he is ignorant of any such technology, thus to him it is a magic door.
Pretty much any instance of magic in literature or myth is replicable by today’s technology or at least a reasonable substitution extrapolated from today’s scientific knowledge.
Yes, there is still impossible magic. But you can get pretty close to replicating most storybook magic.
This brings me to “real” world magic. Again there are apparently two different types of magic in the real world.
The first type is commonly known as prestidigitation or magic tricks.
A conjurer does something that is seemingly impossible in front of an audience, without the audiences awareness of what really was done.
This is known as illusion.
We know it did not happen as we perceived it to happen; the true means was hidden from us, by some kind of misdirection.
Any reasonably sophisticated and educated adult is aware of this.
The second type of magic is known as a “miracle."
Are miracles truly a different form of magic or are the same as the first type?
Well, that really depends on how we chose to define the word miracle.
Typically, miracle is something that defies natural laws as we understand them to be.
It does not good to be ignorant of natural laws, because in that situation there are no miracles.
If you do not know what a natural law is, then how will you recognize when an event defies them?
Natural law or the law of nature is a theory that posits the existence of a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere.
To know what these laws are you must be a scientist, you cannot be merely a casual observer of events.
As I mentioned before, a casual observer (such as the audience in a magic act) can be fooled into thinking that something which in fact did not happen, happened.
I’m not saying that scientists cannot be fooled, they can easily be, but rigorous scientific testing should be considered necessary to determine if, indeed, an event is defying natural law.
For instance, most of the popular Catholic miracles are not necessarily accepted as such by the Catholic Church.
The Church is very careful about accepting claims of miracles and making them official.
The popular view is that these are accepted by the Church, but the fact is that they are not, and have never been official miracles.
James Randi and the JREF offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.
It’s not strange that not one single modern "psychic" or miracle-man has taken up the challenge and gotten the million dollars.
Staying on the subject of miracles, we can again separate them into two instances.
The first instance would be of event which happened naturally without the intervention of mankind, such as for example, the beginning of life or the creation of the universe.
We were not there, the event happened in contradiction of what we perceive on a day to day experience (we have no observable instances of universes being created out of nothing, or of life beginning from nothing, that we could see and study,) thus we can easily call these miracles.
The second instance is events in which people act as agents.
We know many of these are hoaxes, or acts of prestidigitation.
We can prove them to be false, or equally, can provide a reasonable explanation that does not defy natural law.
One example of this is spoon bending.
Uri Geller became famous for this claim, which has ultimately been proven to be a trick.
And yet, people still persist in believing it to be a genuine miracle, by whatever definition of the word they seem to use.
The other instance of human miracles are of events that occurred in the past so that we have only a sketchy description of it, compounded by the problem that we cannot go to the past to observe and study.
One example of this is the miracle of the bread and the fish that is described in the New Testament.
We do not know in detail what happened; we only have an ancient and badly translated text describing it with few, if any, details.
And it is up to us to interpret what the event could have actually been.
The movie Millions has a realistic and reasonable explanation for it: Jesus passed the basket, and as people received it, were ashamed of taking something they did not need, instead ate the food they had brought for themselves and in some instances actually put food on the basket for others that might need it.
When the basket came back to Jesus it had more food than was there originally.
This event is described by an actor playing Saint Peter as a witness to the event.
Saint Peter says something to the effect that originally he did not think it was a miracle, and yet, as he thought more about it, maybe it was miraculous indeed.
The event changed people internally and made them want to share with others not as fortunate as they were.
It’s funny because I’ve seen the movie twice, and twice this scene has struck me.
This second time I saw it made me realize that I’ve seen this miracle, as perceived by Saint Peter, on a weekly basis, but I’ve never recognized it as such.
In Sunday mass, the priest sends out an empty basket, and by the time the basket comes back it is full of money.
Is this a miracle?
Is this what is to be used as the proper definition of the word?
Maybe a miracle is the inner change and growth people experience as they realize they can and should help others.
Maybe a miracle is when people can put aside their differences and live as brothers.
It does not violate or defy natural laws, and yet it happens without apparent scientific explanation.
It seems to me that these kinds of internal changes are what should be considered magic or miracles.
Maybe this is where God is.
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