headspace-hotel came up with this neat fantasy concept that there are lots of different worlds and all of them have different levels of access to magic. Some are just all over the place and some have no magic at all. Our world is in the “numinous” world category:
Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves collaborated on a novel series titled “InterWorld” where multiple parallel dimensions essentially run on a “High Magic to High Science” spectrum and while slightly more on the science end we’re a bit closer to balanced-neutral.
Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Though like being from a Death World you might not notice that you’re from a world with sufficiently advanced technology until someone points out the cursed magic rocks or that you can send your voice through the air on waves of invisible energy or that you can capture a person’s image on a sheet of paper coated in the right potion.
I’m more interested in the other direction.
I love how in Mistborne a character talks about how magic isn’t real- and then gets an earful about how the allomancy that she regularly practices is totally magic.
I know a lot of people think that you can’t have atheists in D&D because clerics have real magic powers and can show you miracles. I find that really silly since non-religious folks can be sorcerers, warlocks or mages as well. It is really fun to have an atheist NPC talk to your party’s cleric about how magic doesn’t prove the existence of their god.
In a world where gods are known to exist, you can’t be an atheist. You may refuse to worship them, but you know they’re real. But you *can* be an anti-theist. You acknowledge they exist, but oppose them to some degree.
Or maybe some other term I haven’t thought of.
BTRC’s EABA iteration of Warp World calls them the Forsaken. That covers people who just don’t worship them all the way up through those actively looking for a way to kill all the gods.
In a world where gods are known to exist, you can’t be an atheist.
Yeah, that would be ridiculous. I mean, that would be like a bunch of people in this world not believing that the earth was round— okay, bad example.
Okay, it would be like denying the effectiveness of scientifically proven medicine, in favor of nonsense that has been disproven– whoops, also not the best example.
Okay, it would be like believing that the world was only a few thousand years old, despite all the evidence showing… Dang it!
The moral is, you could indeed have atheists on a world where gods are known to exist, but they would be lunatic fringe idiots.
Placebo effect isn’t magic, it’s literally the ability to rewrite your own code. NLP is very similar, only conscious rather than subconscious.
…although if you occupy the same universe as Charles Stross, magic is just a branch of applied mathematics. Stuff such as computational demonology, and realising too much Python can turn you into a gnome! ;o)