Stephen John C.

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“The magician’s twin”

Year 2020 is kind of a rough as it started with a lot of political issues, conflicts,
problems, plagues, social issues, terrorism, natural disaster, and the like. If only I could
restart the year, I would. Since , we don’t have classes for almost a month im trying to
find a very good and relevant movie, documentary, essays, and the like to critically
review and give my insights, and after our professor gave us the movie “ The magician’s
twin” I have really find it interesting. I find the movie “ The magician’s twin” by C.S.
Lewis as very timely movie to be watched as it tackles the abuse of scientific
methodologies or scientism and a lot more. Today the rising issue of CoVid-19 as a
health threat is one of the relevant correlation I can think as I watched the movie. The
phrase “the magician’s twin” comes from Lewis himself was pointed out, the comparison
between science and magic runs throughout a number of his works the two ideas of
science and magic being similar in that they are able to function as an alternative
religion Darwinism as given example by the movie, in their encouragement of a lack of
skepticism, I find this “ science as credulous” as one of the reason why Philippine Myths
were created as they lack science to explain things, hence providing a literature to
explain it instead; it has the same sense based on m what I have understand on the
movie, and in their quest for power, the conflict that exist until the present days.
Im going to explain what I have understood in a contemporary way that the people of
my time can relate with. The point about the twin of magic is science is for me, a very
relatable in their times, but for what I see in the future, science and magic are twins but
they still have another brother- the social media. Nowadays we can feel the science as
lack of skepticism, science as power, with the help of its brother, the social media.
Relating to what I have mentioned earlier about, Covid-19, people and organization,
world health organization, for example are very careless on spreading news about the
said virus. People in social media are being media illiterate spreading fear to the people.
We can see that science is kind of a feudal as it controls what people will do, giving us
safety precautions, medicine to take( which some are clearly for profit sense by the
capitalist and not as remedy or solution for health issues), but if try to see in a different
lens, tuberculosis and HIV are still one the risky and can be easily transmitted diseases
recorded in the Philippines, yet it is given a very huge attention and precaution, and in
this sense, abuse of science as power as well as science as lack of skepticism is really
observable. Plus the inappropriate use of social media to spread a lot of fake news is a
gasoline to the fire. “The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed
has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the
birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the
sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that
came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was
very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the
high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific
endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they
were twins. They were born of the same impulse.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
If we can still remember about the natural disasters and tragedies that hit the
Philippines I can relate the science as the artificial religion as I, myself is also a victim of
this. Before, I kept believing on science to a point that I almost doubt God because
science could feed me facts as religion could only feed me faith. But after watching the
movie it will give a better lens about life. Going back to the natural disaster and
calamities, the eruption of taal volcano has caused a lot of casualties. The sudden
death of the NBA player Kobe Bryant that made the world cry. Since a magical view of
the world gives us the sense that there is something out there whether one is religious
or not- fairy tales; nature is magical. Science can give this same sense-evolution; man
has developed out of nothing into what we are now agains all odds and struggles
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." In this view a lot of
people who claim their selves to see the future, gives their premonitions, and give some
people fear. Many people too are connecting Kobe’s death to some magical thing that
aren’t really making any sense Again this is another way of abuse of science as religion,
and many people can be victim since the social media platform is a thing that no one
could really control. Or maybe, US are happy to see our datas from facebook.
The things is Science is a good and a bad thing. But because of the people who abuse
the scientism, made it a biggest threat to science. Science is knowledge and everyone
is privileged to learn it and if you infuse feudalism to science, people will believe to
anything you say because it is scientific knowledge, and it will lead to a manipulating
concept. It is not bad to believe in something even if it is scientific, but you should not
give what you believe is true, control people because of it. Because I believe that fear is
only just ignorance. We don’t know the consequence behind it.