An anti-magical take on the world in which nature is understood in a purely natural way so that all meanings and qualities only really exist as subjective by-products of matter.
The materialist, or anti-magical, take follows naturally from the supernatural take. The bifurcated construal of the supernaturalist proves highly unstable. It cannot retain its shape. The modern materialist take arises from, as Paul Tyson says, “the naturalistic fulfillment and the supernatural redundance” of the dualist nature/supernature construct.
If nature does not need supernature to be what it is, and if nature can be understood in a purely natural way, then the supernatural becomes functionally superfluous to our knowledge of the world. It is now possible to discard the supernatural (and the magical, and the metaphysical) as outside of a true knowledge of tangible reality… Reality itself is here understood as entirely immanent and purely material, such that all meanings and qualities only really exist as subjective by-products of matter, within our brains… This is a theory that interprets anything “magical” in an unmasking and deflationary way. This is not just a stance that has no interest in magic, it is a stance that refuses to treat any aspect of reality in a magical way and that actively interprets our experience of reality in anti-magical terms.1Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic
Belief in magic, or anything supernatural for that matter, is now dismissed as childish superstition. It has no place in the modern scientific age. Any appeal to something beyond the reductively materialist domain of science is seen as delusional.
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