Does equal and opposite reaction mean good makes evil happen?
The following is an exerpt from "Wicca 333:Advanced Topics in Wiccan Belief" by Kaatryn MacMorgan, used with absolute permission and NOT to be reprinted without her permission!
Perhaps the worst example of misunderstood science I’ve experienced from the mouths of young Wiccans and others was the idea that since, as Newton tells us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, every good act done in the world generates an evil one and the world works out neutrally because of it. I cannot begin to describe my reaction to this belief. Shock? Shame? Bewilderment? I’m not sure there is a word that describes the complex mixture of emotions this statement generated in me. It made my wife -daughter of a physics professor and generally somewhat restrained- guffaw, but she wasn’t standing in front of the person who said it, either.
If I hadn’t encountered the same statement from another person a few years later on Beliefnet, I probably would’ve forgotten the entire episode. I’m generally of the opinion that if you hear a thing once it is a fluke, and if you hear it twice it’s either a fluke or a trend. In this case I pray it’s a fluke but I’m going to pretend it’s a trend for the sake of argument. It’s not as if I’ve met tens of thousands of Wiccans, but if the people I’ve met have been a representative sample, this view is held by a few dozen folk who vacillate between confusion and anger about it. The first one even dismissed Wicca as a valid faith because that was part of our beliefs.
First I’ll explain the problem with the physics of this idea. It hinges on the word opposite. Opposite has two related but distinct meanings in the English language. The first is the one we heard on Sesame Street and in our nursery rhymes, and is actually better described by the word antonym, with “opposite” pairs such as good and evil, light and darkness, mean and nice, etc. The second is the more technical use of the term and means the reverse or alternate, like the opposite side of a coin or piece of paper or the opposite direction. The complete extent of this problem is caused by seeing the phrase “equal and opposite” and using the first meaning, not the second. Rather than simply leave it at that, I’ll explain.
If you had a spring, and that spring had a weird scale exactly in the middle, and you pushed that spring/scale against a wall, it would say that you and the wall were pushing with the same amount of force, you toward the wall and the wall away from the wall. Actually, there would be two sets of forces, you and the wall, and the spring’s compression, not to mention gravity, magnetism, wind and all those other forces we were always told to ignore in the first months of learning physics.
Metaphor always works well in this situation, so imagine you are in a frictionless skating rink. Forgetting for a moment that you’d fall down because of the way our bodies are shaped, imagine the hand of god, or the deity of your choice, pushes you toward the north wall of this skating rink with just enough force to get you moving. When you hit the wall, even though the hand of god pushed you north, you begin to go south with the same amount of speed that you were previously going north (the magic walls of the frictionless skating rink absorb none of the momentum.) You are now going equally and opposite of the force and direction you were going before.
The metaphysical version of this is that when you put energy, in the form of will, into the universe you get an equal and opposite reaction-the universe pushes back. Chaos, life, karma -whatever factors that you wish to consider- alter this equal and opposite energy just as friction, wind, gravity and magnetism alter the force you place on the wall. The important distinction here is that the Wiccan view of good and evil points out that energy has no good or evil. The electricity that powers the machine that keeps a great man alive is the same electricity that runs through an electric chair. It’s not good, nor evil, just energy.
Related to this is a silly new trend in Wicca, to draw out energy, in the form of a spell or just a prayer and to say, as you focus it out into existence, “so long as this harms none,” with the belief that those words will somehow stop something from happening as a result of your actions. There is nothing wrong with hoping that your actions will have no negative effects, however, this type of disclaimer offends those of us who see magick as real. You see, to us, it is energy, just like electricity, or a bullet being propelled from a gun. I do not think anyone who says this “so long as it harms none” thing would be willing to point a gun at themselves, say “so long as this harms none” and pull the trigger. To those who see magick as energy, there is no difference.
Even though the problem at the core of this argument came from a misunderstanding of English, not of energy, the idea that magick is energy shows the need for a basic understanding of another of the sciences-physics. As with biology and statistics, you don’t have to know or understand these things at a college level, you just need to have a basic understanding of the facts and language. Such an understanding can be grasped by watching a kids science show on television, or reading a good how-to website. More importantly, those who teach need to be prepared and willing to fill in where their students lack knowledge, if they cannot answer a question, they need to learn to turn the students on to someone, or something, that can.
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