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You're listening to Episode 79 of Jimmy Aiken's Mysterious World,

where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason.

In this episode we're talking about religion, magic, psychic phenomena and science.

I'm Dom Betanelli and joining me today is Jimmy Aiken. Hi Jimmy. Howdy, Dom.

Ever since the beginning of human history, people have wondered about the world in which we find ourselves.

Many explanations have been proposed for the phenomena we see around us.

Some of these explanations include religious ones, magical ones, psychic ones and scientific ones.

So how are we to sort all these out? That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Aiken's

Mysterious World. So Jimmy, this is a key episode of Mysterious World. Why is that?

Well, there are certain episodes of the show where rather than looking at a specific mystery,

we dig down and look at foundational concepts that will run through multiple episodes.

These key episodes lay the groundwork for things we'll cover in the series generally.

For example, we did Episode 55 where instead of looking at a specific event where people claim to have

had contact with aliens, we instead looked at the more fundamental issue of what would the

theological implications be if we discovered intelligent alien life. This episode will be similar

in that we'll be looking at a set of concepts that appear or will appear in multiple episodes.

And those concepts are religion, science, superstition, magic and psychic phenomena.

The relationship between these concepts is tricky because historically there weren't sharp

distinctions between them. For example, in the ancient world astronomy, which today is a science

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