In all Unbelieving science there is an "irrationalist gene" waiting to break forth. We have seen this with modern cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking who now propounds the existence of a potentially infinite number of parallel universes in order to "make sense" of our own. Meaninglessness is required in order to cling to the possibility of meaning in our world. The rational/irrational dichotomy lying within all Unbelieving thought has long been documented by Christian thinkers.
A similar connection between post-Christian science and magic can be seen historically. David Bentley Hart makes the argument:
In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over all the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it evokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural--in the theological sense of "transcendent"--but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos.
Hermetic magic and modern science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. . . . There never was . . . an antagonism between ["magic" and " post-Christian science"]: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum. David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.82.
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