I missed your reply when it first came out and just found it now. It reminds me of my discussion of the world’s disenchantment and re-enchantment, which also looks for a third way. Here are a couple of passages from that article I wrote on my blog:

“What, then, is disenchantment? The key point isn’t just that modernity unleashes instrumental reason and drives us all to seek to maximize utility by calculating and controlling everything we encounter. That bureaucratic, utilitarian lifestyle is only a coping strategy. The deeper problem is that we’ve lost the double sense of nature’s mystery. We have the terror but not the fascination, the strangeness of the living-dead flow of godless physicality, but not the childish mental projections. We sense that the world is strange not because we’re wholly ignorant as children, but because we know enough about our smallness in the universal scheme to have reason to doubt even our treasured convictions. We know that organic life’s advent is probably unplanned, that there’s no satisfying reason for unnecessary suffering in nature, that life proceeds largely by chance and thus is unfair, and that we all die no matter how we live, which makes our choices absurd. Moreover, we acquire abundant sour memories from everyday experience which prove that there’s no grand plan and thus that subjectivity isn’t central to nature, in spite of our personal longing to be appreciated…

“One way in which modernity doesn’t disenchant, however, but on the contrary deepens the universal mystery is apparent from the role of spells in enchantment. Children view the world as magical, because they don’t understand how or why most events unfold, and so they fall back on biased intuitions. The world appears ordered but the child isn’t aware of the real causality that brought that order about, and so fortunate events seem to her so many magically produced gifts of the child’s omnipotent parents (assuming the child grows up in a relatively prosperous, sheltered environment). The archetype of the spell-casting wizard stands in for causal knowledge, not just because it’s easy to appeal to mumbo jumbo to provide an illusion of understanding, but because the witch or wizard has that dual character of being both terrifying and fascinating, strange and familiar, which makes for the frisson of wonder.

“However, when angels and demons, faeries and gods fled the scene as we came to excel at causal explanations, the symbol of the magical spell cast on the world to make it run became incoherent, because there was no longer room for an intelligent designer or manager of natural affairs. Nevertheless, science presupposes natural order as its explanandum, and so we have the mystery of a spell with no spell-caster. The universe somehow directs itself into being, according to modern naturalism. The mindlessness of nature’s foundations provides for a less satisfying but more mysterious call for wonder, since the absurdity of self-creation baffles even our intuitions which are so readily deployed to belittle any phenomenon by personifying it.”