Did a Protestant pastor's daughter have a supernatural dream confirming the assumption of Mary?

A Protestant pastor, named Daniel, recently posted a video about a potentially supernatural experience he had with his daughter related to Mary's assumption. He was researching the assumption of Mary, asked God to reveal to him whether the assumption is historical, and was told by his daughter afterward that she'd had a dream in which she saw Mary going up to heaven.

The incident seems to have a lot of potential to be supernatural on its face. Before I get to possible explanations of the episode if it is supernatural, I want to address some reasons to be hesitant about concluding that there is anything supernatural that needs to be explained.

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.

Healings In UFO And Other Non-Christian Contexts (Part 1)

Because Christians have been so negligent about paranormal issues for so long, they're poorly prepared to address a large number and variety of the topics involved. I've discussed some examples in my most recent posts, in response to the release of Jonathan Kendall's The Metaphysics Of UFOs (Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2026).

One of the subjects Christians tend to handle poorly is the existence of healings and some other miracles in non-Christian, and sometimes more specifically non-Protestant, contexts. Healings affiliated with UFOs are part of that category.

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.

You Have To Move From Theory To Fact

Critics of religion and the paranormal are often overly focused on hypotheticals. Too much time in the abstract, too little time in the concrete. They claim a certain prior improbability for miracles, go on and on about how unreliable human memory supposedly is, the problem of bias, the potential for hallucinations, how an overactive imagination often misleads people, etc. That sort of consideration is valid up to a point. But there's also a point where it becomes suspicious, if the facts involved in a particular situation aren't being addressed adequately.

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:

The Recent Resurrection Discussion Between Mike Licona And Dale Allison

Mike posted it on his YouTube channel here. The recording is incomplete. It stops partway through the question-and-answer segment. I don't know if there's a longer recording available anywhere. For now, I'll respond to the incomplete one linked above.

How Close, And Yet How Far Apart, Were The Worlds Of The Familiar And The Extraordinary

Guy Playfair wrote about an occasion when he was inside the Hodgsons' house while investigating the Enfield Poltergeist. He's contrasting the paranormal events inside the house to what was going on with the people walking by outside, who were focused on other things:

"It was late afternoon, and commuters were going home from the station, snatches of their conversation drifting through the window. Once again I was reminded of how close, and yet how far apart, were the worlds of the familiar and the extraordinary." (This House Is Haunted [United States: White Crow Books, 2011], 50)

Skeptical Myths About The Enfield Poltergeist

There's a constant stream of new videos, podcasts, articles, and other material coming out about the Enfield case. There are certain skeptical misrepresentations that are recurring themes. I've addressed many objections to the case here and elsewhere over the years, but my material has been scattered across a lot of locations. I want to gather in one place some concise responses to particular objections, including some of the most common ones, with links to lengthier responses for those who are interested.

The objections vary a lot in their quality, but they're ones I think are worth responding to because of their popularity or for whatever other reason. Sometimes an objection is inaccurate because it's assigned too much significance to one degree or another, even though it would be accurate if kept in proportion. Since some otherwise valid objections seem to often be taken out of proportion, that's one of the problems I want to address here.

This post is meant to give people a better understanding of the case, whether as a cure for the myths after encountering them or as an inoculation before encountering them in the future. I'm not trying to resolve every issue here. You can read my other posts on Enfield, like the ones linked above, for more.

Each myth will be summarized in bold print, followed by a response. I'll probably add responses to more myths as time goes on. Below is a list of each one, with a link that will take you to the relevant section of the post.

Jesus' Nonverbal Apologetic Work

There have been a couple of occasions lately when I've heard people make comments to the effect that Jesus didn't do much apologetic work in his public ministry. I suspect a common problem with how people evaluate that issue is that they're ignoring or underestimating how much Jesus did that was of an apologetic nature in contexts that were partly or entirely nonverbal. He was frequently fulfilling prophecy, healing people, reading people's minds, casting out demons, etc., activities that have apologetic implications. Not only did Jesus often call people's attention to the apologetic significance of such activities, but so did the prophets who predicted his coming and the apostles who followed him. When you take both Jesus' verbal and nonverbal apologetic work into account, apologetics was a major part of his public ministry, far more a part of it than what modern Christians typically do and typically are called upon to do. If we're going to follow Jesus' example, we need to do much more apologetic work, not less.

Christians Need To Get Better At Addressing Near-Death Experiences

Here's something I recently posted in a YouTube thread on the subject:

Non-Christian Corroboration Of Early Christian Miracles

"In fact, Jewish sources otherwise critical of Jesus repeatedly admit that he did work what we would call ‘miracles’. We see this most strikingly in the ‘Jew of Celsus’ (c.150 ce) who says that Jesus did perform παράδοξα, using the precise word deployed by the TF [Josephus' primary passage about Jesus]. Justin the Martyr further says that Jews believed Jesus worked miracles by magic, and a similar claim is time and again lodged against Jesus by Jewish authorities in the Gospels themselves. The Babylonian Talmud also criticizes Jesus ‘because he practiced sorcery’ (שכישף). And the Jerusalem Talmud states that Jesus’ followers could heal in his name, yet it still cautions faithful Jews not to be persuaded by them. The versions of the Jewish Toledot Yeshu (second–fifth centuries), an early account of Jesus, are highly critical of him, yet records all sorts of miracles that Jesus worked including even raising the dead. Likewise, a second- or third-century Jewish-Christian document, perhaps called the Ascents of James, reports that Jews would accuse Jesus of performing miracles like a sorcerer might do. Pagan sources also spoke similarly, as with the Milesian Apollo, who acknowledged that Jesus did ‘miraculous deeds’ (τερατώδεσιν ἔργοις) and the anti-Christian writer, Porphyry, effectively agrees....Porphyry admits that the apostles did miracles (Jerome, Tractatus de Psalmo 81; found in Morin vol. 3.2 p. 80 lines 21–2). Similarly, Arnobius engages with an opponent who alleges that Jesus worked miracles through the knowledge of secret, magical arts or because he was a kind of demigod of old; see respectively Arnobius, Against the Nations 1.43, 53, and 1.48–9." (T.C. Schmidt, Josephus And Jesus [New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2025], 74 and n. 85 on 74)

There are other examples that could be cited. Schmidt's book is about Josephus, and he argues that Josephus corroborates Jesus' miracles. I've discussed other examples not mentioned by Schmidt elsewhere, like here and here. Notice the diversity of sources: mainstream Christian, schismatic, heretical, Jewish, and pagan.

Another category that should be taken into account is prophecy fulfillment. It's distinct from what Schmidt is addressing, but is relevant to non-Christian corroboration of early Christian miracles. Many ancient non-Christian sources corroborated facts of history related to Christianity that line up well with Old Testament prophecy: the timing of Jesus' life (in connection with Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy), the Bethlehem birthplace (in connection with Micah 4-5), the penal practices of the Roman empire (crucifixion and various practices associated with it in connection with passages like Psalm 22 and the third Servant Song in Isaiah 50), the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple (in connection with Daniel's Seventy Weeks prophecy), etc. We've discussed such prophecies, their fulfillment, and non-Christian corroboration of the fulfillment, like in the posts gathered here. As with the sort of miracles Schmidt is focused on, the corroboration here comes from a large number and variety of sources, from the first century onward.

Using Other Miracle Claims To Argue Against Jesus' Resurrection

It's common for critics of the resurrection to argue against it by means of other alleged miracles, such as Marian apparitions. The argument will take on a variety of forms. For example, it will be assumed that such-and-such a miracle didn't happen, yet it has comparable evidence or better evidence than we have for Jesus' resurrection, so we should conclude that both the other miracle and the resurrection didn't happen. Or it will be suggested that since a Christian wants to attribute the other miracle to demonic activity, the resurrection could be considered demonic as well, and Christians have no way to justify viewing the resurrection as Divine while viewing the other miracle as demonic. And so on.

We've written a lot about that kind of objection over the years. See this recent thread (including the comments section) on the Zeitoun Marian apparitions, for example, for brief overviews of many of the issues involved (the explanatory options for miracles, whether the resurrection needs to have better evidence than other miracles, how to evaluate how the evidence for one miracle compares to the evidence for another, why we shouldn't think the resurrection and Christianity as a whole are demonic, why we shouldn't think the resurrection and Christianity as a whole are the result of human psi, etc.). I also wrote a couple of other posts on Zeitoun recently, here and here. Steve Hays wrote some posts about the Fatima Marian apparitions, such as here and here. He and I wrote about the miracles affiliated with the Salem Witch Trials in chapter 8 of the e-book here (pages 102-24). I wrote a post a decade ago that responded to a book that discusses religious miracles, and that post addresses many of the issues involved in comparing Christianity's miracles to the miracles of other religions. That post briefly discusses Sai Baba's miracles, a subject sometimes brought up by critics of Christianity. See here for some brief comments from Steve about Sai Baba. On UFOs, see here for an overview and our archive of posts on the subject here. These are just several examples of what we've written about miracles skeptics often bring up when discussing Jesus' resurrection. You can find a lot of other relevant material in our archives.

These skeptics often don't have sufficient reason to reject any of the miracles they're discussing. Frequently, when they suggest that we know that such-and-such a miracle didn't happen, they're bluffing. Their assumption shouldn't be granted. And they're typically substantially ignorant of the breadth and depth of explanatory options Christianity has for miracles. (Many Christians are highly ignorant as well.) These skeptics also don't know much or act as if they don't know much about the justification Christians (and others) have for placing different miracles in different categories and ranking them in a hierarchy. Sometimes the best response to a skeptical appeal to another miracle is that their miracle doesn't seem to be historical, whereas the resurrection is. But it's often the case that the Christian shouldn't deny that the other miracle occurred, and there isn't much difficulty in reconciling it with the historicity of the resurrection and the truthfulness of Christianity.

Joe Nickell's Death

I disagreed with him on a lot of issues, but, as with anybody who does the sort of work he did, there's a lot to agree with him about and appreciate as well. Since there's so much that's false and fraudulent in religion and the paranormal, anybody who gives so much of his life to opposing that sort of thing is going to do some good in the process.

One of my memories of him is an appearance he made on "The Sally Jessy Raphael Show" in the 1980s. He was part of a panel with Ed and Lorraine Warren, Ed sitting next to Joe. You can watch it on YouTube. Go here for a segment in which Joe commented, "I've not met a house that I thought was haunted. I think the Warrens have never met a house that they didn't think was haunted." That's hyperbolic as far as the Warrens are concerned, of course, but it's a memorable way of expressing something that's true. Ed and Joe both went too far, in opposite directions.

You can read my response to Joe on the Enfield Poltergeist here. He called the magician Milbourne Christopher "one of the greatest influences on my early career as a magician turned paranormal investigator". Christopher visited the house where most of the events of the Enfield case occurred, and he probably witnessed some paranormal events while he was there. Some of those experiences were recorded on audio tape. You can read about Christopher's visit to the house and his involvement in the case more broadly here. It's a lengthy article, but you can go to the shorter section focused on Christopher to read the most relevant material.

Nickell's prominence in skeptical circles is reflected in some comments Robert Price made fifteen years ago:

"In appealing to the universal facts of human experience, Hume is being neither deductive nor circular. He is merely appealing to what everyone knows: the frequent reports of the extraordinary we hear from UFO abductees, Loch Ness Monster fans, people who see ghosts or who claim psychic powers, always seem to turn out to be bunk upon examination. Ask Joe Nickell. Ask James Randi. Ask the evangelical stage magician Andre Kole, who exposed Filipino 'psychic surgeons.'" (John Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion [Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010], 277)

Nickell, Randi, and Kole are all dead now. There was already good evidence for the supernatural before any of them were born. There's more evidence for the paranormal now than there was then. (See, for example, here and here.) Looking to such people to debunk the paranormal as a whole has always been a false hope.

What should we make of the Zeitoun Marian apparitions?

I've discussed the subject in other threads over the years, but only briefly, and the Zeitoun case has been getting a lot of attention lately. So, I want to expand upon my previous comments.

The Prominence Of Sola Fide In Acts

One of the factors to take into account when judging the small number of passages in Acts that are cited against justification through faith alone is how often only faith or repentance (two sides of the same coin) is mentioned as the means of receiving justification: 2:21, 3:16, 3:19, 4:4, 9:42, 10:43-44, 11:17, 11:21, 13:39, 13:48, 14:1, 14:27, 15:9, 16:31, 16:34, 17:34, 19:2, 26:20.

I'll expand on some of those passages, to clarify why I've cited them. Acts 3:16 refers to a healing, but it's probably the sort of double healing passage I've discussed elsewhere. The healed man is referred to as praising God after the healing and is described as following the apostles (3:8, 3:11). Both of those make more sense if he had converted than if he hadn't. And Peter and John don't say anything to the man about a need to do anything else in order to be reconciled to God, which also makes more sense if the man had already been reconciled to God. Furthermore, Peter refers to the healed man's faith as "the faith which comes through [Jesus]" (3:16). A reference to "the faith" makes more sense if it's a faith that people in general are supposed to have, not just people seeking a healing.

Some of the passages I've cited mention faith without mentioning justification (4:4, 9:42, 14:1, 17:34), but the passages make the most sense if faith is viewed as bringing about justification. If something more was needed for reconciliation to God, then it would make less sense to highlight faith so much and not mention more. Seeing these passages as referring to justification also aligns them better with the rest of the material in Acts, like the other passages cited above.

Some Agreements Between Paul And The Gospels On Miracles

In a recent post, I discussed the double healing passages, which involve incidents in which people are healed both physically and spiritually. Notice that those passages provide more examples of agreement between the Synoptics and the fourth gospel. And notice that Paul corroborates some of what we see in those passages. In Galatians 3:5, he refers to how miracles are often received through faith, as we see in the double healing passages in the gospels. And he compares that reception of miracles through faith to receiving justification through faith, as in the double healing passages.

The Double Healing Passages

One of the reasons why the evidence against baptismal regeneration is underestimated is that much of that evidence is overlooked. An example of that is a category of passages that could be referred to as involving double healing. An individual is healed both physically and spiritually. But the physical healing tends to get more attention, sometimes even to the point of not noticing or forgetting the accompanying spiritual healing.

What if Christian miracles don't come from God?

In a recent podcast, Stand To Reason addressed the following question:

"All supposed revelation of religions involves a subjective experience of receiving that revelation, so how do we know the biblical authors (Moses, the prophets, etc.) were interpreting their experiences correctly as opposed to Mohammed or Joseph Smith?"

I don't know how much the questioner was thinking of something like a scenario in which Christianity is a demonic deception. But that objection comes up occasionally and doesn't get addressed much, so I want to take this opportunity to address it again. Go here for a couple of comments I wrote on the topic a few years ago, then read this one that I wrote shortly afterward. The second thread just linked also has some comments from Hawk on the subject. For a response to the notion that Christian miracles are just manifestations of human paranormal capacities, see here.

I've given a couple of examples above, namely demons and human paranormal abilities. But the same principles are applicable to other non-Divine sources (e.g., an alien trying to deceive us). A Christian just has to argue that God is the best explanation, not that no other explanation is possible.

Resources For Evaluating The Enfield Levitations

The BBC recently reaired a television program about the Enfield Poltergeist that came out a couple of years ago. So, there's been another round of media coverage of the Enfield case (e.g., here and here). One of the issues that's come up, as usual, is levitation, including discussion of the levitation photos.

I've said a lot about the evidence for the Enfield levitations in other posts. For an overview, see here. And here's a lengthy discussion of the evidence for the famous December 15, 1977 levitations. Janet Hodgson produced some paranormal results in a scientific experiment conducted in 1982 that was related to levitation. Here's a discussion of that experiment, and here's a lengthy discussion I had with David Robertson (one of the researchers involved) about the experiment and other scientific testing that was done on Janet. You can watch Maurice Grosse discussing the experiment I'm focused on in a 1998 television program here. And there's some photographic evidence for some of the levitations. The post linked above that provides an overview of the levitation issue discusses some of the photographic evidence. Below is a photographic sequence that wasn't mentioned in that post, one that I got from Apple TV's Enfield documentary that came out last year. As Graham Morris explains starting a little after the 30:12 mark in the second part of the documentary, there was one-sixth of a second between the two photos in this sequence:

That's not as good as video evidence, but it's close. (For a discussion of the segment of the documentary featuring Morris' comments, go here and do a Ctrl F search for "30:12". For a discussion of the video evidence for some other Enfield phenomena, see this post. Regarding the common skeptical objection that there isn't more video evidence, start listening here in a 1978 documentary on the Enfield case. The relevant segment is less than three minutes long. You'll hear two professional camera operators, Ron Denney of Pye Business Communications and Graham Morris of the Daily Mirror, commenting on how their camera equipment malfunctioned in extremely unusual ways while they were in the Hodgsons' house and attempting to film the poltergeist's activities. They use the phrases "impossible", "absolutely impossible", and "one chance in a million" to describe the likelihood that these malfunctions would occur by normal means. Their testimony is important for multiple reasons. They're professionals whose jobs involved working with that camera equipment. So, that addresses their competence to assess what's involved and skeptical claims about a need to have professional analysis of such events. Furthermore, the events in question not only provide evidence that something paranormal was going on, but also provide evidence that the entity involved sometimes didn't want to be filmed. The researchers did attempt to film it, though, and were occasionally successful.) For a discussion of the evidential value of some of Morris' other levitation photos, see my overview post mentioned above.

The post here discusses some other levitations. Do a Ctrl F search for "One doctor's" to read about a levitation that occurred while Janet was incapacitated with Valium and, therefore, not in a condition to fake the event. During the course of the Enfield case, a double-digit number of witnesses reported seeing one or more levitations. Do a Ctrl F search for "Edwards" in the post just linked. Read on for a while, and you'll get to a transcript of a discussion between Maurice Grosse and another individual who witnessed some paranormal events, including some levitations. Another subject that comes up in that post and others is audio evidence for these levitations (how tapes of the events corroborate the testimony of the witnesses, a lack of creaking noises from beds and floorboards in circumstances in which those sounds are relevant to fraud, throwing incidents that involved landing with a louder noise than jumping produces, etc.).

I'm just giving several examples here. There's a lot more in the posts linked above and elsewhere. Keep these things in mind when you see skeptics making their typical claims about Enfield and the levitation photos.