You want to make everyone around you suddenly start talking about the weather? Make sure they never invite you to a cookout again? Find reasons their kids can’t play with yours?

Just start talking about demons the way Christians have always talked about them. Say “The devil was a murderer from the beginning” or “He’s the father of lies” (John 8:44) and even Christians will find a reason to go water the plastic plants. You’ll make any religious skeptics you know very happy.

The Doctor and the Demons

That kind of talk spooks many Christians as well as secular people. Yet there it was, on the Washington Post‘s website — the Washington Post! — in an article by a medical school professor — a real scientist! — titled As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession. “Careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.” writes Richard Gallagher, a professor at the New York Medical College.

This evidence included “rationally inexplicable” actions like people speaking languages they didn’t know. He appealed to the great number of people who’ve seen the same things and his own experience as a doctor who’d treated the mentally ill and could tell the difference.

Is that evidence good enough? The skeptical writer Steven Novella claims it’s not. He argues that Gallagher doesn’t question his evidence hard enough and that he ignores other good explanations for the things he ascribes to demons. Novella offers other possible ways without invoking demons to explain what Gallagher saw. I think he fights Gallagher to a tie.

As Christians, let’s thank skeptics like Novella. They keep us on our toes and make us think harder. They make us up our game. But in return we can remind them of their own limits. We can help them be more skeptical of their anti-supernaturalism, by pointing out that skepticism simply can’t answer the big questions.

The Skeptic’s Problem

Like almost every other aggressive skeptic, Novella takes down an argument for the supernatural without seeing that this leaves him with a big problem of his own. What if there really is a supernatural? More to the point, what if there really are personal malign spirits who are out to get you? How could you tell? What could you do to protect yourself?

What if there are, to borrow Hamlet’s famous line, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the skeptic’s philosophy? How would the skeptic know that, since experimental science doesn’t have the tools to see them? Science measures. That’s how it knows what it knows. You can’t measure demons, even if one’s sitting on your shoulder whispering in your ear telling you that demons don’t exist.

The skeptic like Novella should try a thought experiment, by answering the question: What if there really is a world of spirits who wish us ill? What if we do suffer the attacks of personal tempters who push us to do wrong? What if they’re clever enough to make sure we won’t notice them even when we’re doing what they want?

He’d be exactly where he is now. He might be able to say “I don’t think that evidence holds up,” but he can’t generalize from that to any statement at all about the existence of demons. All he can really say is: “I don’t think Dr. Gallagher proved his case.”

Hard For Skeptics

It’s hard for many skeptics to see this, when they’re dealing with the supernatural. They begin with a bias against it. (As many Christians begin with a bias for it, which is why we need skeptics to push us to think harder.) They tend to think that when they’ve cast doubt on someone’s claim for the supernatural, they’ve proven that there’s no supernatural.

But they can’t say that. They don’t have the tools to justify it.

The skeptic who denies the existence of demons because science doesn’t see them has used the wrong tool. He’s like the man who brings a telescope to study microbes and declares triumphantly there are no such things as viruses and bacteria because he can’t see any. Christians would like to offer him a microscope.

Here are two of Richard Gallagher’s articles, published in the Catholic monthly New Oxford Review: A Case of Demonic Possession and True and False Professions, Revisited.