How do we respond to atheists who refer to god as a magician?

From James

Transcript

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Question from James Prabhu.
How do you respond to atheists who refer to God as a magician? Answer, scientists use the word or atheists use the word magician in the sense of someone who does something which is unscientific. Basically, they use the word magic to say that something which is just a hoax, that their idea is everything has a rational scientific explanation and that’s why there is actually no such thing as magic. And by inference, they say that by using God as an explanation for anything in this world, we are just like using a magic wand and we are basically giving no explanation.
But again, this is a disanalogy, it is a false comparison for several reasons. First and foremost, as an alternative, even atheists introduce natural selection and evolution as a magician. Natural selection and evolution are used to explain away everything that is unexplainable by common sense and inference from that common sense.
Much of the complexity of the design that we see in the universe and in the patterns of living beings, in the patterns in the bodies and the cells and the genes of the living beings are so complex that natural selection cannot explain them. So Richard Dawkins, one of the most well known atheists, he says that if you can’t figure out how natural selection works, that is your problem, that is not natural selection’s problem. This is just ascribing God-like power to natural selection, a magical power to natural selection and demanding religious-like faith in natural selection and almost ascribing inconceivable powers to natural selection.
Saying that you can’t, just as religious people may say that you can’t figure out the ways of God. So here, Dawkins is saying that you can’t figure out the ways of natural selection. So essentially, there is no difference between the two as far as the material level of explanation is concerned.
So often evolution and natural selection are used as a magic wand for explaining everything that is there in the universe, in nature that we see around us. Now, there are certain things which do indicate that some level of evolution takes place. This is actually microevolution.
That means certain species can change within certain limits. So small apples can be made big or dogs can be by some genetic mutation or something like that by some crossbreeding and various other mechanisms. They can be made from small to big and big to small.
But this is microevolution that is within the species. And then there is, but what actually needs to be demonstrated to actually prove evolution is macroevolution. That by small gradual changes, one species can change into another species and that has not been neither demonstrated empirically nor explained theoretically with any reasonable degree of satisfaction because there is not even a clear mechanism or a pathway to explain how this species could have evolved into the species.
And there is no archaeological evidence also adequately for that. So the point is that as far as empirical or logical explanations are concerned, even evolution does not give any explanations for that. So now putting evolution aside, the idea that God is a magician, if it is meant to say that everything is, that scientific explainability is to be, is removed by such an argument, that is not true because magic essentially means we don’t know the mechanism by which something works.
But God does have a mechanism and even the scriptures talk about the mechanism by which God creates the world. So for example, the second, third cantos of Srimad Bhagavatam do talk about creation and they may use some terminology and some conceptual analysis that we may not be able to immediately comprehend, especially the chapters in Sankhya that are there in the third canto. They are very profound and they contain the potential for great research and through these we can actually understand much of the mechanism and then we will not say that God is a magician in the sense that just by referring to God we are bringing something unscientific, but we will understand that there is actually extraordinary mechanism by which God creates and that mechanism is so astonishing that it can be almost called as if magical.
But that doesn’t mean, but essentially this doesn’t mean that, that the concept of God is being used to just bring in magic in the world of science and reject and reject scientific cause effect and theory evidence. Actually that is done by evolution primarily and as I mentioned in the other answer that intelligent design is not a resort to super naturalism to explain nature, but rather it is a logical inference from natural observations towards an intelligent cause. So in that sense it is not magical, it is a reasonable and logical.