Since Christians so often suggest that something or other is demonic, and much of the time they seem to do it with a lot of carelessness, it's worth considering the problems with falsely attributing things to demons. My focus here will be on attributing paranormal activity to demons, but the principles I'll be discussing also have a broader application. I'm not trying to be exhaustive. I'm just providing some examples:
- We should value accuracy as a general principle, whether we're considering demonic activity or some other topic. We don't always know all of the implications of something. An error in one place could lead to a bad result in some other place where we didn't expect it. We don't always know how things are connected. We should try to be accurate in general, including when discussing demons.
- There are other explanatory options, and some people will be aware of that fact. What impression are you giving people if you're careless in handling the explanatory options? Why is something being attributed to demons rather than to some other source, such as living humans, the deceased, or place memories? It's problematic if Christians give the impression that they have unreasonably little familiarity with other explanatory options or unreasonably little interest in responsibly sorting through the options they're aware of.
- You can better treat a problem if you diagnose it correctly. We recognize that fact in other contexts, such as medicine, and it's true in the context of the paranormal as well.
- Many paranormal phenomena have characteristics that seem to be better explained by a source other than demons, such as poltergeists that go away when a psychological problem in the life of one of the participants goes away. A lot of paranormal activity is trivial, nonsensical, fragmentary, closely aligned with human psychology, or of some other nature that's better explained or has a large amount of potential to be better explained by a non-demonic source. When addressing near-death experiences, UFOs, or other paranormal phenomena, people will often highlight characteristics of those phenomena that they think would be explained well by demonic activity, but there often are other characteristics involved that don't fit well with the demonic hypothesis. You have to explain the evidence as a whole, not just a portion of it.
- Appeals to the demonic seem to often reflect a character flaw, and the more somebody appeals to the demonic hypothesis in that sort of context, the worse their character gets. People can appeal to demons to explain the paranormal because of laziness. They find it a quick and easy explanation, and they don't want to do the work of sorting through a larger variety of explanatory options. Or there may be a problem with emotionalism. Somebody finds it exciting or emotionally appealing in some other way to attribute things to demons. It's more dramatic than other explanations, suggests there's more at stake, and so on. I often come across people who say or suggest that they supposedly know that something is demonic because of a feeling, an intuition, or some such thing, and their comments will often be met by other Christians in the conversation nodding their heads or expressing agreement in some other way. I often wonder how these people supposedly know that the thing in question is demonic and how they're so seemingly confident about it. Or somebody might tend toward demonic explanations because they're overly pessimistic, have a misguided sense that it would be too dangerous to underestimate demons by assigning too little to them, or some such thing. I'm just bringing up several examples here without trying to be exhaustive. Given the state of our culture and other evidence we have for a lot of character problems in contexts like the United States, I'd expect a large percentage of appeals to the demonic hypothesis to involve character flaws in one way or another.
- The demonic hypothesis often causes problems for the people closest to the paranormal activity. They're held in more suspicion than they would be otherwise. What if it's their fault that demons are active in their lives? What did they do to get involved in demonic activity? Maybe their relatives are guilty of doing something wrong that brought demons into their lives. If we can't see any evidence of something they did wrong to bring on the demonic activity, we should be highly suspicious that something like that is involved and hasn't been uncovered yet. We need to avoid such people. If we get too close to them, the paranormal activity may start happening in our lives as well, sort of like catching a cold. Etc. Guy Playfair wrote about those who experience poltergeists, "As word spreads around that something spooky is going on in your house, you suddenly find your friends pointedly looking the other way when you pass them in the street. People give you funny looks in the local shops. Passers-by stop and stare at your house. You receive malicious phone calls and threatening letters. In short, your life is ruined." (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], vii)
There's good reason to think demons exist and that they're highly active in the modern world. However, we have to be careful in distinguishing among the explanatory options and not attribute too much to demons. I've discussed some of the principles involved, beyond what I've said above, in other posts, like here.
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