Joe Heschmeyer examines the subject of demonic activity, posession, and exorcism and the case it presents for the truthfulness of Catholicism.

Transcription:

Demonic possessions, miraculous cures, exorcisms. These things play a pretty big part of the New Testament story as Graham 12 tree points out, the academic dean for the London School of Theology. Of all the activities associated with Jesus in the synoptic gospels, Matthew, mark, and Luke exorcism appears to be the single activity that took the greatest amount of his time. Now, you would not know that listening to the way a lot of modern Christians talk about Christianity, there’s no mention of the supernatural of relics or miracles or exorcisms or any of these things. And yet, as 12th tree points out, we know of no historical or literary figure in antiquity who is said to have conducted so many exorcisms. So how do we square this? Well, 12th tree makes the argument that we’re uncomfortable with exorcisms as moderns. We think of this as kind of a superstitious thing that old people believed in antiquity, and he puts it like this. He says, the fundamental problem is the premise on which exorcism is based, that malevolent spiritual beings, demons exist and that they can invade control and observably impair the health of an individual who in turn can be cured through someone purportedly forcing the spiritual beings to leave.

That is not a claim that sits well with modern Christians anymore than it sits well with modern non-Christians, as well as free says for the vast majority of biblical scholars and theologians, this is tantamount to believe in such entities as elves, dragons, or flat earth. I would go further and say plenty of people believe in one of those three things and still bulk at the idea that the demonic exists and that exorcisms are real. So maybe we could put the problem like this in Luke chapter 11. Jesus says, if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. That is the core message of Jesus. The opening words in Mark’s gospel repentant belief for the kingdom of God is at hand. One of the ways Jesus showed that the kingdom of God was at hand was the exorcisms, that the finger of God is among you in casting out demons.

Now we’re going to get back to Luke 11 and take a closer look at that, but I want to just acknowledge that we have to square these two things as Christians. On the one hand, it’s very clear from reading the New Testament that exorcisms are all over the place and that Jesus is doing a lot of what he believes are exorcisms. On the other hand, it’s clear that we now know that many things that may be old people in the medieval era or the ancient world thought of as spiritual problems are medical or psychological problems. So let’s confront that objection head on because I think that’s at the heart of where we get really uncomfortable with the miraculous claims. So let’s talk about miracles in medicine, one of the most common misconceptions is that the ancients, the people in Jesus’ day, maybe Jesus himself, viewed everything as a spiritual problem, and that is simply not true.

In fact, the biblical evidence points to the opposite. In Matthew chapter four, for instance, we find Jesus’s ministry described this way that he was going about Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted, various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics, and he healed them. So notice what you have there. You have different categories of ailment or illness if you want to put it that way. You’ve got on the one hand, people suffering from a physical condition. On the other hand, you have people suffering from a mental or a neurological condition, and then you have acts for suffering from a spiritual affliction. But there is implicit in this the recognition that those are different categories, that there is a distinction between different types of ailment or illness and some of that, but not all of it is spiritual.

In fact, Jesus describes his own ministry as being a spiritual physician. He says those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. What’s implied within that is that there is such a thing as illness for which you need not a priest or a pastor or an exorcist, but a physician. And so Jesus is applying those words metaphorically to himself. He’s not claiming to be an actual medical doctor here. He’s performing spiritual cures with people, but that presupposes that there is such a thing as medical doctors, as physicians. In fact, those words were in the gospel of Luke and we’re told by St. Paul in Colossians that Luke is the beloved physician. So the ancient world, contrary to our modern kind of prejudices against it, understood that not everything was spirits. Not everything was demons. Now maybe they misdiagnosed some things maybe we do as well, but that doesn’t prove the case against the demonic.

I’d give this example. There’s what’s called psychosomatic disorders, psycho meaning like the psyche, the mental state and soma of the body that there are things that can go wrong where your interior distress, anxiety, that sort of thing can manifest in actual physical ailments. Now, a doctor could look at that and they might misdiagnose it. They might mistake a psychological problem for a physical one or a physical one for a psychological one. Plenty of people have these stories about being misdiagnosed that they had a really chronic condition and they went to the doctor and the doctor said, oh, it’s all in your head. You’re just stressed or you’re anxious or you’re neurotic or whatever else, and they really had a physical problem. Or you have people where way around they go and get a bunch of unnecessary procedures when they really needed some sort of mental health care.

So we can make that distinction now and say, look, there’s these different categories, these different buckets, if you will, in the human person. You have the mind and the body. Well, likewise, the soul may be the reason why things are going wrong, not the mind or the body. It may not be a mental problem, it may not be a bodily problem. It may be a spiritual problem. So I hope that distinction is clear. You don’t have to believe that every problem is demons. The New Testament doesn’t claim that every problem is demons. It quite clearly shows Jesus performing physical healings. It quite clearly shows him doing a lot of healings that don’t involve driving out demons whatsoever. And it quite clearly shows contrary to some modern groups like the Christian scientists that medical doctors are good. This is part of God’s plan. You take care of the body.

So given all of that, I would suggest we want to watch out for modern bias, assuming the people in the past were just silly and stupid. In fact, I would go further than that and say, we need to, as Christians take very seriously the argument from the supernatural and the argument. I’m going to look in this case, it’s the argument from the demonic, but you can make a parallel argument for the miraculous. The arguments I’m going to make work in both directions. Whether it’s a supernatural malevolent force or benevolent force is not really the point. The point is that you have these beings that can’t be explained in a naturalistic material way and that don’t make sense on the grounds of atheism. So let’s talk about that. What is the burden of proof? Why should everyone, Christians, non-Christians take really seriously the demonic claim? To just reiterate and to make sure we’re really clear, Christians do not claim that every ailment is a demon or a ghost or a miracle.

We don’t even claim that all purported, demonic or miraculous or ghostly sightings are real. We rather take them on a case by case basis. Plenty of people think that they saw a ghost and didn’t. Plenty of people think they’re sick and it’s in their head. That doesn’t disprove the idea of sickness. It doesn’t disprove the idea of ghosts. On the flip side, atheist, at least what are called materialistic atheist atheists who believe that the world of matter is all there is, there’s no supernatural or spiritual world. They deny definitionally the reality of ghosts, of demonic possessions, of miracles, of any kind of divine or supernatural action prior to judge in any particular case, right? If Ms. O’Grady says, there was this horrible ailment that I had and the doctor said I had 30 seconds to live, and then I said this prayer and then was miraculously cured and left the hospital, Tristan can say, that’s amazing.

That’s a miracle. Or Well, maybe the doctor’s misdiagnosed you. They’re free to do either one. The atheist is not free to do either one without contradicting their priors, their priors foreclose the question. They’ve prejudged it. GK Chesterton makes this in a powerful way. This point in his book Orthodoxy back in I believe 1905, he says, my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all. I believe in them upon human evidence as I do in the discovery of America, right? An Englishman like Chesterton, he hasn’t seen America directly, but he believes in it on the basis of the testimony of others on that kind of evidence, and this is why he’s going to say he believes in miracles. But then he says, there’s a simple logical fact that we have to get straight somehow or other. An extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and unfairly while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma.

In other words, as if Christians are forced to accept these ridiculous, miraculous claims while atheists and agnostics and skeptics are just coldly evaluating on a case by case basis, and he says that gets things entirely backwards. The fact is quite the other way around. The believers in miracles accept them rightly or wrongly because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them rightly or wrongly because they have a doctrine against them. In other words, take the O’Grady example. I can believe or disbelieve O’Grady because of O’Grady, the atheist rejects O’Grady at the outset because her testimony doesn’t fit with his vision of the world. That’s dogmatism and chesterton’s going to call it out for the dogmatism that it’s, and his words, it says, the open, obvious democratic thing is to believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a miracle. Just as you believe an old apple woman when she bears testimony to a murder, the plain popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost, exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord, and he points out, look, you could fill the British museum with evidence uttered by the peasant and given in favor of the coast.

If it comes to human testimony, there’s a choking cataract of human testimony in favor of the supernatural. Now, I want to witness to this. I was once at a bar in Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas, and I was supposed to be meeting up with some people, and I was there by mistake an hour early. And so I ended up talking to the bar regulars who were just there on a weeknight at six or seven or whatever time it was, and somehow the conversation got around to the miraculous and to ghosts and to demons, just kind of those supernatural, eerie sort of sightings. And it seemed that every person in that bar, I’m sure it wasn’t literally everyone, but it was one person after another after another, once they had the safety of saying like, oh, okay, this is a place where we can talk about this openly.

One person after another after another had these stories. Now, does that automatically prove that any or all of the stories are true? It does, but it would be a mistake to assume that there isn’t a lot of testimonial evidence in favor of these things. People claim to have seen a lot of stuff that contradicts atheism. And so you can only as Chesterton argues respond to that if you’re going to reject it. You have to do it in one of two ways. You either reject the peasant story because he’s a peasant or because the story’s a ghost story. If you reject the peasant story because he’s a peasant, he says, you deny the main principle of democracy. You’re just kind of taking this condescending view that, well, this person isn’t as smart as me. They must be gullible. They must believe just anything. You can take that view of your fellow men if you want to, or you could affirm the main principle of materialism, the abstract impossibility of the miracle.

But in either case, you are being the dogmatist here, you’re not evaluating the evidence on his merits, you’re rejecting the evidence because it doesn’t agree with your dogmas. And as Christians, we need to do a better job of calling that out. And as atheists, I think you need to do a better job of recognizing that reality and coming to terms with it that no, it is not true, that atheism just logically follows from the lack of testimony about the supernatural. There’s an abundance of testimony about the supernatural atheism rejects it in most cases, entirely out of hand. We’re going to take a look at one of those cases in a little bit here. Chesterton says it like this. He says, it is weak Christians who accept all actual evidence. It is I rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed, but I’m not constrained by my creed in the matter and looking impartially into certain miracles of medieval and modern times.

I’ve come to the conclusion that they occurred. But notice he’s not not forced to accept them, right? He’s free to handle the evidence, follow wherever it goes, but the person who kind of scoffs who says that could never happen, has already judged the case on a thing that they really have no basis upon which to judge it. And Chesterton points out the arguments here are usually pretty absurdly circular. He says, if I say medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles, and this is pretty true, right? You look at ancient and medieval documents, you’re going to find taken for granted in there the idea that certain miracles happen and the person there witnessed them. It’s not some sort of controversial claim. It’s not going to get a lot of headlines. It’s just taken as a given. And yet modern historians are going to accept the testimony about the war, but not about the miracle.

There’s a famous example of this in the crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar claimed to have gotten a sign like some sort of supernatural sign that he was supposed to cross. Now, historians don’t believe in the sign, but they do believe the crossing of the Rubicon happened just not the way everyone who witnessed it said it happened. That’s dogmatism. That’s not just following the available evidence. So put a pin on that and I’m going to go back to Chesterton’s argument. So he says, if I say medieval documents attest certain miracles, as much as they attest certain battles, they meaning rationalists answer, but medievals were superstitious. If I want to know on what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in miracles. So you see the circularity if you say you’ll only accept miraculous accounts if told by people who don’t believe in miracles, you’re putting not just a thumb on the scale, you’re seemingly judging the case before it’s before you.

Mike was, he says, if I say a peasant saw a ghost, I’m told, but peasants are so credulous, if I ask why credulous, the only answer is, well that they see ghosts. So you can always look at the underclass or the people who don’t have the same degrees as you and say, oh, those people are still booed and gullible and I’m not going to believe their evidence. But it may be that you are just prejudging the case and that they actually are onto something that you are not. And so Chesterton puts it like this. He imagines an argument that just goes, Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it. And the sailors are only stupid because they’ve seen Iceland say they’ve seen Iceland. That’s what you’re doing here. If the medievals are stupid because they claim miraculous stuff happens or they’re credulous because they claim miraculous stuff happens, that is entirely a circular argument where you say, I’ll take any evidence for the miraculous unless it’s given by someone who believes in the miraculous.

What evidence could possibly satisfy that? Alright, so putting it very simply, the burden of proof looks something like this. As I said before, we don’t claim that all claims of demons or ghosts or miracles are true, but rather the materialist atheists deny the reality of all those claims. So even one contrary case disproves, materialistic atheism, that if you can point to even one. So let’s say there’s 10 alleged miracles, there are 10 alleged demonic possession cases, 10 alleged exorcisms, 10 alleged ghost settings, whatever, it’s maybe you can make a really convincing argument that nine of those are hoaxes or frauds or the person was actually suffering from a mental issue that was misdiagnosed or whatever. It was just an old house that happens to be creaky. But if that one turns out to be a pretty convincing account of ghosts and demons and supernatural in whatever form that is, evidence of the Christian side.

So it’s like this. If I believe that there’s a thing called COVID-19, it doesn’t disprove that to say, I think you’re sick and I don’t think you have covid, which I don’t think I do. I think I’m a little sick. I don’t think I have covid. Well, likewise, I’m doing a video on miraculous stuff and on demonic stuff, and I wake up sick, unable to speak clearly, and one answer is Ah, demons maybe, but it could also just be a physical ailment. I was around people who were sick, and so I’ve just downed a liter and a half of orange juice and we power through with a little more gravitas than usual. I hope The point there is that if even one of those claims turns out to be true for the Christian side, that disproves the atheist side. But if one of those claims turns out not to be true, that’s actually completely consistent with Christianity.

It is fine to say my sickness is probably not demonic possession. It might just be a coincidence and it is fine to say this other case might be different. So what I want to do now is look at one particular case. This is one case I have found really fascinating personally, and your mileage may vary. You might find it interesting, you might find it ridiculous, but what I find fascinating about it is the different reactions Christians and atheists tend to have to it. It’s called the Amons exorcism case. So here’s an introduction to the case from one of the priests involved.

CLIP:

The first time I heard about the incident was when just after the boy walked up the wall backwards, there was a F there about people running out calling for the police security, the chaplain, he called me,

Joe:

I’m sorry father, you were called after the boy did what? Walked up the wall backwards. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the strange things in this case. So this case, credit words do Marissa Kowski of the Indianapolis Star broke this case. She later became more famous for breaking the case of Gary Nassar and his abuse of the gymnast for team USA gymnastics. But at the time, back in 2014 when she broke this story, it was by far her biggest kind of breakthrough, and I’m actually going to talk about that a little bit later on because she had to work against some institutional forces to present this really astonishing, and I think it’s fair to say at times incredible sort of case. And I mean that in the literal sense of both amazing, but also hard to believe and some people refuse to believe it, but it has two things going for it as we’re going to see, we’re really hard to explain facts and a number of apparently unrelated and reputable sort of witnesses.

So I’m going to give you just some of the passages from this story, which was picked up from the Indianapolis store star two USA today. She said a woman and three children claimed to be possessed by demons. A nine-year-old boy walking backward up a wall in the presence of a family case manager and hospital nurse. So it’s not just that he’s walking backwards up the wall, it’s that you don’t have to take mom or grandma’s word for it. The people who are checking on him because of these claims of demonic possession are writing about this stuff and official reports. And then she quotes the police captain for Gary Indiana, Charles Austin saying it was the strangest story he’d ever heard. And he was initially skeptical. He’s been a veteran of the police department for 36 years at this point, and he doesn’t originally believe it. He thinks for some reason she must be trying to use this somehow to make money.

But after several visits to the home, he comes away a believer and we’re going to see some reasons why he and particular seemed to have been targeted and has a good cause to come away, a believer. But she says not everyone involved with the family was inclined to believe its incredible story and many readers will find amman’s supernatural claims impossible to accept. And I like that phrasing because I think it gets to that issue that if you’re following this just on the evidence, if this was any other kind of news story, if someone said, there’s been a horrible massacre, it’s unthinkable, and yet here are these police officers and medical professionals and eyewitnesses and everything else who all attest to the same thing, we would be heavily inclined to believe that it was real. But when it’s instead these children were possessed by demons or this house is haunted, well then we don’t want to believe it.

But that’s just an out of hand dismissal. Dogmatically not an evaluation of the evidence. So I like that she calls it just impossible to accept, not hard to believe or anything like that because the claims themselves, if you get rid of the bias, seem compelling. Let’s read on, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. She says, whatever the cause of the creepy occurrences at be fellow family, whether they were seized by a systematic delusion or demonic possession, it led to one of the most unusual cases ever handled by the Department of Child Services. So for those of you not familiar, the Department of Child Services checks in on families. If there’s a reason to suspect a child may be in danger, malnutrition, abuse, neglect, those kinds of things, in this case when you’ve got kids saying, I’m possessed by a demon, DCS is going to get involved, they’re wondering, is this a cry for help because of something going on in the home?

But notice here, again, I really like the reporter’s language that the options really are demonic possession or systematic delusion that you can’t just say, oh, the mom’s crazy, or the grandma’s crazy. You also say the doctors are crazy and the medical professionals and the police are crazy, and department child services, everybody’s crazy. Everybody in Gary is just crazy. Now, you can do that if you want to, but it is less probable every person you have to add to the conspiracy to be able to pass it off as a counter explanation to no, ... Read more on Catholic.com