I've said before that many Christians, including Evangelicals, have a problem with attributing too much to demons. It's a problem in multiple contexts, such as people blaming their sins on alleged demonic influence, but the context I'm focused on here is the paranormal. It's commonplace for Evangelicals to allege that a variety of paranormal phenomena are demonic or to give the demonic hypothesis too much attention and to give alternative views too little attention. I've often noted that Christians typically seem ignorant of some of the major explanatory options, such as a non-personal source, like we see with the stone tape hypothesis or place memories. It's also common for Christians to dismiss deceased humans (ghosts) as an explanatory option, even though the Bible is so supportive of the existence of ghosts. And we have good reason to think living humans have paranormal abilities to some extent, and living humans are capable of evil, so that gives us further reason to not assume that any paranormal activity of an evil nature must be demonic. But demonic activity has become a simple (simplistic) explanation for many Christians, who apparently don't know much about the issues involved and don't want to know much.
There's a problem on the other side of the spectrum as well. Some people are irrationally adverse to the existence of demons. Given the reasonableness of the concept of the existence of evil non-human spirits and the evidence we have for paranormal activity of a bad nature, people ought to at least be very open to the possibility of the existence of demons and demonic activity in the world. Whether you consider those things probable is another issue, and I would argue for their probability on the basis of the truthfulness of Christianity.
But the demonic hypothesis doesn't seem to be the best primary explanation for near-death experiences (NDEs). (Whether demons are involved in a secondary or lesser way is another issue and one that's more difficult to discern.) I've argued elsewhere for a dream hypothesis to explain NDEs. You can access a large collection of my posts on NDEs and related issues here, and here's a post that provides an explanation of my dream hypothesis and an overview of the evidence for it. To simplify things here, I'll provide some of the reasons why I think the demonic hypothesis isn't as good as my dream hypothesis. Much of what I'll say here will have broader applications as well. My focus will be on the two hypotheses I've just mentioned, but what I'll be saying will be relevant beyond those two views:
- The dream view is simpler in that it involves one entity, the experiencer, rather than two.
- The dream view may also be simpler, and I think typically is simpler, in that the demonic alternative involves a larger number of explanations of NDEs and/or related phenomena. Whether the dream view is simpler in this context depends on how many other hypotheses are being appealed to by each side. If one person is appealing to the dream view to explain all NDEs, whereas somebody else is appealing to demonic activity to explain most NDEs and a couple of other hypotheses to explain the remainder, then that's an advantage the first person's approach has over the approach of the second person. And my sense is that the demonic view is inadequate enough to require adding a larger number of additional explanations. Even if you don't think that's true of NDEs, I think it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain that position when other, significantly similar phenomena are added, such as deathbed experiences (DBEs).
- The dream view seems to have a larger explanatory scope. It better explains some features that we often see in NDEs, such as the large pieces of fruit and other such details discussed in Gregory Shushan's book on NDEs among indigenous peoples. See my post here for a discussion of some of the relevant details. See, for example, the material about people without heads or limbs in the afterlife, "drinking a little blue man in a cup", and moss growing on the foreheads of people in the afterlife who died long ago. Why would demons include such features in NDEs? They're better explained in a dream scenario. I think a dream hypothesis has less difficulty explaining the content of NDEs.
- The dream view better explains hellish NDEs, which probably are some low double-digit percentage of the NDEs that occur. I suspect that twenty-some percent of NDEs are hellish, though they're hellish to varying degrees. Last I saw, the percentage of reported NDEs that are hellish is in the teens, but it's likely that hellish ones are less reported than heavenly ones due to the shame and such involved in hellish experiences. There's some evidence of people being reluctant to report hellish ones. Why would demons want to give so many people a hellish NDE? That sort of NDE would tend to make the experiencer more concerned about the afterlife, more self-critical in that context, etc. Even if a demon would want to cause a hellish NDE in a tiny percentage of cases, such as with people who have suicidal tendencies or tendencies toward depression, in order to plunge them into despair, hellish NDEs seem to occur among far more people than just those types. A dream hypothesis seems better here, with hellish NDEs being analogous to nightmares. Remember, I'm primarily responding to the use of the demonic view by Evangelicals and others who most often appeal to that explanation. You could come up with a hypothetical or actual individual for whom my criticisms wouldn't be applicable or would be less applicable. A universalist (proponent of universal salvation) could suggest that demons are using hellish NDEs to make God look bad or make people overly pessimistic about life, for example. But that's far from the typical way the demonic hypothesis is advocated.
- There's more precedent for the dream view. We dream in our everyday lives, and our soul's entering a dreamlike state when prematurely separated from the body and under whatever other circumstances is analogous to dreaming in normal states involving a similarly inactive body. I'm not aware of any equal or better precedent for the demonic hypothesis.
- There's also a timing issue involved. How likely is it that demons would be prepared and willing to get involved at just the right time across so many contexts? Are they anticipating or rapidly adapting to every heart attack, fall from a building, etc. that brings on an NDE, to the point where they can so quickly get involved in the relevant ways? By contrast, if the soul of the experiencer is bringing on the NDE in a dreamlike way, this timing issue seems to make more sense. You don't need a demon so closely monitoring the circumstances of so many people who have NDEs (and related phenomena). You just need people's souls adapting to their circumstances, which seems to me to make more sense as an explanation. We're always present in our own circumstances. There's less reason to think demons are always present, and even when they are present, there's less reason to think they'd have the relevant knowledge, interests, and such. Only a small percentage of the population have NDEs that they remember, but even in that limited context, it seems unlikely that a demon would be prepared and willing to be involved at the right time across so many contexts. And related phenomena that seem to happen more often, like DBEs, which seem to happen more often than NDEs, are even more poorly explained by a demonic hypothesis in this context.
In closing, I want to say that I'm not trying to be exhaustive. And I'm holding some of the views I've expressed here with a loose grip. Some of these issues are large and complicated. One thing is tangled up with another, and there often are many factors tangling up with each other in a lot of different directions. I'm trying to make progress with my own thinking on these issues and to move other people toward making progress in their thinking. These issues get discussed too seldom, and they're typically addressed in far too shallow a way.
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