This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 4, from 1992.
A recent article by Andrew Brown, religious affairs correspondent of The Independent, reported a revival of belief in the supernatural among the newer, more conservative or fundamentalist Christian sects and cults (The Independent,15 September 1990). At first sight this is an odd claim, for it implies that there is, by contrast, a type of Christianity that repudiates the supernatural. But all Christians believe in a supernatural God, and in spite of some doubters like the Bishop of Durham, most Christians believe in the reality of a series of supernatural happenings surrounding the life of Jesus, including the virgin birth, the incarnation and the resurrection. Christianity is and always has been founded on essential supernatural claims, so it cannot be just this general adherence to the supernatural that makes the beliefs of the newer sects stand out as different.
It turns out that what Brown is drawing attention to is the resurgence of particular supernatural beliefs, namely those that accept the existence of demons, spirits and similar inhabitants of the occult world, and that attribute human sins, vices and other evil manifestations to the actions of such demons. So to accompany this revival of demonological beliefs there has been the growth of exorcism, or ‘deliverance’ as it is now called, which is no longer just a fringe movement but is threatening to become an industry.
Readers of The Skeptic have already had one aspect of this modem demonology drawn to their attention by Steve Donnelly in his Hits and Misses column (The Skeptic 4.4, page 5). There, Brendan O’Friel, governor of the aptly-named Strangeways prison at the time of the 1990 riot, is quoted as saying: ‘I certainly believe very clearly in the devil… None of us understands the battle that goes on between good and evil, but there was a manifestation of it at Strangeways’. As Donnelly points out, O’Friel is a Roman Catholic, so the revival of demonological supernaturalism is by no means confined to fringe Protestant groups.
Strange Ways of Governor O’Friel
Steve Donnelly, Hits and Misses, The Skeptic (Volume 4, Issue 4, 1990)
In the wake of the events at Strangeways prison last Easter, governor Brendan O’Friel gave a press interview in which he talked frankly about the 25 days of violence and destruction that gripped the prison. O’Friel is a devout Roman Catholic who was educated at a Jesuit college in Lancashire and firmly believes that no less a personage than the devil was behind the prison riot and occupation. ‘I certainly believe very clearly in the devil’, he said. ‘I am not looking for easy answers. None of us understands the battle that goes on between good and evil, but there was a manifestation of it at Strangeways. Something was going on for which we do not have a totally rational explanation’. The prisoners at Strangeways not only had to put up with cramped, overcrowded conditions but also with the missionary zeal of O’Friel and his team of five prison chaplains of different denominations who had developed their religious work to the point that the prison had 29 weekly services and religious meetings. He found it highly significant that the riot had begun in a chapel, that another chapel was destroyed and that rioters desecrated a cross and some religious vestments. During the first week O’Friel became increasingly concerned that something terrible was going to happen on Good Friday. ‘The omens were pretty bad. Good Friday was also the 13th’. He appealed to congregations of all denominations to pray for Strangeways and is convinced that the spiritual outpouring which resulted from his appeal averted disaster on this day. With Manchester’s chief constable, James Anderton in direct contact with God and the governor of Strangeways seeing the devil in every evil act I would suggest that any atheist criminal in Manchester have a getaway car standing by to drive him to nearby Liverpool in the event that he is about to be apprehended by the long arm of the law.
Brown’s article is straight factual reporting, but it is fair to say that it contains an implicit warning against credulity and the fraud, fakery and commercial exploitation that could follow in the wake of this demonology. Such warnings are eminently justified, but to a considerable extent their force within Brown’s argument depends on the conceptual framework that he is using, especially the distinction between those supernatural beliefs that are acceptable, or at least respectable, and those that are not. Again, the distinction is more implicit than explicit, but Brown mentions the resurrection, divine healing and possibly miracles as central to orthodoxy, and contrasts these with the demonological beliefs of the supernaturalist revival.
But what is the basis of this distinction? If a supernatural God is a respectable religious belief, then why not supernatural demons too? It can’t be their supernaturalness that is objected to. Nor can it be the novelty of the belief, since demons, especially in the persons of their chief, the Devil, have a long history as actual entities in the Christian universe. Perhaps it is evil spirits that it is claimed are unorthodox, because a good God would not permit them to exist. But what then about angels and other good spirits? Are they acceptable? And what about the tradition that demons are fallen angels, on which Milton was so eloquent?
Without some basis for the distinction, it is simply arbitrary to draw a line through supernatural beliefs and to declare that those on one side are acceptable and those on the other are not. So in terms of rationality, respectability or plausibility, belief in a supernatural God and belief in supernatural demons have the same status. They stand or fall together. Anyone who wants to hang on to God has no reason not to accept demons too. But if supernatural demons are too much to swallow, their demise leads to the death of God as well.
The simplest solution is to reject the supernatural altogether, and to accept, but only in a suitably tentative form of course, the existence of nature and the scientific account of it. But perhaps this is too naive. For as Brown points out, one factor behind the revival of supernaturalism is ‘the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, which have destroyed the materialism of the nineteenth century.’
But this will not do. It is true that the materialism of the nineteenth century has been overturned, but materialism has not. Nineteenth-century materialism has not been replaced by spiritualism or any other form of supernaturalism but by twentieth-century materialism.
It is a common but crude error to suppose that the fundamental changes that have taken place in our understanding of the world in the twentieth century have swept away not just the old theories but the very idea of science itself. Those who fall into this error do not realise how open terms like ‘science’, ‘nature’ and even ‘matter’ are. Of course they have acquired a wealth of historical associations and connotations, but these do not fix their meaning. Consider for example just how easily the idea of splitting the atom, once by definition the smallest indestructible particle, has been accommodated by modern science. Matter is a similar example. Matter might have been ‘dematerialised’ by twentieth-century science, but it has not been spiritualised. We no longer think of matter, the fundamental constituent of things, as hard, impenetrable stuff, but as energy. The physics is different (and more difficult), but it is just as objective as before, and the universe remains as substantial, as material as ever.
It is the same with ‘nature’. The idea of nature has no fixed content. Nature is simply whatever exists, and the task of science is to discover what it is like, at a fundamental level. These are not question-begging definitions, for they leave open the issue of what will be discovered in the future, and by what means. Science has no prior commitment to any particular results or to any particular method, but only to certain procedural checks which are supposed to ensure some level of objectivity and reliability in its conclusions. But even these checks are hardly constraints, since there is little agreement among scientists and philosophers about what constitutes objectivity and reliability in science. And even if there was agreement now, this could not be legislation for future scientists who had good reason to try something different. To put the point simply: we cannot lay down or even predict what science will be like in the future, in either its methods or its results. Scientific method is essentially controversial, and scientific theories always tentative.
So it is a reasonable hypothesis that the conception of matter as energy will be overtaken by new theories, just as the conception of matter as hard stuff was. It is not unlikely that the science of the future will be as different from the science of today as the science of today is from the science of the ancient Greeks. It is even conceivable that the existence of spirits and demons will be demonstrated in the future. But paradoxically this victory of supernaturalism would at the same time be its defeat. For whatever is, is part of nature, and if spirits and demons exist, they are part of nature, not ‘supernature’.
What are some suitably sceptical conclusions? It is impossible completely to rule out the existence of spirits, but their existence is implausible because it would complicate the world picture, not simplify it. Spirits are not needed. The vast processes of the cosmos can be explained without them, and as for human vices and sins, they are more likely to find an explanation in the psychological and sociological study of human nature.
Science puts a lot of emphasis on the idea of simplicity. This is not a dogmatic commitment, but just something that, all things considered, seems plausible. Scepticism should adhere to the idea of plausibility. It is a bit vague, but the best that there is. What seems plausible remains plausible until there is a good reason to think that it no longer is. Using ideas like simplicity, plausibility and good reason as regulators, themselves liable to change, human beings try to build explanatory theories about nature.
The notion of a complete explanation of everything is implausible, for many reasons. It is likely that there will always be things that are not understood, perhaps because they are beyond the reach of human intelligence. But why should this be a troubling thought? It is more modest, as well as more sceptical, to suppose that there are limitations to the powers of the human mind than to the inhabitants of the so-called supernatural world.
