Category: Paranormal

The Natural and the Supernatural: Catholics, Protestants, and Modernity

Here are some notes on a fascinating book our resident historian, Dr. Vito  C. Caiati, recommended to me: Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023, xviii + 492 pp. ). The book is about such phenomena as levitation and bilocation.  It is meticulous, well-written, and utterly fascinating.

1) Eire tells us that a fundamental difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants is that, while both accept the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the reality of both realms, Protestants reject the “intermingling”  of the two. (p. 17) The natural world is the material or physical world. It is the realm of space-time-matter.  The supernatural realm is that of spirit. Both Catholics and Protestants  accept the reality of both realms or orders, and the subordinate status of the natural order. Both also  accept that the supernatural realm is God’s alone.  This by way of contrast to the predominant view of modernity which we can call metaphysical naturalism. This is the view that reality is exhausted by space-time-matter.   If that is the case, then of course there is no God, and the supernatural category is empty.

To put it in my own way, there is a major and a minor opposition. The major opposition is that between supernaturalism and naturalism.  The minor opposition is one within supernaturalism  between a view that allows the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and one that does not.  So I will say, glossing Eire,  that  Catholics are ‘irruptionists’ and Protestants ‘non-irruptionists.’  But this simple schematization needs qualification which I will provide in sections (3) and (4) below.  But first:

2) An example of what I am calling the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and what Eire calls the  “intermingling” of the supernatural  and the natural,  is what is supposed to occur in the traditional Catholic mass, namely, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The technical theological term for this is ‘transubstantiation.’ The idea is that in the mass at the moment of consecration, Christ himself becomes really present, literally not figuratively present,  in the consecrated elements, bread and wine.  This is an irruption that no Protestant countenances.

3) But if there had never been any irruptions of the supernatural into the natural, would any religions ever have arisen?  Presumably not, as Eire suggests: “. . .all encounters with a supernatural reality are the bedrock upon which religions have been built.” (xiv) He goes on to refer to these encounters  as “theophanies,” “hierophanies,” and “irruptions of the sacred.” Given that an irruption of the supernatural is a miracle (miraculum, prodigium) as Eire points out (p. 15), and given that Protestantism is a religion or a family of religions, it follows that  there had to have been some miracles that Protestants countenance. Which?

4) Protestants countenance only those that occurred before the first century anno domini.  This is the doctrine of the “cessation of mysteries” or the “cessation of charismata.”  Eire tells us that this doctrine was accepted by Protestants of all stripes. (p. 17)  The miracles related in the Bible really occurred but “became unnecessary after the birth of the early church and would never, ever happen again.” (ibid.)

5) It follows from (4) that levitations, bilocations, stigmata, supernatural hyperosmia (a heightened sense of smell that allows the mystic to detect the sins of others), and many  other bizarre phenomena, including supernatural insomnia, the power to get by with little or no sleep [Trump?] —  all of  them listed by Eire on p. 13 — could not be the work of God.  Curiously, however, their occurrence is not deemed impossible by Protestants, but held actually to have occurred.

6) It follows from (4) & (5) that all of the above miraculous occurrences that occurred after the first century A. D. are diabolical in origin! Now whether this is really the Protestant line, one that Protestants of every stripe adhere to, is not for me to say, given my limited familiarity with Protestantism. I am simply reporting what Eire says. But it sounds right.

7) If Eire is right, then “miracles became a marker of difference  between Catholics and Protestants . . . .” (p. 18)  For the Protestants, all supposed miracles after the first century were either fraudulent or diabolical in origin. Not so for Catholics, who, while not denying that many supposed miracles are either fraudulent or diabolical in origin, held also that there are genuine miracles whose origin is divine.  Enter the need for what is called “discernment” as between diabolical and divine etiology of presumptive miracles.  As I read Eire, he is telling us that for  Protestants, there are exactly two disjoint classes of presumptive miracles after the first century A. D., the fraudulent ones and the diabolical ones. For the ‘Romanists’ as Protestants sometimes call them, there are exactly three disjoint classes of presumptive miracles: the fraudulent, the diabolical, and the divine.

Perhaps we can say (and this is my formulation): for the traditional Catholic, miracles are presumed either fraudulent or diabolical unless proven divine.  Now  in the Anglo-American system of positive law, if a person is presumed innocent it does not follow that he is innocent,  nor does it follow that he is not. Similarly with respect to miracles: the presumption of  fraud or deviltry does not entail either, not does it not entail either.  Hence the need for inquiry, trial, inquisition, The Inquisition.  Either defeat the presumption or uphold it.

It just now occurs to me that in Protestantism there is no need for such an institution as the Inquisition because there is no need to discern between diabolical and divine  causation of miracles.   Why not? Because for the Protestants, no presumptive miracles are of divine origin.  Protestants burned plenty of witches, but not after an inquiry into whether a given witch was a good witch or a bad witch: which type of witch is this witch is a question not posed.   All were presumed bad, and the presumption was non-defeasible. Correct me if I am wrong about this.

8) Now we are getting in deep, where an historian of ideas such as Carlos Eire will not go.  His history of the impossible is a history of the presumptively impossible, not the impossible an sich.  He is clear about this, even though he doesn’t put it in quite the way I am putting  it.  Obviously, there cannot be a history of the impossible sensu stricto. For the impossible is that which cannot occur in any sense of ‘cannot’ whether  logical, metaphysical, nomologically . . . .  What cannot occur never occurred, whence it follows that there cannot be any history of it.   So Eire is using ‘impossible’ sensu lato, to refer to ideas and views about occurrences such as levitations and bilocations according to which these putative occurences are regarded as impossible in the strict sense.  That is his factual basis: views and opinions as attested by testimonies and documents in archives. Eire could rightly claim the title Archivarius Maximus given the load of lore he has laid before us in his 500 page tome.

9) The philosopher of religion wants to know, not just what various people at various times have opined about, say, the difference between religion and magic, or the difference between religion and superstition, but what these differences are, and whether they really obtain.  If he is a Christian, he wants to know whether characteristic Christian doctrines such as Trinity and Incarnation are or are not superstitious nonsense.  If he is a traditional  Roman Catholic Christian, he wants to know whether or not  the words of consecration in the mass Hoc est enim corpus meum are hocus pocus.

A Pre-Print of THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT for Comments

Chad McIntosh, the editor of the new journal Triptych, invited me to submit an article to his online publication. He suggested a revision of an old Substack article of mine.  Here is the redacted version.  I solicit your comments on content and style.  The final section is incomplete.   My deadline for submission is 1 September. 

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THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

In The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, Andrew Klavan writes,

There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2016, p. 231)

I’ve often had a similar thought. In this article I will present an argument from the fact of great moral evil to the existence of God. I will conclude with a brief comparison of my argument to some others in the literature.

Project

The usual order of proceeding is from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. (See J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for an against the Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) There is no need to rehearse the familiar logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God. They are well-known and have been carefully studied. There is no denying their force. Some of them are plausible even if none of them are strictly probative. But one can also plausibly argue from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in several different ways.

One way is to argue that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. That there is such an objective difference is a presupposition of the stock atheist arguments. They can’t get off the ground without it. Given this objective difference, how is it possible? Might “the moral law within me” (Kant) require a transcendent lawgiver? One could argue that the objective difference between good and evil either requires a divine ground or is best explained by the positing of a divine ground. This is not the way I will be arguing. I do, however, presuppose that there is an objective difference between good and evil.

Another way of arguing, an instance of which will be presented here, does not argue to the existence of God from the objective difference between good and evil, or from evil in general, or from natural evil in particular, or from moral evil in general, but from a special feature of some moral evils. The special feature I will focus on is the horrific depth and severity of some moral evils, a phenomenon that beggars naturalistic understanding. This type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at above.

My aim is not to give a rationally coercive or ineluctably conclusive argument for the existence of God from horrendous moral evils. So I do not maintain, with Klavan, that the depth of these evils “requires” or entails God’s existence. There is no valid deductive argument the premises of which are either absolutely certain or ‘morally certain’ (certain beyond a reasonable doubt) that can take us from the fact of horrendous moral evils committed by humans to the existence of God. The most we can hope for is an abductive argument to God as the best explanation of the fact of horrendous moral evils. Given that ‘refute’ is a verb of success, my aim here is not to refute atheist arguments from evil but merely to neutralize them by showing that the tables can be turned: the objective fact of moral evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. This is especially so if we focus on the worst instances of moral evil.

Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments from evil in the eyes of atheists. My old friend Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” For him this question had the force of a refutation, articulating as it did one of his deepest convictions: the godlessness of the universe. Against convictions that run as deep as this, convictions ‘bred in the bone before born in the brain,’ argument comes too late. So my purpose in the following is merely to show theists that their position is rationally acceptable and thus rationally defensible. A secondary purpose is to show that those who are inclined to accept theism, but have not yet committed themselves, may embrace it while remaining within the precincts of reason. A tertiary purpose is to foster this inclination in those who are open-minded ‘fence-sitters.’

Definitions, distinctions, and assumptions

By “God’ I mean the God of the Christian Bible replete with the standard omni-attributes, the very ones exploited by Hume et al. for their atheistic purposes. More specific attributes such as divine simplicity and divine tri-unity are not relevant to what follows.

I provisionally assume the standard distinction between moral and natural evil. Moral evil is evil that has its source in a misuse of free will. Whose misuse? The only moral agents we are familiar with are ourselves, human beings. Human beings are physically embodied and reside in the natural world. But we ought not assume that all finite moral agents reside in the natural world. Between the natural and the supernatural lies the preternatural wherein presumably are located such finite spirits as angels, fallen angels (demons) and perhaps pre-embodied and disembodied human souls. Demons are demons because of their misuse of free will. If there are demons, then moral evil has one source in us and another in them. If demons are allowed into our ontology, then the distinction between moral and natural evil remains, but with the proviso that natural evil is, or can reasonably be viewed as, a species of moral evil, namely, the evil bought about by demons by their pernicious influence on us, on lower animals, and on inanimate nature. The Christian theist can then account for all evil as moral evil. Multifarious are the ways in which demons are supposed to bring about evil. Most common is temptation, an ‘ordinary’ diabolical influence. But there are also ‘extraordinary’ diabolical assaults which include possessions, oppressions, and vexations. The Roman Catholic exorcist, Fr. Carlos Martins distinguishes six types of demonic activity. The first type is ‘ordinary,’ the rest ‘extraordinary’: temptation, vexation, infestation, oppression, obsession, and possession. (See his The Exorcist Files, New York: Faith Words, 2024, pp. 43-60)

If there are no demons, and natural evil is not a species of moral evil, then this irreducibly natural evil, affecting as it does both humans and lower animals, is a very powerful reason to reject theism. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit this. Without the reduction of natural evil to a species of moral evil, nature “red in tooth and claw” is hard to square with theism. The notion that a world so apparently awful as ours could be the creation of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving deity, one who providentially cares about his creatures, strikes many as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. To repeat what Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” A world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, are biologically programmed to do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the omni-competent and omni-benevolent architect of our world, would you design it to be a slaughterhouse? (See Quentin Smith, “An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (Religious Studies, 1991), https://infidels.org/library/modern/quentin-smith-evil-laws/) If, on the other hand, natural evil is a species of moral evil, then this ‘abattoir objection’ to theism can be turned aside. Natural evil can be charged to the account of the demons.

But are there demons? Well, they are attested in the Bible, in the Pauline letters and elsewhere, and are essential to the Christian narrative. If you want empirical evidence of their existence, I refer you to Richard Gallagher, M. D., Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attack, and the Paranormal (Harper One, 2020). See also Fr. Carlos Martins, op. cit.

I assume that the difference between good and evil is objective, and not a matter of attitude or anything merely subjective. When I say that the horrific depth and intensity of some moral evils “beggars naturalistic understanding,” I mean that the magnitude of these evils is hard to understand if naturalism is true. By ‘naturalism,’ I mean metaphysical naturalism. David M. Armstrong’s ‘strict observance’ definition serves present purposes.

According to Armstrong, naturalism is the thesis that “all that exists is the space-time world . . . .” (D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 1). The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis of naturalism, then, is that reality is exhausted by physical reality. Armstrong deploys a criterion of reality that is at once both physical and causal: an item is real if and only of it it is physical and causally active/passive. Other philosophers, such as Graham Oppy, favor a more latitudinarian definition that allows the ontological inventory to include causally inert abstract objects in addition to spatiotemporal concreta. Oppy’s position, however, is just as inhospitable to theism as Armstrong’s since both sorts of naturalist “suppose that causal reality just is natural reality” and that theists “suppose that in addition to natural reality there is a further nonnatural causal reality,” one that includes God, angels, and departed souls. (Graham Oppy, “Conflict Model,” Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy, Zondervan 2016, p. 31)

The holocaust argument

The argument is animated by the intuition that homo homini lupus does not capture the full extent of human depravity: man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. The Latin saying is an insult to the wolves to boot, who are by nature predatory. Lacking free will, they cannot help eating animals alive. By contrast, a man who behaves savagely towards human beings does so by free choice. His savagery is not plausibly viewed as merely animalic, a matter of biological ‘programming,’ but is plausibly regarded as spiritual in origin, and in a two-fold way: as deriving internally from a will that is free, but also as deriving externally from demonic influence. Free will is a spiritual attribute: no wholly material system possesses it. And of course demons are pure spirits. Human savagery is therefore two-fold in origin.

Before proceeding it would be good to have before us an example of human savagery. Fidel Castro, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:

Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ”political rehabilitation” were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ”drawer cells,” specially constructed units that make South Vietnam’s infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.

The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ”Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn’t close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.”

That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention. (Ronald Radosh, “Surviving Castro’s Tortures,” The New York Times, June 8. 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/surviving-castro-s-tortures.html?pagewanted=all)

Now no man is a demon, but a man can freely choose to play the demon in his behavior towards other animals both human and non-human. If he so chooses, the person is morally and not merely causally responsible for his morally horrific behavior. Moral responsibility presupposes freedom of the will. But although we are free, we are susceptible to the influence of any demons there might be. Of course, it does not follow from our choice to behave in a demon-like way that there are demons. The evidence for their existence is impressive, but hardly conclusive. For all we can claim to know, there may or may not be any demons. But if there are, we would be open to their malign influence and, though we would not be determined to act in accordance with their influence, we would be inclined to do so by our morally ambivalent (fallen) nature, such that some of us would succumb and freely follow their leading. Phase I of my overall abductive argument goes like this:

1) Although none of us are demons, some of us freely play the demon with respect to fellow humans by treating them savagely.

2) While it does not follow from (1) that there are demons, their malign influence on us would help explain what would otherwise be naturalistically inexplicable, namely, the horrendous depravity of the moral evils inflicted by some of us on others of us.

3) That this horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable is supported by the following sub-arguments:

a) We are morally responsible for some of what we do and leave undone. 

b) Moral responsibility presupposes (and thus entails) free will. Therefore:

c) Torturers are morally responsible for the torment they inflict upon their victims.

d) If naturalism is true, however, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions.

e) It is not the case that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. Therefore:

f) Naturalism is not true.

In support of (e), I offer the following epistemic argument:

g) We are directly aware of our libertarianly-free agency, our freedom in the unconditional ‘could have done otherwise’ sense.
h) That we enjoy this direct awareness is better known than the proposition that all of our mental and physical processes are causally necessitated by events antecedent to our births. Therefore:
i. We are justified in believing that we are libertarianly-free even if we cannot explain how this is possible given the putative (macro) determinism of nature.

Have I proven (definitively established) that horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable? No. But this should come as no surprise because in philosophy and theology there are no proofs of any substantive theses. Since the meta-thesis just enunciated is substantive, and a thesis of philosophy, a branch of which is metaphilosophy, there is no proof of my metaphilosophical thesis either. I accept this consequence with equanimity. But it is eminently reasonable to believe the meta-thesis, and like it or not, reasoned belief is as good as it gets in philosophy and metaphilosophy. It is as good as it gets and it is good enough.

Now for Phase II of my overall abductive argument. The truth of (3) — horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable — is logically consistent with the nonexistence of God. How do we get from the falsity of naturalism and the truth of (3) to the existence of God? How do we get from evil demons to the all-good God? As follows.

4) Given the falsity of naturalism, the existence of demons cannot be ruled out.

5) And given that our horrific demon-like behavior would be explained by our free acquiescence in demonic suggestions, the actual existence of these demonic agents is abductively inferrable. Abductive inference is admittedly ‘shaky’ as is every non-deductive inference. Nor can we be certain that the inference terminates in the best explanation. But abductive inferences are not in general irrational, and neither is this one in particular.

6) But we still need to get from the preternatural to the supernatural. The following argument rationalizes this move, in the sense that it renders it rationally acceptable.

j. The demonic host is a hierarchical order at the apex of which is an Evil Principle (and Principal). The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground. Call it Satan.

k. It is not unreasonable, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of evil. One might now speculate that God and Satan are equal but opposite principles and Principals, eternally at war with each other. Manicheanism looks to be a possible explanation of the depth of moral evil. It has been classically maintained, however, that Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Such bifurcation would destroy the unity of Being which is the objective correlate of the mind’s drive toward explanatory unity.

l. So Good is primary, evil secondary and derivative. It is secondary and derivative in that it cannot exist without Good. One way to cash this out is by holding that evil is privatio boni, a lack, a privation, an absence of good. A stock example is ocular blindness. The evil of blindness is a lack of sight. Many evils can no doubt be assayed as defects, privations, insufficiencies, absences. But the privatio boni doctrine, while it accounts for the privative character of evil, does not explain its positive character. Surely there is more to evil than a mere lack of good. Glance back at the tortures inflicted by Castro’s henchmen on fellow Cubans. Was their suffering the absence of pleasure or the absence of a neutral hedonic state? Obviously not. And it was not merely horrific physical suffering that they endured, but the spiritual suffering of being the object of unremitting hatred and the concomitant sense of total abandonment by man and apparently also God, an abandonment akin to what Christ suffered on the cross: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, harking back to Psalm 22:1)

If there is an Evil One as the source of horrendous evil, however, then the positivity of such evil can be charged to the Evil One’s account. The positivity of horrendous evil would then be grounded in the existence of the Evil One and the malevolence emanating from his misuse of his free will. Satan, after all, is not a mere absence of good, but a positive entity in his own right who, although good in his Being, is evil in his Willing. The Father of Lies is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. To be is to be good; hence every being (ens) is good insofar as it participates in esse (Being) Yet Satan is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

m. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as an Evil Person created by God, then good exists in its prime instance as the wholly good Person, God.

The holocaust argument and other similar arguments [incomplete]

There is more than one way to argue from evil to God. In a very useful article, “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Daryl Ooi distinguishes three types of argument, arguments from objectively horrifying evil, pragmatic arguments, and arguments from reasonable responses. (See Ooi, D., “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Philosophy Compass 2022 17(8), pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12866 )

Alvin Plantinga has sketched arguments of the first type. (See Ooi, op. cit. for references.) My ‘demonological’ argument is also of this type. Marilyn McCord-Adams offers a pragmatic argument, the gist of which is as follows.

……………………

Rudolf Höss, not to be confused with Hitler’s Landsberg amanuensis, Rudolf Hess, was a torturer by day but a loving family man by night. [ENDNOTE: Rudolf Höss (1900–1947) was a German SS officer and the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex, serving from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944. Höss was instrumental in industrializing mass murder, introducing Zyklon B as the primary method of execution in Auschwitz gas chambers. During the Nuremberg Trials, he provided detailed affidavits and testimony regarding the camp’s operations, admitting to personally supervising the extermination of approximately 1.1 million people. AI generated.]

AI and Demons

You may remember our 'demonic' discussion from last summer. See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., "The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the 'soul' or will') of a person by one or more evil spirits." (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher's book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions. 

The Dangers of Psychic Phenomena on the Spiritual Quest

The thoughts of Paul Brunton well presented in a short video. I have been reading him for years. Like Thomas Merton, the man is at his best in his journals. I have read and re-read all sixteen volumes. For some extracts see my Brunton category. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ghosts and Death

Leslie Kean's Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017) just arrived via Amazon. HT to Vito for recommending it. It looks good. Have book, will blog.  Pressed for time this evening. But not so pressed that I can't scrounge up three tunes.

Highwaymen, Ghost Riders in the Sky

Spiderbait rendition

Blood, Sweat, and Tears, And When I Die

Time for Mark Levin. 

Rod Dreher on Fr. Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior

Dreher quotes Martins:

Between these two goals—tempting man and gaining him for eternity—there is another evil desire that the Devil aims to satisfy: the possession of his victim. Possession is the state where the victim is under demonic control from the inside. The demon takes over the body of the one he possesses. During possession, a victim’s consciousness is suppressed, and the demon animates his body as his own. 

Given that demons exist outside of time and space, how can a demon be “inside” someone during demonic possession? While a demon’s lack of physicality frees him of the limitations to which physical objects are subject and gives him access to everything in the physical universe simultaneously, he does not have power over all things equally. When the Devil possesses a victim—and is now “inside” him—the Devil has gained legal jurisdiction over him in such a manner that he can bully and manipulate the victim from the inside. The legal control a possessing spirit has is so great that the body he possesses appears to be his own. 

I'd like to hear more about this legal jurisdiction. If the possessing demon has a legal right to occupy and use the body of the human being who is possessed, from where does the demon get this right? Suppose some children are quite innocently fooling around with a Ouija board. Are they thereby inviting demons into their lives, and granting them the legal right to oppress or possess them?  Would a good God allow these kids to be ensnared in this way? I should think not.  Is there the makings here of an anti-theistic argument from evil? My Ouija board example is quite different in obvious ways from the Faust legend or the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a variant of which is here.

Dreher too is intrigued by the the legal aspect of possession, oppression, and the milder forms of demonic influence. "To me, the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the legalistic one. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that the demons are extremely effective lawyers."  From 'Demons are effective lawyers' it does not follow that effective lawyers are demons, though many will be 'tempted' to embrace that non sequitur. Remember Michael Avenatti? But I digress.

Dreher quotes some more:

An exorcist must focus not on the demon but on why the demon is present. Stated differently, if a demon inhabits someone, he has been granted the right. Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his. Just as someone who owns a deed to a property cannot be evicted from it, an exorcist cannot evict a demon from a victim over whom he has gained the right to possess. 

Uncovering demonic rights is challenging and can be the most difficult part of an exorcist’s work. A victim himself often does not know how he has acquired demons. In the case of Jeremy, this was not the case. He knew exactly why he had a demon: he had agreed to a pact with him. But it is often not that easy. An exorcist will probe a victim’s experience, personal history, and psyche to locate the legal claims a demon may have. The demon will do everything he can to remain hidden. 

I plan to return to these questions after I read the book by Martins which I expect to arrive in early December.

Jeffrey Long, M. D. on Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

Here (under 5 minutes).

'Coded' as used by Dr. Long in this video clip is medical jargon. For a patient to 'code' is for the patient to suffer cardiac arrest. 

It is a mistake to think that if an episode of experiencing is real, then  the intentional object of that episode of experiencing is also real. The question I want to pose is whether Dr. Long is making that mistake. But first I must explain the mistake and why it really is a mistake.

Consider a perceptual illusion.  I am returning from a long hike at twilight. I am tired and the light is bad. Suddenly I 'see' a rattlesnake.  I shout out to my partner and I stop marching forward. But it turns out that what I saw was a twisted tree root. This is a typical case of a visual perceptual illusion.  (There are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory illusions.)

What I initially 'saw' is what I am calling the intentional object. The intentional object, the object intended, is distinct from the act  (occurrent episode) of consciousness directed upon the intentional object. Act and intentional object are obviously distinct; but that is not to say that the one can exist without the other: they are, necessarily, correlates of one another.  No act without an intentional object, no intentional object without an act. 

Now not all episodes of consciousness are object-directed, or consciousnesses of something (the 'of' to be read as an objective genitive). But some conscious states of a person are object-directed. These mental states exhibit what philosophers call 'intentionality.'  (Bear in mind that 'intentionality' as here used  is a term of art, a terminus technicus, not to be confused with more specific ordinary-language uses of 'intend' and 'intentionality.') Intentionality, then,  is object-directedness.  One must not assume, however, that every object of an intentional mental state  exists. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. 

Philosophers before and after Franz Brentano have repeatedly pointed out that the intentional object of  (subjective genitive) an object-directed state of consciousness  may or may not exist.  Intentionality, we may say, has the 'non-inference property.'  From 'S is conscious of  an F,' one cannot validly infer, 'there exists an x such that x is an F.' For example, if I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about a centaur, it does not follow that there exists a centaur that I am imagining, or hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply thinking about.

In my hiking example, the snake I 'saw' did not exist. But there is no denying that (i) something  appeared to me, something that caused me to shout out and stop hiking, and that (ii) what  appeared to me did not have the properties of a tree root — else I would not have shouted out and stopped moving.  I have no fear of tree roots. The intentional object had, or rather appeared to have, the properties of a rattlesnake. So in this case, the correlate of the act, the intentional object, did not exist. And this without prejudice to the reality of the act. 

If we agree that to be real = to exist extra-mentally ('outside' the mind), then in my example, the visual experience was real but its intentional object was not.

Suppose now that a person 'codes.' He suffers cardiac arrest. Oxygenated blood does not reach his brain,  and in consequence his EEG flatlines, which indicates that brain activity has ceased  and that the patient is 'brain dead.'  Suppose that at that very moment he has an NDE. An NDE is an occurrent episode of experiencing which is, moreover, intentional or object-directed.  The typical intentional object or objects of NDEs include such items as a tunnel, lights, angels, dead ancestors, and the the heavenly realm as described in Long's video, and as described in innumerable similar accounts of NDEs.  But from the occurrence and thus the reality of the near-death experiencing it does not follow that the heavenly realm and its contents are also real.  Their status might be merely intentional, and thus not real,  and this despite their being extremely vivid. 

Yes or no? This is the question I am raising.

Is it logically consistent with the patient's having of that near-death experience that he not survive his bodily death as an individual person who 'goes to heaven'?  Yes it is.   That he had a real experience is not in question. The patient was near death, but he was alive when he had the experience.  He is here to answer our questions. The patient is honest, and if anyone knows  whether he had an NDE, he does. He is the authority; he enjoys 'privileged access' to his mental states. 

But unless one confuses intentio and intentum, act and object, experiencing and the experienced-qua-experienced, one has to admit that the reality of the experiencing does not guarantee the reality of heaven or of angels or of dead/disembodied souls or one's  survival of  one's bodily death.

For it could be — it is epistemically possible that — it is like this. When a patient's EEG flatlines, and he does not recover, but actually dies, then his NDE, if he had one, is his last  experience, even if  it turns out to be an experience as of  heaven. Perhaps at the moment of dying, but while still alive, he 'sees' his beloved dead wife approach him, and he 'sees' her reach out to him, and he 'sees' himself reach out to her, but he does not see her or himself, where 'see' is being used as a 'verb of success.'  ('See' is being used as a verb of success if and only if 'S sees x' is so used as to entail 'X exists.' When 'S sees x' is used without this entailment, what we have is a phenomenological use of 'see.'  Note that both uses are literal. The phenomenological use is not figurative. Admittedly, the point being made in this parenthesis needs defense in  a separate post.)

If this epistemic possibility cannot  be ruled out, then there is no proof of an afterlife from NDEs. In that case we cannot be objectively certain that our man 'went to heaven'; we must countenance the possibility that he simply ceased to exist as an individual person.

Finally, can Dr. Long be taxed with having committed the mistake of confusing the reality of the experiencing with the reality of the experienced-qua-experienced? I think he can. The video shows that he is  certain that there is a heaven to which we go after death, and that the existence of this heaven  is proven by the very large number of NDEs that have been reported by honest people. But he is not entitled to this certainty, and he hasn't proven anything.

Am I denying that we survive our bodily deaths as individual persons? No! My point is merely that we cannot prove that we do on the basis of NDEs.  There is no rationally coercive argument from the reality of NDEs to the reality of an afterlife in which we continue to exist as individual persons.  

Reading Now: Demonic Foes

By Richard Gallagher, M. D. Available via Amazon.

It arrived yesterday and I'm already 60 pages into its 247 pages.  A page-turner for sure.  I did, however, refrain from reading any of it in bed last night before drifting off — for obvious reasons.  Experiences of my own incline me to take very seriously "Unseen Warfare."
 
Dr. Gallagher comes across as a very credible witness.  Rooted as he is in Western canons of rationality and scientific method, he nonetheless appreciates that there are points at which methodological naturalism must give way in the teeth of massive evidence of super- and preter-natural phenomena.
 
This article features an interview with Dr. Gallagher.
 
UPDATE (6/14).  I am now up to p. 82.  It gets better and better. Packed with distinctions essential for clear thinking about this topic. 

Intimations of Elsewhere: Sensible Reminders of Hidden Beauty

Salzburg, Austria, December 1971. A young Austrian girl, radiant and beautiful, walked into the kitchen. I lost all desire for the food I had prepared.  My soul sprouted wings. The visible beauty triggered a memory of a timeless Beauty. Anamnesis pierced for a moment the amnesia induced by the bodily senses.

Dayton, Ohio, 1978. Gripped by the audible beauty of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, the solo passage near the beginning of the Larghetto (26:33), upon return from a long, hard run, I could not eat the huge salad I had prepared. I set it down, my appetite gone.

Simone Weil (FLN, 318): "When once the whole of one's desire is turned toward God, one has no desire to eat when one is hungry."

The metaphysical elsewhere: beyond space, before time. Space- and time-bound as we are 'at present,' we must use spatial and temporal language to point beyond the spatiotemporal.

The intimations are rare. Don't ignore them, record them, honor and remember them. To dismiss them as the worldly are wont to do strikes me as the height of spiritual foolishness.

Contemplating Suicide?

Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit.  You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence?  You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.  

Pike Other SideIt would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals.  It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause. 

Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:

I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings.  (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)

 

Pike James A.If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited  is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.

Mortalism

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul – or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,  Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

     As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or
     vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a
     foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any
     diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness,
     accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading
     of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:

   1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied
   consciousness in a variety of ways.

   Therefore

   2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like  this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues  to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it had while embodied.  Variations in the quality of consciousness would be exactly what one would expect given the soul's embodiment.

Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any committed mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist  would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied.  For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of consciousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it.  One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith — or unfaith.

Related post: Near-Death Experiences:  Do They Prove Anything?