Quote Originally Posted by VoxRationis View Post
It is fallacious to conflate "science" with "the rules of the real-world universe." Science is a process, a methodology of systematic analysis and discovery. If magic actually exists in a setting, science is not automatically opposed to it; in fact, it should embrace it. Science can absolutely work together with magic, in the same way that it can work with physics and chemistry, if magic exists in a setting. The fact that wizards in D&D apply their Intelligence scores to the effectiveness of their spells, learn from books and field notes, and develop their spells in more powerful ways as they learn and observe their effects suggests that they are in fact scientists of a kind, merely ones who are far stingier about sharing knowledge than the real-world scientific community (and with good reason; how many people do you trust enough to give them intimate knowledge about how to rewrite the universe?).
Well, that's one interpretation...And that's really the problem here, isn't it? There's just so many different possible interpretations.

In the case of D&D, it's entirely reasonable to interpret magic as science, for the very reasons you just pointed out. However, for those very reasons, it lacks a certain profundity or even, dare I say, magic. Now, I could just be projecting, but when I hear people draw an artificial divide between science and magic for the purposes of keeping the latter mysterious, keeping it wondrous, I think they really don't know what they want.

The allure of mystery lies in its resolution. People want to understand. The problem with D&D is that its magic is just so mundane. Understanding it bears no novelty. It does not open the eyes to vistas of insight. It just is and on the most paltry of justifications.