Any fantasy books that deal with the tension between magic and critical thinking/empiricism?

Of course I know there's no REAL tension here within the fantasy genre itself, as the rules are different between fiction and nonfiction and the best writers use magic to say something real about the world or simply to enrich the work (me believing fantasy books promote actual belief in magic which would be a pretty wild takeaway lol) but I've delved deeply into science and philosophy over the years and have come to deeply respect Carl Sagan and Sean Carroll for their dedication to truth and critical thinking in a world prone to mysticism and misinformation (Sagan's book Demon Haunted World and Carroll's The Big Picture are genuinely life changing for this). With everything happening in the US right now I'm quite passionate about pursuing the truth no matter how ugly it is. Anything but the pretty lie or falling under the spell of a religion that promises to answer the unanswerable. While the human longing for deities and for meaning is deeply understandable and the myths are genuinely foundational for our literary canon, I still can't help but feel the weight of how much progress we as a species lost out on by giving into mysticism and wishful thinking constantly instead of seeing the world as it is and working from there instead. I know most fantasy writers don't have insane beliefs I'm more talking about the genre and concept itself having fundamentals roots in HISTORICAL mysticism that gave rise to some pretty horrific acts of both suppression of knowledge and oppression of people.

I feel all this in my bones and yet genuinely still think fantasy is SO important, both for myself and the human imagination. Almost everything about who I am (my morality, philosophical views, politics) can be traced back in some way to a childhood spent daydreaming about Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and fairy tales. I remember Robin Carhart Harris (a prominent researcher of psychedelics) mentioning on a podcast once how myths, metaphors, and Jungian archetypes were genuinely the best way for people on psychedelics to process these near mystical experiences, not because there WAS magic going on, but because language (a communication tool originally optimized for observable phenomena) is just so profoundly limited when talking about the wonders of what goes on in the human mind. We think in the language of magic.

So…while a love of magic and myth isn't necessarily at odds with scientific reason and pursuit of truth, I do feel at my core a tension at times. Wondering if there are books out there that'll help me process this (Though writing all this out like this surprisingly already helped more than I thought it would lol)

Nonfiction is fine too btw!