Healings In UFO And Other Non-Christian Contexts (Part 2)

Picking up where I left off in my last post, I want to respond to chapter 6 in Rey Hernandez, et al., edd., Beyond UFOs (United States: The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation, 2018). The chapter was written by Joseph Burkes, a retired doctor and UFO researcher, and Preston Dennett, a UFO researcher, and it addresses alleged healings that occurred in the context of UFO experiences. They examine ten cases and discuss some other research on the topic.

Does ending UFO experiences by appealing to Jesus prove that the experiences were demonic and provide evidence for Christianity?

My last post cited some material from Jonathan Kendall's new book on UFOs. I want to quote another part of the book that's relevant to a different topic I've addressed before. I'll quote my comments in an earlier post, then quote Jonathan's book.

Creating A Ghost

In a post last week, I mentioned the possibility that an apparition of the dead involves a place memory or an appearance of a deceased human rather than a demon. I want to discuss another explanatory option.

Should we expect demonic and other paranormal activities today to be the same as they are in the Biblical record?

No, since there are significant contextual differences. Not all historical contexts are the same. They involve different individuals, with different things at stake, etc. The Bible is Divine revelation that's meant to address some topics and not others and to address the topics it does cover to different degrees. Just as it doesn't tell us everything about astronomy or prayer, for example, it also doesn't tell us everything about the paranormal. There are reasons for the Bible to give a lot of attention to one thing and little or no attention to something else, even if the thing that gets little or no attention is more common, is more relevant to people in some contexts, etc. The fact that illness X was more common than illness Y in Biblical times, and therefore gets discussed more in scripture, doesn't change the fact that we should be giving much more attention, money, and other resources to Y if it's far more common than X in the modern world, does more harm than X, and so forth. Similarly, there's a different rate of literacy today than in Biblical times, so we expect more from people accordingly (e.g., how much we expect them to read scripture). Or when something like transgenderism becomes more popular at a certain point in history than it was at another point, we make adjustments to accommodate that. The same is true with paranormal matters. If near-death experiences are being discussed much more today than in past generations, including during the Biblical era, then we should make adjustments accordingly, living in the way appropriate to our context, not the Biblical one.

Interacting With The Dead

Greg Koukl addressed the issue of interacting with the dead on a recent podcast. Start listening at 50:16 here. He was responding to a Christian caller whose parents have recently been having some allegedly paranormal experiences that they've interpreted as contact from their deceased daughter. I suspect ninety-some percent of the Evangelicals who would typically listen to a program like Greg's would agree with the answer he provides. But I want to address some problems with it. In addition to addressing what Greg and the caller said, I want to talk about some other misconceptions I suspect many people have about these issues.

Problems With Attributing Too Much To Demons

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:

Jacques Vallee On UFOs And "Satan's Toys"

He was recently interviewed by Ross Coulthart, and the subject of the demonic explanation of UFOs came up. Coulthart asked about the widespread reports that Christians (apparently primarily or exclusively Evangelicals) in the United States government have tried to shut down UFO research on the basis that UFOs are demonic and that we shouldn't do further research into them. Coulthart and Vallee both dismiss that sort of reasoning, comparing it to refusing to investigate a crime because it involves evil. I agree with them that even if the demonic hypothesis were true, the government and other people should still research UFOs and, in fact, should research them a lot. For more on the subject, see here. What I want to do in this post is focus on some other comments Coulthart and Vallee made while addressing the issue of demonic activity.

How To Argue For Miracles And Demonic Activity In Particular

Here's something I recently wrote in private correspondence about miracles. I was addressing a large number and variety of issues and providing links to articles that say more, so I didn't go into a lot of depth in the correspondence itself. I wasn't attempting to cover every category of miracle or every related issue.

Not Aliens Or Demons

Since UFOs are in the news, I'll post some comments I made in an email exchange earlier this year:

I've read the book on UFOs by Ross, et al., and I've occasionally looked into the subject briefly in other contexts, but I haven't studied it much. One of the general parameters I would set down is that, as with other paranormal phenomena, it's important to include some explanatory options that Christians often neglect. I mentioned some of those options briefly in the fourth paragraph of my recent post about miracles on video (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/02/miracles-on-video-some-examples.html). The demonic hypothesis shouldn't be taken off the table, but it should be accompanied by a much larger number and variety of other options than Christians typically consider. When UFOs accommodate current human expectations regarding how aliens would behave, for example, that could be because demons are accommodating those expectations, but it could also be because the phenomena are coming from human psi and are being shaped by the human imagination (consciously or unconsciously). The problem isn't that Christians lack explanatory options for UFO phenomena. It's that we have so many options to choose from and not much to go by in choosing among the options. That could and should change over time as more research is done.

Something I keep coming back to in thinking about UFO phenomena is how events of a similar nature are known to occur on a smaller scale, such as in poltergeist cases (e.g., objects much smaller than a UFO moving around a house in "impossible maneuvers", as you put it). If something like human psi or the spirit of a deceased human could do that in a context like a poltergeist, why not also in a UFO context with a larger object? (I think it was Guy Playfair I heard talking about a poltergeist case in Brazil that involved the throwing of an automobile across a long distance. The objects that are moved aren't always small, though they usually are.) Demons exist, and it would be surprising if they didn't sometimes manifest themselves in the modern world, but the demonic hypothesis is just one option among others. And there could be all sorts of creatures we don't know about or don't know much about, like the unusual creatures referred to in some portions of scripture (e.g., Revelation).

A good first step would be to explain to people why an alien hypothesis for UFOs is highly unlikely, for reasons like the ones you've referred to. Then, we can explain what other options are available and cite examples, like poltergeist phenomena that are similar to UFO phenomena, though on a smaller scale. Once people realize how unlikely the alien hypothesis is, how many other options there are, and how similar UFO phenomena are to other kinds of phenomena, that should significantly change their perspective. It's good to get people less focused on aliens and more focused on more likely explanations….

UFO phenomena are different than poltergeist phenomena and more impressive in some ways, but there are significant similarities as well. In the Enfield case, the large majority of the apports occurred in the house, such as rocks or coins appearing near a ceiling and dropping down. There was a series of outdoor apports on May 30, 1978, however, involving objects like rocks, bottles, and clumps of earth moving around outside, including objects falling from the sky. You could say that the May 30 events were a sort of escalation of the previous events inside the house. If such events could move from within the house to the immediate atmosphere outside the house, why couldn't they occur further away as well, where UFO phenomena usually happen?

As far as I recall, almost every apport object I'm familiar with that's been tested has produced normal results in terms of the composition of the object. It seems like the sort of material we encounter under normal circumstances. The rocks, coins, and such seem normal. But they're abnormal in other ways, such as where and how they first appear, how they move, and their temperature (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc_TV6KmSZk).

Crooked spirits

Steve recently posted an article from Craig Keener. The entire article deserves to be read, but I thought the following sections might be worth highlighting:

Ancient Christians accepted the reality of spirits besides God but believed that, in any confrontation, their God would readily overcome all other spirits not submitted to him. In the second century, the Christian movement often spread through exorcisms; it was considered common knowledge that Christians could cast out demons (Barrett–Lennard, 1994, pp. 228–229; Lampe, 1965, pp. 215–217; MacMullen, 1984, pp. 27–28, 40–41, 60–61; Martin, 1988, pp. 49–50, 58–59; Sears, 1988, pp. 103–104; Young, 1988, pp. 107–108).

Tertullian (c. 155–c. 225) even challenged the church’s persecutors to bring demonized people to Christian court hearings; the demon will always submit, he insisted, or if not, the court should feel free to execute the Christian as a fake (Apology 23.4–6)! Tertullian lists prominent pagans whom Christians had cured from evil spirits (Tertullian Ad Scapulam 4, in Kelsey, 1973, pp. 136–137). In the fourth century, exorcisms and miracles are the most frequently listed reason for conversion to Christianity (MacMullen, 1984, pp. 61–62). Augustine reports affidavits attesting effective exorcisms (City of God 22.8; Confessions 9.7.16; Herum, 2009, pp. 63–65).

Still, a divide in cultural assumptions remains (see Acolatse, 2018; Mchami, 2001, p. 17). For example, residents of the Peruvian jungle, exposed for the first time to the Gospel of Mark, dismissed their Western translator’s rejection of real demons, noting that it comported with their local reality (Escobar, 2002, p. 86).

[...]

Many early Presbyterian missionaries to Korea had learned in seminary that spirits were not real, but most came to believe otherwise in the context of ministry alongside indigenous believers (Kim, 2011, pp. 270–273). My own experiences in Africa and those of my family (my wife is Congolese) have forced me to grapple with some hostile spiritual realities to which I would rather not have been exposed (Keener, 2011, pp. 852–856).

[...]

David Van Gelder, then a professor of pastoral counseling at Erskine Theological Seminary, rejects most claims of possession (1987, p. 160), but encountered a case that he could explain no other way. When a young man involved with the occult began “snarling like an animal,” nails attaching a crucifix to the wall melted, dropping the hot crucifix to the floor. A minister invited the young man to declare, “Jesus Christ, son of God,” but when he began to repeat this, the young man’s voice and facial expressions suddenly changed. “You fools,” he retorted, “he can’t say that.” Finally the group decided that he required exorcism, and calling on Jesus, managed to cast the spirit out (Van Gelder, 1987, pp. 151–154). Van Gelder observes that all the mental health professionals present agreed that the youth was not suffering from psychosis or other normal diagnoses (p. 158).

[...]

Another psychiatrist, R. Kenneth McAll, offers many examples. He observes that only 4 percent of the cases he has treated have required exorcism, but mentions that about 280 of his cases did require exorcism. Consistent with Crooks’ expectations, most of these involved the patients' or their familys' occult practices, such as ouija boards, witchcraft, horoscopes, etc. (1975, p. 296) He notes one case where a mother’s successful deliverance from spirits proved simultaneous, unknown to them, of her son’s instant healing from schizophrenia in a hospital 400 miles away, and the healing from tuberculosis of that son’s wife (1975, pp. 296–297). Other cases include:

1. A patient instantly freed from schizophrenia through an exorcism that removed an occult group’s curse.

2. The complete healing through an exorcism of a violent person in a padded cell who had previously not spoken for two years.

3. The instant healing of another person in a padded cell, when others far away and without her knowledge prayed for her; her aunt, a mental patient in another country, was cured simultaneously.

4. A six-year-old needed three adults to restrain him, but he was healed when his father repudiated Spiritualism.

[...]

Power encounters appear in early twentieth-century indigenous African Christian prophetic movements (Hanciles, 2004, p. 170; Koschorke, Ludwig, and Delgado, 2007, pp. 223–224). They continue today where indigenous Christian preachers confront traditional religions (Itioka, 2002; Khai, 2003, pp. 143–144; Lees and Fiddes, 1997, p. 25; Yung, 2002). Many converts from traditional African religions have burned fetishes and abandoned witchcraft practices due to power encounters (Burgess, 2008, p. 151; Mayrargue, 2001, p. 286; Merz, 2008, p. 203). By addressing pereived local needs, power encounters have expanded Christian movements in, e.g., Haiti (Johnson, 1970, pp. 54–58), Nigeria (Burgess, 2008, p. 153, before subsequent abuses in exorcism ministries), South Asia (Daniel, 1978, pp. 158–159; Pothen, 1990, pp. 305–308), the Philippines (Cole, 2003, p. 264; Ma, 2000), and Indonesia (Wiyono, 2001, pp. 278–279, 282; York, 2003, pp. 250–251).

Such displays of spiritual power have proved sufficiently compelling that even a number of shamans who previously claimed contact with spirits have switched allegiances to follow Christ, whom they decide is more powerful (Alexander, 2009, pp. 89, 110; De Wet, 1981, pp. 84–85, 91n2; Green, 2001, p. 108; Khai, 2005, p. 269; Pothen, 1990, p. 189). Thus, for example, a prominent Indonesian shaman had allegedly murdered a thousand people through curses (others also attesting her success); but she claims that she abandoned witchcraft to follow Jesus after experiencing a vision of him (Knapstad, 2005, pp. 83–85; cf. p. 89).

Crooked Spirits and Spiritual Identity Theft

http://www.craigkeener.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Crooked-Spirits-from-Journal-of-Mind-and-Behavior-39-4-2018-complete.pdf

The Bible and mythology

According to the Bible, human beings can be possessed by disembodied evil spirits. And while the Bible is a bit sketchy on the next part, the backstory seems to be that demonic evil spirits are the losers in a primeval civil war in heaven. Now if that's not mythological, what is? Certainly it seems that way to progressive theologians and atheists. These are the superstitious talltales of Bronze Age goatherds. 

But here's the catch: there's lots of direct empirical evidence that some human beings are possessed by evil spirits. Not just the stuff of ancient books or medieval monks. 

And if that's the case, then purely as a matter of logical elimination, there are only so many explanations. Either the evil spirits always existed or else they came into existence. Either they were always evil or else they became evil. 

So we could turn the exclamation around: if that's not mythological, where does that leave the rest of Scripture? 

Demon casting

"'I could see the demons': An exorcism in Arkansas"

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

I. I'm going to make a few observations about John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It reflects a classic contrast between Puritanism and Anglicanism. Both Puritanism and Anglicanism have virtues and vices. On the one hand, I think Bunyan's autobiography is somewhat overwrought. Moreover, he makes salvation seem like a trial by ordeal–where the goal is constantly threatened. That makes for gripping drama when he allegorized his autobiography (The Pilgrim's Progress), but it stands in tension with sola gratia. If salvation is truly by grace alone, then the outcome shouldn't be constantly in suspense, where you dare not relax. 

On the other hand, there's an urgency to his outlook that's unthinkable in Anglicanism. It's inconceivable that an Anglican could write The Pilgrim's Progress. That's because Anglicanism, with its pacific ritualism, is prone to index salvation to baptism, the eucharist, liturgical prayer, and public acts of worship. So long as you use the right mechanism, you're probably safe. Salvation by ritual.  

II. Critics sometimes note the contrast between Bunyan's trifling vices and his terrified guilt. It seems disproportionate. In the same vein, I'm reminded of Ruskin's statement (in Praeterita) that:

Though I felt myself somehow called to imitate Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress, I couldn't see that either Billiter Street and the Tower Wharf, where my father had his cellars, or the cherry-blossomed garden at Herne Hill [his boyhood home] where my mother potted her flowers, could be places I was bound to fly from as in the City of Destruction. Without much reasoning on the matter, I had virtually concluded from my general Bible reading that, never having meant or done any harm that I knew of, I could not be in danger of hell: while I saw also that even the crème de la crème of religious people seemed to be in no hurry to go to heaven. On the whole, it seemed to me, all that was required of me was to say my prayers, go to church, learn my lessons, obey my parents, and enjoy my dinner. 

That's an obstacle to evangelizing adults as well. While the sentiment is understandable and even acceptable in a child, what it fails to grasp or appreciate is that in Christian theology, we are born lost, absent divine intervention. It's not as if the default condition is that we're moving in a heavenward direction, and must commit some heinous sin to lose our way. Rather, we are lost at the outset, and must find our way out of the forest before we're overtaken by the snowy night. Bunyan was fundamentally right about that. 

Dreams And Trances At Enfield

The hardest Enfield tapes to listen to are the ones that feature the Hodgson children in altered states of consciousness, primarily in November of 1977. The states are often referred to as dreams and trances, so I've titled my post according to that convention, but we can't say much beyond the fact that some altered state of consciousness was involved. In a discussion with Hans Bender, Guy Playfair commented on Janet Hodgson's condition in the closing days of November:

We found the girl screaming, yelling, lying on the floor. She was underneath the table, trying to kick it over…The mother was absolutely desperate, you know. She didn't know what to do. And Luiz [Gasparetto, a Brazilian medium] spent about half an hour with her [Janet], and she immediately became quiet. I have all this on the tape. He talked to her very quietly in Portuguese, and she went to sleep. She went to sleep at 7 o'clock in the evening and she woke up the next morning only at 9 o'clock. That's fourteen hours of sleep. And she never had another hysterical fit. She just had one bad dream, and, after that, there was no more….The mother told me that she doesn't mind the tables falling over, but these hysterical attacks were absolutely too much, you know. She was really very, very distressed. And, I must say, that I was, too. It's one of the most horrible things I've ever seen, because they would go on for three, four hours. They would go on until 3 o'clock in the morning. And she would even wake up in a conversion. She was completely out for four days…Twice we called a doctor, emergency doctor, who gave her an injection of Valium…An interesting detail was that half an hour after she was given an injection of Valium, she was thrown out of bed, right across the room….the two girls would dream together….And we would open their eyes, and we would shine the torches [flashlights], and the pupil [wouldn't] contract. And we would also tickle under the arms, and they were completely asleep. And they would talk to each other….Again, we have it on tape. (tape 39B in Playfair's collection, 0:41)

Bell, Book, and Candle updated

Patrick Chan and I have updated the bibliography for this post:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/02/bell-book-candle.html

In addition, he fixed the dead links on the old post.

Fallen angels

It's striking how little the Bible explicitly has to say about the fall of angels. Just a few scattered, sometimes ambiguous passages. 

Liberals say the theology of fallen angels is a Second Temple development (e.g. 1 Enoch). And because it's a later development, this is legendary embellishment or pious fiction. Tacked on at a later date. But there are basic problems with that characterization: 

i) Even in the NT, reference to the fall of angels is scant. Even in the Gospels, Satan isn't classified as a fallen angel. Yet the theological narrative of fallen angels was already in place by then.

ii) Even if we grant liberal dating for the sake of argument, they also tend to date the Pentateuch to the Exilic period, so on their own dating scheme, the fall of angels isn't an especially late development in relation to the OT narrative.

iii) Although Scripture doesn't say much about the fallen of angels, the OT has a lot to say about angels generally, as well as moral evil generally. This goes all the way back to the Pentateuch, including Genesis in particular. So angels and moral evil already figure in the earliest stages of the OT plot. 

It is, however, a short step from the existence of angels in general to evil angels in particular. Likewise, the origin of moral evil is a natural question to ask. Is that confined to the human realm? Or does it have a parallel in the angelic realm? And given the interaction between men and angels in Scripture, it's a short step to the idea that evil angels as well as good angels intersect with human history. So there's no overriding reason to assume this is a late theological development.

Toward a Reformed demonology

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2019/03/a-reformed-demonology.php

Wise men from the East

SaelmaWhile leading a Bible study with a group of young adult Hmong Christians, active members of an LCMS congregation with a Hmong ministry, the topic of demons came up. Usually I deal with this topic and the occasional morbid interest very simply by saying: 1) Demons are real, and 2) Don't play with fire. 

To my astonishment, members of the study group began to share experiences of personal encounter with what could only be considered demonic entities. These included audible, visual, and even physical manifestations. Every single person there was well aware of such incidents with close friends or family members, and in many cases the events were witnessed by or happened to the people there present. (One of them was currently serving as a congregational elder!) This went on for some time and I kept, for the most part, a shocked silence.  

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2018/11/the-lutheran-approach-to-exorcism/#comment-4204620267

It must be very strange for non-Christians from the Third World who believe in the supernatural from personal experience to come to the West and encounter mainline denominations and progressive Christians who deny the supernatural! Likewise, it must be amusing for Third-World Christians to encounter the same disconnect!

Lutheran exorcism

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2018/11/the-lutheran-approach-to-exorcism/