The Perks of Demon-Free Living

Martin Shongauer, St. Anthony Possessed by Demons

At the library where I work, there's a certain kind of patron who comes in and says, "Can you tell me where to find books on...(and here there's a dramatic, vaguely defiant pause)...the OCCULT?" They usually seem a little let down that I don't gasp, give them a dirty look, tell them Jesus loves them, or something. I just smile and say, "Sure, right back here."

These dramatic dabblers in the dark arts seem to want to be shocking or scary. They would dissappointed to hear that a different s-word pops into my mind when I hear talk about the occult: silly. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well be asking for books about training unicorns. They're reading about things that don't exist. If they go home and draw up a pentagram and burn some candles or something, they might freak themselves or their parents out, but outside of their own mind, precisely nothing will happen.

I've never seen any convincing evidence that dark supernatural forces (or any other supernatural forces) actually exist. I believe the world works according to regular natural laws. Nature doesn't care what kind of incantations you mutter. It doesn't alter its laws because you go digging up mandrakes at midnight or wear a hood and chant. That's not the kind of world we live in. Its levers are physical and psychological, not supernatural.

People often say they feel sorry for me when I express disbelief in the supernatural. I do see why they feel that way. If they fervently believe in the more positive aspects of traditional ideas of the supernatural--that prayer can cure illness, or that we go to heaven after we die, or that Jesus is still alive and loves us--those ideas would give them enormous comfort, and they would feel sorry for someone who didn't believe they were true.*

But there's a flip side to this equation. Yes, it can be depressing not to believe in the sunnier side of the supernatural, but it's also pretty nice not to believe in its dark side. It's nice not to believe in malevolent ghosts and demons. It's nice not to worry about bad omens. I once walked through an old cemetary next to my house in Baton Rouge, and saw two black cats mating on top of an above-ground tomb. I thought, "Wow. I'm glad I'm not superstitious, because if I were I would go straight home and lock the door." People throughout history have been paralyzed with real fear by such sights. I can just laugh it off. A common belief around the world is that sorcerers can make your penis retract into your body. This is something that truly terrifies some people to this day. Some Europeans believed it in the Middle Ages. In the Malleus Mallificarum, the notorious manual for witch hunters, we find this remarkable passage: "And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn." I'm really happy not to lose sleep over this happening to me.

Of course, I don't want to suggest that most Christians who feel sorry for me are superstitious in these archaic ways. Most of them aren't (though many still are, especially in other countries). But they do commonly believe things I'm very glad to think aren't true. Once I had a job as a day camp leader for kids at a resort community in Arkansas. We were doing some kind of craft, and one of the kids surprised me by mentioning how they had talked about demons in Sunday school. I was thinking, "Demons? Seriously? In Sunday school?" when the lady leading the craft activity surprised me even more by saying, "Well, that's great. I think demons are one of the most important things Christians need to learn about."

Many of the Christians I know would disagree, but such beliefs aren't that uncommon. Roughly half of Americans believe in demon possession, and the Catholic Church still has official rites of exorcism. Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most powerful men in the country, got irritated with a reporter recently who expressed surprise that he believed in the devil:

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

I don't know how the reporter was looking at him, but he is right that most Americans (fifty-something percent, depending on the survey) believe in the devil. Anyone surprised by that figure really is out of touch.

But even if 100% of the people throughout history had believed it, that wouldn't make it true. Personally, I do not believe in the devil, and I really like it that way. Believing there is a super-powerful, evil genius bent on destroying the human race--that does come with certain worries. It's also quite nice not believing in hell. If you're a traditional Christian believer in hell, who thinks that anyone who doesn't accept Jesus as savior goes there, that means you believe that most of the people who have ever existed are currently languishing in hell. Billions and billions of people, suffering eternal torment, right this minute. I am thrilled to think that isn't true.

But don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't believe it because it makes me happy not to. I can't very well say, "You can't just believe heaven exists because it would be upsetting to think it didn't," and then turn around and commit the same fallacy (the consequentialist fallacy) with hell. No, the reason I don't believe in these things is that I've never seen any good evidence that they exist. I've never seen anything to indicate that the world's workings are based on the action of dark forces or entities that somehow exist outside of natural law. There are always simpler, naturalistic explanations that don't require us to postulate complex supernatural entities.  I certainly can't prove such entities don't exist, of course. But that's not where the burden of proof lies. If you're saying, for example, that hell exists, but you can't find it with a telescope, seismograph, or any other scientific instrument, then I think the burden of proof is on you, not me.

Evil itself, however, does exist. History is full of evil, awful deeds, and I have met evil, awful people (though not many.) But that doesn't mean evil is some sort of active supernatural force or entity. Evil, I think, can be explained naturalistically. While nature itself is not evil, it is callous and amoral. Nature doesn't stop and think, "No, if Vesuvius erupted again, that would just be too tragic. Better not." What happens in nature just happens. As for human evil, I think you can account for that with evolution. Evolution is based on competition for scarce resources. That means organisms--even members of the same species--are in a sense programmed to struggle with each other over those resources, often in very nasty ways. (That doesn't mean it's right, by the way. If we can transcend those nasty tendencies, great.) Given the way evolution works, it's no surprise that people are prone to being horrible to each other. We evolved in a rough, callous world.

But evolution isn't the only source of evil deeds. One major cause of human evil, I'm convinced, is believing in things that aren't true...believing, for example, that mentally ill people are possessed by demons, or that women have been especially prone to sin ever since that incident in the Garden of Eden. Oddly enough, then, dark supernatural forces can be destructive, even if they don't exist in the physical world. They can be destructive simply because people believe in them, and act accordingly. In that case, it's not just the believer who is made unhappy by them. The misery gets exported.

Think of all the people who have died horrible deaths because others thought they were witches or sorcerers. They weren't, and they died for no reason. Even if a few of them really believed they were witches, they were wrong. They weren't really able to call forth dark forces and cast malevolent spells (except through a kind of placebo effect, which really can hurt people--but once again, only people who believe in it.)

Here in the United States, we think this kind of thing is confined to past ages. It's true that its less common in western culture than it used to be, but it still happens. Mentally disturbed people are still sometimes subjected to exorcisms when they should be getting psychiatric treatment. As recently as the 1970's, the exorcism case that inspired the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose resulted in the death of a mentally ill girl through starvation and neglect. Even today, people in places like central Africa and Papua New Guinea are regularly killed as witches. Saudi Arabia officially executes suspected sorcerers. In some parts of Africa, albinos are killed by witch doctors who think their body parts can help them work powerful spells. This happens today; in a time when we've eradicated smallpox and landed a car on Mars. What the hell?

If evil supernatural forces don't exist, and the occult only has power to the extent that people believe in it, these are terrible tragedies. Even in more sophisticated regions, if there is no hell, no demons, no devil, it's a tragedy that people are still terrified by these things. It's a tragedy that children are still told they might go to hell and meet those demons if they don't believe certain things. It's a tragedy that they are being told what to believe, not based on evidence, but based on the consequences of disbelief. That's always seemed like a form of existential blackmail to me; with a memetic logic exactly like that of a chain letter. Believe and pass it on, and good things will happen. Don't believe, and you're in big trouble. Chain letters can spread and multiply for years because of that logic. Maybe hell is just one big chain letter?

There are plenty of real sources of evil and suffering in this world. Why add a bunch of made-up ones on top of them? Even if people in countries like the United States aren't quite as terrorized by imagined forces of darkness as we used to be, the tendency is still there, and we could easily retreat toward the dark ages. As usual, Carl Sagan expressed this worry much better than I can, so I'll leave my ending to him:

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. 

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

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Anneliese Michel (exorcism victim)

YouGov Survey on Belief in the Devil and Demonic Possession

The Demon-Haunted World / Carl Sagan

The Persecution of Witches, 21st Century Style

Koro (fear of penis retraction) 

*New Age sorts have also said they feel sorry for me, but more because they think I live in a humdrum, mechanistic world devoid of wonder. I don't. I'm constantly bowled over by the world's wonders--it's just that I don't think something has to be unexplained to be wondrous. As Terry Pratchett once said, "It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Good Presidents and other Matters of Opinion

Lately I've witnessed a couple of vitriolic instances of a common American pastime: arguing about whether some president or other was good one or a bad one. People seem pretty sure of themselves when they declare that president A was great, and president B was horrible. Of course, others are just as sure it's the other way around, which may explain why the arguments get so heated. But why do people feel so certain in the first place? They act like it's a simple question with an obvious answer. It isn't. For one thing, it's pretty hard to figure out how much you can credit a president for events and trends that happen during their terms. It's a chaotic world, and presidents face powerful opponents, not least within their own government. That's how the system is supposed to work, after all.

Most people understand that. But what they rarely acknowledge is that deciding who's a good or bad president will always be a value judgement--a matter of opinion as much as fact. People act like there's an agreed upon standard for deciding what makes a president good or bad. There isn't. Whether you think a president, or any other politician, is good or bad depends on what you want that president to accomplish. It depends on what kind of country you want him (or her, eventually) to work toward. Answering "Who's a better president" isn't like answering "What's the temperature outside?" You can't just pull out a thermometer and take a reading. It's more like asking whether steak is better than lobster. It is--at least in part--a matter of opinion. It's a matter of what you value, and different Americans value different things. If you want to live in a country where the government has a strong presence and works toward more economic equality, you'll think someone like FDR is the model of a good president. If you want to live in a country with minimal government, where economic freedom is valued over economic equality, you'll think someone like Reagan was a good president. There's no law written across the sky that says exactly what constitutes a good president, or a good country.*

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there are no objective standards for judging these things. You can certainly measure unemployment or inflation, for example, though once again, it's not easy to say how much they depend on a president's actions. I'm not saying it's completely a matter of opinion, just that it's substantially a matter of opinion. It's weird that people don't acknowledge this. I'm also not advocating some kind of radical relativism here. I don't mean that what makes a leader or society good is nothing but a social construction. Mao, Stalin, and Hitler were bad leaders who oversaw bad things in their societies. Still, politics is to some extent a social construction--what constitutes a good country or president depends on what We The People want and value. The good society just doesn't objectively exist in the same way the deepest part of the ocean does, at least not in a way we know how to measure.

Besides, it's not like any of us are in a position to rule on these matters once and for all. We like to think our opinions are based on pure, clear-eyed reason, but for the most part they aren't. I suspect most political opinions are largely a matter of upbringing, socio-cultural identity, and innate temperament. Reason and evidence are bit players at best. How many people ever really engage in some kind of radical Cartesian doubt; setting aside every belief and trying to reason out from scratch which ones are strong enough to remain standing? Hardly anybody. Some may try, but it's not even clear that humans are capable of that kind of pure objective reasoning.

In short, judging societies, or policies, or politicians is at least as much a matter of opinion as a matter of fact, and our opinions aren't exactly based on superhuman rationality. We're only human, our politicians are only human, and our politics are only human. All too human. That doesn't mean we should just give up and conclude it's hopeless to try to muddle our way toward a better society. Maybe there are better ways of measuring the goodness of a society.** Maybe one day we'll come to an agreement about what kind of country a president should work toward, and then we'll have more objective way to measure whether she did a good job or not. Until then, maybe we should spend less time ridiculing the political judgements of others, and more time questioning our own. None of us has it all figured out yet.

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*Or if there is, we haven't found a way to verify with enough certainty that everyone can agree on it.

**Some sort of national happiness index, like Bhutan has, seems promising to me, but I know people who would think that's crazy. The overall life satisfaction of a country's citizens does seem like a real, semi-measurable criteria by which to measure a government's success. Way better than GDP, anyway. Well, in my opinion.

To An Unknown God

Star Formation in NGC 2174 Nebula. Hubble Space Telescope

The other day I finally got around to reading The Language of God, by Francis Collins. Collins is the former director of the Human Genome Project and the current director of the National Institutes for Health. He's also a devout Christian, and his book is an admirable attempt to explain how Christianity and science--including evolution and the Big Bang--need not be in conflict. The explanations of science are truly first-rate. His defense of his religious beliefs didn't convert me from agnosticism, but they did make me do some hard and uncomfortable thinking. The man has a formidable mind, and his book is well worth reading, whatever your religious beliefs may be. I'm still scheming about how I can get more creationists to read it.

Collins' book got me on a kick of reading about the intersection between science, religion, and philosophy. I went on to read Owen Gingerich's book God's Universe (also very good), and then a couple of books on the philosophy of religion. It's interesting stuff, and as usual, I was humbled by the breadth of my ignorance on the topic. In fact, I'm still pretty ignorant, so this post is more of a reflection on my impressions than a carefully considered argument.

The Christian philosophers and scientists I was reading are smarter than I am, and some of their arguments are extremely impressive. I'm sure I'll come back to those in later posts, but in this one, I want to talk about one I found less impressive. One reason Collins, Gingerich, and many others claim that God and science are not in conflict is that science is concerned with nature and its laws, while God transcends nature. God, they say, is outside of space and time, and therefore beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. This means non-religious scientists like Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger are wrong when they claim that God is a scientific hypothesis like any other; one which should stand or fall based on empirical evidence. I suppose this explains why discussions among these sophisticated theists are based on logic, Christian tradition, and a feeling of personal revelation far more than observation and experiment.

In these discussions, God is said to have a whole host of great qualities. He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, utterly good and loving, eternal, and necessary (as opposed to contingent). Philosophers of religion seem to spend a lot of their time trying to work out how he can be all these things at once without contradiction. Much attention, for example is given to the problem of evil, which was succinctly expressed by Epicurus over 2000 years ago:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

It's a conundrum, no doubt about it. Another apparent contradiction involves free will--a cornerstone of Christian faith. If God is all-knowing, then he knows everything that will happen before it does. How, then, can we be free to choose our path? Isn't it already predetermined?

Of course, some Very Smart People think such contradictions can't be overcome, and Very Smart People think they can. The arguments get extremely subtle, and occasionally mind-boggling. Take the Ontological Argument for God's existence, for example:

God is perfect.
It's more perfect to exist than not to exist.
Therefore, God exists. 

That line of reasoning makes me feel like I'm staring at one of M.C. Escher's impossible drawings--something seems very wrong about it, but it's hard to say just what.

I'm guessing Douglas Adams felt the same way when he wrote this passage about the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God. 

The argument goes like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing. 

`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' 

`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic. 

`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing."

That's a caricature, of course, but not a groundless one. The real arguments in the philosophy of religion can also be quite bewildering, and can seem a little disconnected from ground-level reality (as Adams' philosopher discovers when he tries to cross an actual road.) Many theists readily acknowledge this disconnect: If God is outside of space and time and beyond the reach of science, as the argument goes, then we can't rely on science to ground our speculations about him.

This seems problematic to me. When I read religious philosophy, as sophisticated as it may be, I always feel like I'm listening to people arguing about whether creatures from Alpha Centauri have eight legs or ten. I think, "What makes you think you can figure out anything about them without actually seeing one? How can you even know whether they exist at all?"

The thing is, figuring out how the world works based on pure reason and faith doesn't have a great track record. Philosophers tried to reason out how nature works for thousands of years, coming up with many plausible-sounding, but wrong, ideas: the Great Chain of Being, the flat and motionless earth, the teleological theory of physics, Descartes idea that the body and mind met in the pineal gland, and many more. They made very little real progress in understanding nature until they started relying on observation and experiment. The world revealed by science has consistently proven far grander and more sophisticated than we ever imagined based on reason and speculation.

Why should it be any different with God? Why do we think we can figure out what he is like--if he exists at all--without having some way to systematically observe him? Why shouldn't we currently be just as clueless about God as Kepler was about General Relativity? What if, instead of the characteristics we traditionally ascribe to him, his real nature turns out to be a huge surprise? That's how it's been with the rest of the universe so far.

Of course, people will object that God is outside nature, so we will never be able to observe him the way we might observe a distant quasar. But then...how do they know that? I see no proof of that assertion (unless you want to prove it by appealing to the definition of God, and definitions are just human inventions). If people like Francis Collins and Owen Gingerich don't think we can access God empirically, but still think we can understand him in any meaningful way, they have a lot more faith in pure reason and revelation than I do. Those approaches have proven to be awfully fallible over the years. Besides, what does it even mean for a being to be outside of space and time, or outside of nature? What if such a thing is impossible? Couldn't nature just be bigger than we thought? Couldn't what seems supernatural be an aspect of nature we haven't fully understood yet?

I'm not saying it's useless to try to reason about God. Doing so can at least clarify our thinking, and tell us which ideas are incoherent on a purely logical basis. Philosophers and theologians don't agree much on what God is, but they do seem to have some consensus about what he can't be. All I'm saying is that you can only get so far without actual observation, and I think it's premature to conclude that (if there is a God) we can never approach him scientifically. Maybe we can. Or maybe we can't. Or maybe one day he'll just come out and say: OK, here I am, and here's what I'm all about. Stop killing each other over it, because none of you had any clue in the first place!*

We humans are small, and the universe is big. We don't even fully understand gravity, or the origin of life, or how many species there are on Earth. Why should we think we're anywhere near understanding God?

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The Language of God / Francis Collins

God's Universe / Owen Gingerich

Philosophy of Religion: A Beginner's Guide / Charles Taliaferro

Philosophy: The Pursuit of Wisdom / Louis Pojman

Of God and Other Mysteries / an even more rambling post I wrote on the same topic


* Why wouldn't God just unambigously reveal himself to us, after all? What would be the point of keeping us guessing? Does he really consider faith in the face of uncertainty such a virtue? For that matter, if Jesus was the incarnation of God, and he died and rose from the dead to save us, why wouldn't he just reappear and say: "The records of my first appearance are spotty and don't always agree, and people don't usually rise from the dead. Why shouldn't you want as much proof as Thomas had? So here I am. Oh, and I made a second moon, just to show I'm the real deal."