This is the sort of question I have when I hear people praying/casting spells to win the lottery. What if two people pray/cast spells? They can’t both win the lottery if they have different numbers.
I think maybe the answer that a believer will give is that he/she who wants it more or casts the better spell will win the lottery (and in the case of traffic lights will get the green light)
Like the OP, I’m also curious as to how a believer would explain these things, though I think the atmosphere in this thread is not very inviting for magick believers to come and explain their beliefs.
The fantasy fiction of Terry Pratchett often contains interesting views on this type of subject. In his stories, “wizard magic” is your typical fireballs-and-lightning-bolts stuff, whereas “witch magic” is usally (but not always) more low-key, using a minimum of influence to achieve a maximum of results.
One example which he has used in several books is that of a witch walking through a dense crowd of people without getting slowed down. The witch is not pushing people aside, nor do people consciously step out of her way, nor does she deliberately weave left and right in order to find the gaps in the crowd. Instead, it just so happens that there is always, by pure coincidence, a naturally-occurring gap in the crowd right in front of her.
Think of a gambler having a statistically unlikely stroke of luck at the roulette table: every individual win looks innocent enough, and he doesn’t win all the time; it’s only when you look at all his wins over a longer period of time that you can tell there is something fishy going on.
If I believed in magic[k], this would be my explanation (which, I fully realize, is a non-explanation from a scientific point of view). I am not actually influencing any specific traffic lights; I have merely changed my luck so that I happen to arrive at the crossing at the right moment, a little more often than chance would predict. (And since presumably even the most hard-core magick-believers do not claim a 100% success rate, the trick question of “what if two magickians arrive at the same crossing” is not a problem.)
That that a solenoid was what’s under the pavement at a triggered light like that. I vaguely remembered that from senior year, but. . .you know. It’s been a little while.
The answer is a combination of Angel of the Lord and Walton Finn’s posts. Whatever you shall believe shall be true. This thinking though isn’t limited to Pagans. Most religions and belief systems have some mystical component.
The idea that there is a material explanation to what can be construed as magical (or holy)phenomenon is to negate the concept of magic in the first place. As an eclectic Pagan myself, I find the idea of ritual, rite and spellwork or prayer only worthwhile as it relates to the acknowledgement of the change of season or holiday. Rather, I believe that a righteous heart, a giving spirit and a kind soul are the things that change the world in your direction. If you are good, good will follow.
On the other hand, I haven’t looked for what the dopers have to say about it, but there’s a field called Noetic Sciences, (which I’m sure the hard core science crowd has their own opinion about) that posits humans have the ability to effect change in their surroundings, in thier physical world, using thoughts and prayer. If there is anything at all to the Noetic Sciences, then perhaps there is something to the idea of spells and prayer changing things. I would submit though that in order to change traffic lights, for instance, one would have to know how they worked, intimately. I mean down to the last relay and solenoid. Not that it isn’t possible to know these things, but it seems unlikely that someone who had a belief that a candle, two eagle feathers, some ground bull penis and a ceremonial broom could change the stoplights would know how they worked in detail.
Still, i think if it were possible, so doing would be a bit like the visualization techniques that athletes use, the see it-be it thing.
Perhaps an interesting article about any form of religion is “Superstition in pigeons” by Skinner. Skinner is the inventor of animal testing (only behavioural AFAIK) where they are in a box and get rewards for certain kinds of behaviour.
Once, pigeons simply got food with a certain interval no matter what they did. Pigeons in this test develloped superstitions of silly actions they had to perform in order to receive the reward (the food). Surely, the traffic light trick works the same way.
Secondly, I once attended a lecture from a pagan and it was - if you know what I mean - very disappointing: he did not give us any crap about ancient traditions from poor peaceful earthloving, treehugging, druids being savagely repressed by christianity. He completely conceded that paganism had pretty much been invented in the 19th century and did not really go back to the dark ages. Not a treehugging loony who got into it because his parents made him go to church or because he wasn’t popular at school. He did believe in spirits I assume, but he was very practical about it, defining his beliefs only as something that works without an explanation.
Late to the thread. Not a Wiccan, but have a sister and a couple friends who are. Walton Finn’s answer sounds a lot like how they talk about the practice. Only his explanation actually almost makes sense. They don’t get quite so close.
Of course, the same could be said for many official religions.
I guess people secretly do what they do almost always: they have an opinion, and then select the evidence and the arguments and situations that support it.
I’m Wiccan and I don’t believe in magic(k) in the way that most of my fellow practitioners do. My “belief” (such as it is) is that a spell or a ritual is really more of a meditation in the sense that Angel of the Lord describes in the first part of his discussion.
It’s to create within myself a better sense of my goals or purpose, to speak to myself on a deeply non-verbal level about what I truly want to accomplish in my life. It’s not to make red lights change for me. Those kinds of people drive me batty - they always seem to be living on the verge of homelessness and chaos and I want to ask them why their all-powerful magickal skills haven’t manifested in some sort of financial stability for them, like, EVER.
There’s a serious point there, actually. Ever since the concepts of quantum physics first got introduced to the general public (in horribly dumbed-down form, generally), a lot of people with a mystical bent have tried to use it to explain or validate their beliefs. Ask a group of pagans to explain how their magic works, and it’s a fair bet that one or two of them will start saying things like “recent scientific developments prove what my ancient Druidic forefathers knew all along…”
To be fair, it helps that quantum physics is so strange and contra-intuitive that a lot of respectable physicists tend to use metaphors with a rather mystical flavour when discussing its implications.
Two concepts which tend to get pulled into service for this purpose a lot:
a) The influence of consciousness on quantum interactions. One of the most well-known concepts from the quantum realm is the two-slit experiment, in which a photon’s behaviour changes depending on whether it is observed. Now, in most mainstream interpretations of this experiment, the ‘observation’ can be anything which causes the photon to interact with matter. However, many popular descriptions of the experiment could easily lead the reader to believe that there is something special about having a conscious observer in the process. (Shrodingers came up with his famous thought experiment about the cat to illustrate the absurdity of this line of reasoning.) Aha, says the believer in magick! Science has confirmed that it is possible for a human mind to affect physical reality!
b) The many-worlds interpretation. We all know this one, at least in its simplified form: whenever an event can have multiple random outcomes, the Universe splits off into multiple copies, and each of the possible outcomes is true in each of them. E.g. let’s say you sit down and flip a coin a hundred times in a row. At least 2[sup]100[/sup] different universes will be created; in the vast majority of them, the coin will show an unsurprising combination of heads and tails, but somewhere out there is a universe in which you are staring, full of surprise, at a coin which just landed tails-up a hundred times in a row.
A slight misunderstanding of this concept, combined with a willingness to believe in the paranormal, is likely to result in the following conclusion: “So, if I concentrate real hard, I should be able to choose, by pure willpower, to enter that one universe in which everything works out brilliantly for me all the time!”
Of course, this shows a rather basic lack of understanding of the theory. Even if we ignore the fact that kazillions of universes are being created every microsecond (most of them reflecting rather boring random events, such as the decay-or-not-decay of a particle in an asteroid somewhere around a different star) so that it will be rather difficult to pick the best one, there is still the bigger problem that you cannot just choose to enter a different universe – you’re already there, only it’s a different you! You can’t choose which version of a given random event will happen in your universe, because the whole point is that all possible outcomes will take place simultaneously.
If anything, a full acceptance of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics as applied to one’s personal life, should lead to an oppressive fatalism: everything that can possibly happen to you, will happen somewhere, and there’s nothing you can do about it except go and find out which of all the possible universes you ended up in.
