Divinity and magic

I want to jump off of something from a previous post:

The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

This discussion--about the possibility of the divine as a special, purer being that is separate from normal profane (non-sacred) being--is I think a very important one, because it leads naturally to the idea of false or mistaken divinity, or what I call magic (or magical thinking). Simply put, magic is what you get when you take something that is purportedly divine or sacred--which is, ostensibly, of that purer being--and shoehorn it or put it into the context of normal, non-sacred being. For example, I may believe that oak trees are somehow very mystical and sacred, that they perhaps play a special role in the cosmos--but in a different, non-sacred context, these same beliefs, which before were quite epic and meaningful and cosmically important, are now just silly, superstitious, arbitrary, wrong, quaint, and easily dismissed with a condescending chuckle. So what happened here? Clearly there was some kind of mismatch, where either there was a miscommunication, or a mistaken belief, or perhaps, if we want to avoid seeming judgmental, we could say it was a case of two people "living in different worlds". However its put, the important thing is this idea that when divine being is stripped if its divinity, it becomes something debased, profane, and silly: magic.

And so in the conversation outlined in the quote above, what is going on is a struggle, where the believer is trying to get across this idea of divine being, of something fundamentally different from normal being, and the atheist is failing to see or understand this specialness, and instead all of this stuff is registering as mere magic, as no more or less superstitious and silly than the cosmic sanctity of oak trees. There is a mismatch where the believer and atheist are indeed "living in different worlds", and the believer is trying to resolve the mismatch by bringing in the atheist to the world of legitimate sanctity and divinity, and the atheist is trying to resolve the mismatch by trying to bring the believer into the profane world, explaining away the believer's world as a confused bundle of routine falsehoods.

I think what both believer and atheist could do to keep the conservation productive would be to directly address this divinity/magic problem: how can one distinguish between the two--and is the distinction even really coherent? And if the distinction is coherent for the believer but not the atheist, then why is this the case? Is it because the believer has or had access to a special kind of experience that the atheist does or did not, like a direct exposure to the divine, a "conversion experience"? Or is there some other special insight or motivation at work, that does not require some special event in the believer's life-narrative?

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll have more to build off of this later, but I think I want to keep these to short bursts because otherwise I risk losing focus...