The Real Problem with Magic: How Magic is Both Greater and Lesser Than Most People Think

Lewis Ungit, 11/30/24

Michael Shermer is the executive director of The Skeptics Society and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. He has dedicated much of his life to debunking supernatural claims. But there is an interesting element to Michael Shermer: he admits to having experienced a supernatural event. He stated:

“Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have.” [1]

The event he described was this. Shermer’s fiancé had a beloved grandfather who was like a father to her but who had died when she was a teenager. The only thing that she still owned of his was an old transistor radio that no longer worked. As Shermer prepared for his wedding, he thought it would be nice to repair the radio for his fiancé. But after replacing the batteries, messing with the wire connections, and smacking it, he gave up and put it back in the drawer where he had found it. A few months later they were married. His fiancé expressed sadness that her grandfather was not there. When they got home, they heard music playing – a love song. When they traced the source of music they found it was coming from her grandfather’s radio. The radio played that day, and then fell silent the next day and never worked again.

This moment shook Shermer and his fiancé (with his fiancé expressing confidence that her grandfather was there with them). And although Shermer eventually returned to being a skeptic, this incident remains an unexplained mystery to him.[2]

Shermer’s experience is not unique. Many people claim to have experienced truly miraculous or spooky events. And we have all heard the stories even if we have not personally experienced them. But just like Shermer, most of us have an engrained skepticism. We tend to find mental ways to write off these sorts of stories as coincidences, exaggerations, or lies. We are all sort of materialists at heart. 

But what few people I have spoken with realize is that the supernatural realm is not just the thing of ghost stories and anecdotal accounts. It has been demonstrated over and over in controlled scientific experiments. Magic has been scientifically proven. 

Divination 

Throughout history, one role that practitioners of magic have practiced is the foretelling of the future. We think of the famous account of the soothsayer in the days leading to Julius Caesar’s assassination. Here is the story, related by the Roman Historian Plutarch, 

“A certain seer warned Caesar to be on his guard against a great peril on the day of the month of March which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had come and Caesar was on his way to the senate-house, he greeted the seer with a jest and said: “Well, the Ides of March are come,” and the seer said to him softly: “Ay, they are come, but they are not gone.”” [3]

We all know what happened next. Caesar was murdered by his senate. But is it really possible to predict the future? There have been countless scientific studies that answer this in the affirmative. Let’s review one famous study. 

In 2011, Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem designed several experiments to see if the behavior of test subjects could be influenced by future events. He published the results in the reputable Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His results showed strong evidence for precognition. [4] Understandably, his publication caused a controversy and when initial efforts to replicate his results failed, it was assumed that (despite being a reputable scientist publishing in a reputable journal) that some of his methods must have been flawed. But Bem did not let the issue go. In 2015 and 2016, he (along with his colleagues) published a meta-analysis of all known replications. This included ninety studies conducted in thirty-three labs across fourteen countries. And it showed that his results were replicated reliably. According to researcher Dean Radin, “The overall result was associated with odds against chance of 8 billion to 1.” [5]

Other experiments have had similar results. For example, a 2014 study showed that 10 participants were able to correctly predict the Dow Jones. [6] And in 2017, a similar study showed 15 participants were able to predict the German stock market being correct at a jaw-dropping rate of 79.16%. [7] 

But what about other forms of magic? When we think of magic, we often think of the ability of magicians to see things at a distance. To be able to fly out of body and observe things that could not otherwise be viewed. The technical term for this is “remote viewing”. Is there any scientific evidence for this? 

Remote Viewing

Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California-Irvine, evaluated data collected by the US government in now declassified research that spanned from the 1970-1990s and found that there was statistically significant proof that remote viewing produced positive results. She found the data so convincing that she wrote, “It would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. Resources should be directed to the pertinent question about how this ability works.” One example of these government experiments involved one person (a sender) traveling within a 100-mile range of the laboratory and a “viewer” at the lab would attempt to draw what the sender was seeing. A similar experiment used randomly generated computer images that the viewer would be asked to draw. The results were sometimes shockingly accurate. A particularly talented viewer might draw windmills when the sender was at the Altamont Pass windmill farm or a footbridge across a marsh when the sender went to a San Francisco Bay Area wildlife refuge. But often the viewers would get less detailed but still clearly accurate pictures such as rough images of the object’s color, texture and size. The results were rarely perfect, but they were more than statistically significant as even skeptics will admit. [8] 

Alive or Dead?

One aspect of the ancient craft of mediumship is the ability of someone to the dead. Some mediums claim that if they look at a photo of a person, they get a sense of whether that person is dead or alive. This was tested by Dr. Dean Radin and a research team. This group invited twelve “professional mediums” to look at photos. All of the photos were uniform and grayscale and then “counterbalanced across eight categories: gender, age, gaze direction, glasses, head position, smile, hair color, and image resolution.” They counterbalanced every dead person with a living person who had similar attributes (i.e. if there was a dead man who was middle aged with glasses and dark hair, they would include a living man with glasses and dark hair). The experiment included over 400 photos in random order one photo at a time. The mediums outperformed chance modestly. But five of the 12 mediums far exceeded chance. And when only photos of recently deceased people were included, the mediums’ performance improved suggesting that maybe the freshness of death helped their ability to sense it. [9] 

Supernatural powers

Dutch athlete Wim Hof is able to do something that seems impossible. He practices a meditation technique called “tummo.” Tummo (which literally means inner heat and is named after the fierce Tibetan Buddhist goddess of heat and passion) allows the practitioner to not feel the effects of extreme cold. The claims of his abilities seem superhuman. For example, Hof ran a full marathon at −4°F, on snow, barefoot, and wearing just shorts. He was able to sit in ice water for almost two hours (a record). He scaled mountains such as Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Everest wearing just his shorts and without oxygen tanks. Research on Hof has independently verified his abilities. For example, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre submerged Hof in ice cold water for eighty minutes and studied his response to the extreme cold. In another test, he was injected with an inflammatory agent and researchers measured Hof’s response compared to other healthy volunteers. As Radin summarizes, “Hof’s immune response was decreased by 50 percent compared to other healthy volunteers.” [10]

Hof, unlike some of the other examples above, is an interesting case because he took specific steps (utilizing the religious practices of Buddhism) to enhance his natural ability and was able to do something that seems to all observers to be magic. Is it possible that other religions have developed tools to enhance natural magical abilities? 

Interestingly, this has been tested too. 

In the 1990s, Dutch researcher Rens Wezelman joined American researcher, Dean Radin, in an effort to determine if implementing Voodoo practices into an experiment could enhance people’s abilities to remotely touch another person. They used black felt to cover the walls and ceiling, they brought in ritual Voodoo objects, and then used Voodoo dolls to send physical signals to a subject in another completely separate room. Their results showed that not only could the subject in the other room detect the touch (as proven by monitors of their skin, heart rate, and temperature), the “Voodoo environment” enhanced the effectivness of the experiment’s results. [11] Countless anecdotal accounts confirm similar experiences. The use of amulets, candles, magic symbols, and statues are said to be necessary to the practice of magic. But this experimental result is an interesting confirmation of these consistent claims. 

The experiments mentioned above, and many others show “statistically significant” results. In other words, results that demonstrate magical abilities. But they are also not exactly the stuff of movies. Being able to guess whether someone is dead at a higher than random percentage, being able to pass on warm feelings remotely, and being able to see very abstract images of remote areas are amazing but also not particularly useful in any real-world applications. But as we saw with Dutch athlete, Wim Hof, and the Wezelman/Radin Voodoo experiment, there is also the possibility that minor statistically significant skills can be enhanced and built upon. Is it possible that the magical skills that appear in these studies are like athletic skills that if honed and perfected can become more impressive with time? Or, like athletic skills, is it possible that there are some people who are more naturally capable than others? What if a very naturally capable person also honed his skills like Hof did? What would the result be? 

The answer is that there are many mysterious cases of people who did amazing things that have in many ways been strongly validated against fraud. We have all heard of famous religious leaders and legends of great magical acts from centuries past but there are more recent examples that are hard for the materialist to explain. One remarkable example is the case of Daniel Dunglas Home. 

Home wowed audiences by speaking to spirits via rapping sounds, he could cause objects to levitate and call upon invisible spirits to play musical instruments. He could remotely touch people in his seances. And while of course many claimed fraud, none could prove it. And he was very open to skeptics testing him. As Radin writes, 

“The best conjurers of the day tried, and failed, to explain Home’s feats. Scientists investigating Home, including one of the most prominent chemists and physicists of the day, Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), reported evidence in support of Home’s claims. Crookes’s critics were reduced to making ad hominem attacks and misrepresenting the nature of his research. [12]

There are of course skeptics to everything I have written to this point. They question the experimental data, they assume there must be tricks, bad methodology, or biased researchers. But many of these experiments have been repeated (as we saw in the case of Bem’s work) and those that have not were still conducted with the highest standards. So, the rejection and skepticism is not scientific in nature but philosophical. There is a deeply engrained philosophical naturalism in the sciences that precludes the supernatural from the start. But if we don’t start with this skepticism and naturalism, we can be open to the actual results. Magic is real. 

The Real Problem with Magic

Among Christians, the objections to magic tend to be rule based: God outlawed messing with it so we shouldn’t do it. And for many Christians, the rejection of magic is the same objection that everyone else has: a materialist objection. Magic is fake. It is superstition. It doesn’t actually work. Christians laugh along with everyone else at TV psychics and assume with everyone else there must be some sort of a trick involved. And it is true that much of what is claimed to be magic is actually just tricks. This is what keeps people like Michael Shermer in business. 

But, just as Shermer saw and as we have seen with the above scientific studies, this cannot be the whole story. There is clearly something going on. Some of it is real. 

And this is the heart of the true Christian objection to magic. The objection is not that it is fake. The objection is that it is real. 

When people practice Kabbalah, they are doing something real. When people practice Voodoo, they are doing something real. When people practice Yoga, they are doing something real. These things are not dangerous because they are fake but precisely because by messing with them you are messing with something powerful and real. You are opening up a door that we do not really understand. 

And the risks associated are seen most clearly in the ancient world. As we saw above, magic could very strangely be enhanced by employing Voodoo elements. Ancient religions can be thought of as the practical application of the science of magic. Through trial and error and other methods of knowledge the art of magic was developed. Many of the things that sound like fairy tales are told of as though they are real. But the other thing that is rarely spoken of is the dark things that were often done to enhance the magic. Human sacrifice, ritual sex, and drug use were all used as methods of enhancing magical capabilities. 

And all of this was always mixed with conversations with the gods. Entities from the other side that could share information, effect powerful results, and bring power and knowledge. 

Christian Magic 

Enter Christianity. We all know the dramatic stories of witch trials. But most of the removal of magic from Europe and the Americas came in an undramatic fashion. The old religion was pushed out by conversion and laws and people slowly adopted the New Religion. The sacrifices, the magical arts, and the drug use all were set aside in favor of Christianity. 

But it would be a mistake to think that this was the end of magic. It was not. At least not if you consider magic to be the employment of the supernatural in order to effect things in this world. But Christians insisted that the only permissible magic should come through one God – the God of Jesus Christ. 

Many forms of modern Christianity downplay the supernatural. We talk about prayer for the sick but rarely expect miraculous results. We read stories of powerful saints who could drive out snakes, resurrect the dead, and levitate. Most moderns assume these are pious fictions. But given what we have seen so far, can we really assume that?

Consider the case of St. Joseph of Cupertino. Joseph was born in Copertino, Italy, in 1603. Joseph began to experience ecstatic visions as a child. These visions continued throughout his life and were often the object of ridicule. He entered the priesthood and amazing things started to happen. He started to perform miracles. Consider this account, 

“A certain Count don Cosimo Pinelli had an ongoing sexual liaison with the daughter of Martha Rodia; Joseph said that if the count didn’t desist from his amours, he would go blind. This turned out to be what happened, and Joseph … later restored the man’s sight, this time getting him to leave the girl alone and pay reparations to the family!” [13]

Joseph gained a reputation as a miracle healer, a prophet, and a wonder worker who had power over animals and natural forces. Sometimes he spontaneously levitated. His popularity grew, and the stories were brought to the attention of skeptical church authorities. Inquisitors were sent and Joseph was ordered to say Mass in front of these skeptics to see if the claims of levitation were true. They were proven true. He levitated in the presence of the inquisitors. This was not the end of his miracles. In the presence of skeptics and crowds, St. Joseph repeatedly levitated and performed other miracles over and over. 

And this is the point we must all grasp. Christianity is not devoid of the magical, mysterious, and the supernatural. But neither can we say that Christianity is just another form of magic (i.e. we could practice Kabbalah, Voodoo, or Christian mysticism). Instead, the claim of Christianity is much grander. 

This passage from the biblical book of Exodus in which Moses and his brother Aaron confront the magicians of Egypt is in many ways the key to understanding the similarities and differences. 

“So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.” (Exodus 7:10-13)

Notice that both the Egyptian magicians and Moses were able to do real magic. But the difference was that the authority that came from the God of Israel – the Christian God – was able to easily defeat and frustrate the magic of the pagan Egyptians. 

And this is the supernatural claim of Christianity. It is not that the spiritual claims of paganism are fake and mistaken. It is that their powers are limited and overpowered by the Christian God. The scriptures talk about God being able to “chain the serpent” (Revelation 20:2) and as Christianity spread throughout the magical world this was exactly what happened. Spells would be cast upon Christian armies that had no effect. Witches would curse Christian kings, but those kings would live long and prosperous lives. The magic of the pagans was found to be no match for the magic of the Christians. 

And what was the magic of the Christians? While some saints, as we have seen above, did miraculous things, the much more ordinary magic came in the protections afforded by the church. Practices like baptism, the eucharist, the sign of the cross, blessings before meals, and blessings after worship gave protection to the Christian faithful as they interacted with the pagan world. The church’s sacraments and simple prayers proved much more powerful than the most elaborate magical ceremonies of pagans. 

So now we see the real danger of magic. The danger of magic then is that you are choosing the losing side. By engaging in Voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Kabbalah, you are not choosing to mess with nothing. You are messing with something that has real power. A real power that might have dark demands (as many ancient societies saw). But it is a lesser power. It is a power that is set to be subdued and destroyed by the greater power that is the Christian God. This is why we don’t mess with magic. Because Christians must embrace the deeper magic. The magic of God. 

End Notes

[1] Shermer, M. (October 1, 2014). Anomalous events that can shake one’s skepticism to the core. Scientific American.

[2] Radin, Dean I.. Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (p. 7). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition. 

[3] The Parallel Lives by Plutarch published in Vol. VII of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1919.

[4] Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425.

[5] Radin, Dean I.. Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (p. 134). Harmony/Rodale.

[6] Smith, C. C., Laham, D., & Moddel, G. (2014). Stock Market Prediction Using Associative Remote Viewing by Inexperienced Remote Viewers. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 28(1). Retrieved from https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/608

[7] Müller, M., Müller, L. & Wittmann, M. (2019). Predicting the Stock Market: An Associative Remote Viewing Study. Zeitschrift für Anomalistik Band 19 (2019), S. 326–346.

[8] ‘Psychic Spying’ Research Produces Credible Evidence by Andy Fell November 28, 1995 Retrieved from 

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/psychic-spying-research-produces-credible-evidence

[9] Radin, Dean I.. Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (pp. 161-162). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[10] Radin, Dean. Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities (p. 123). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition. 

[11] Radin, Dean I.. Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (p. 149). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition. 

[12] Radin, Dean I.. Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (p. 175). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition. 

[13] Grosso, M. (2016). The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation. Rowman & Littlefield, 22. Thurston, H. (1952). The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. Burns Oates.

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