“Let’s introduce ourselves: I’m Damien Karras.”

“And I’m the Devil! Now kindly undo these straps!”

“If you’re the Devil, why not make the straps disappear?”

- The Exorcist (1973)

As we all know by now, Joe Schmid has reverted to Catholicism, and has now uploaded his ten-hour case for Catholic miracles to YouTube. I don’t really want to watch the whole thing, on account of its being ten hours. However, I saw that he devotes about twenty minutes of his video to the possession of “Robbie Manheim” or “Roland Doe.”

These are pseudonyms assigned to a fourteen-year-old boy who, in 1949, underwent probably the most celebrated ordeal of possession and exorcism in American history. It was, purportedly, Roland’s case that inspired William Peter Blatty to write The Exorcist.

As it so happens, I’ve had a post about Roland Doe sitting in the drafts for a while, and this was the kick in the pants I needed to finish, polish, and post it.

In his video, Joe relies on the account of Roland’s case presented in the book Christ Versus Satan In Our Daily Lives, by the Jesuit Robert Spitzer, a book which I also have read (at least, the relevant chapter).

I recommend you just watch the relevant section of Joe’s video. It’s not very long, and you will see the case as a believer presents it. But if you’re too lazy or impatient, I’ll briefly recount the story here, likewise sourcing from Spitzer’s book.

Roland’s Story

Roland, born in 1935, grew up in a Lutheran family in suburban Maryland. At an early age, he took an interest in occultism and spiritism, encouraged by his beloved Aunt Harriet. She instructed him in the use of a Ouija board, and early in 1949, the Doe house was beset by strange phenomena. The family heard unaccountable dripping, and scratching, and “A picture of Jesus on the wall started shaking, almost as if the wall behind it were being pounded from the back.”1 Just weeks later, Harriet died. Very soon, Roland attempted to contact his deceased aunt through the Ouija board.

The phenomena intensified. “Squeaky shoes could be heard walking and marching next to his bed; the furniture began moving on its own; then a Bible, a pear, and an orange flew through the air. One day in the midst of friends, Robbie’s heavy living room chair rolled up on one side and tipped over, causing Robbie to fall out of it and tumble onto the floor. All the adults tried to imitate this but could not; and then a vase levitated and moved across the room, shattering against the wall.”2

The force followed Roland to school, where it caused his desk to wobble and skitter around the room in view of his frightened classmates. Roland’s bed and dresser moved around his room by themselves. Strange scratches began to appear on his body, spelling out words like “Hell.”3

When this all became intolerable, the family reached out to their Lutheran minister. This man happened to have an interest in parapsychology, and so he invited Roland to spend the night at his house, hoping to witness the phenomena for himself. While there, he witnessed the chair Roland was sitting in shaken and moved by an unseen force. When Roland slept on the floor that night, the pastor saw him glide across the room.

Fairly outmatched, the pastor recommended Roland’s family go to a Catholic priest. While Roland’s mother was on the phone with Father Albert Hughes, begging him to attend to her son, “the table under the phone lifted off the ground and smashed into a hundred pieces.”

When Hughes arrived at the house to see the boy, Roland spoke to him in fluent Latin — “O priest of Christ, you know that I am the devil. Why do you keep bothering me?”

Roland underwent his first exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital. “As Hughes began the exorcism, the bed moved across the room on its own and slammed into the wall, in full view of the nuns who were present; scratchings began to appear on Roland’s body, and he began to curse Hughes. Hughes, kneeling down by the side of the bed, did not notice that Roland had slipped one of his hands outside of the restraints down the side of the bed and unhinged a piece of the spring supporting the bed. As Hughes continued to pray, Roland took the spring and slashed Hughes’ arm from his shoulder to his wrist; his blood saturated the cassock and surplus.”4

This first exorcism having failed, the Doe family went to St. Louis to stay with relatives. The demon tormented them ceaselessly. Roland’s mattress shuddered and shook at night. Further scratches appeared on his body.

Again, the family turned to the Church.

Next to face down the unclean spirit was Father Raymond Bishop, with his assistant Father William Bowdern. The first night, the two priests bore witness to an array of preternatural manifestations. “A relic of Saint Margaret Mary was launched from Robbie’s pillow into a mirror in the room; scratches of a cross appeared on Robbie’s arm; violent shaking began of the mattress, without any physical cause; a bookcase (weighing approximately fifty pounds) was turned around and moved into the entrance of Robbie’s room; a bottle of Saint Ignatius holy water was thrown from a table two feet from Robbie’s room.”

The next day, the priests returned. “While there, the bookcase moved from the wall in an arc of about five feet toward the side of Robbie’s bed.”5

The ordeal lasted a month, during which the exorcisms were held variously at the family home in St. Louis, at the rectory of College Church at St. Louis University, and at the St. Alexius Hospital in St. Louis.

Bishop, Bowdern, and the other priests held him down as they administered the rites of exorcism and doused the boy with holy water. He thrashed, swore, cursed, and damned the priests to Hell. Further unaccountable scratches appeared on his body, and he broke the nose of Walter Halloran, a Jesuit seminarian assisting in the exorcism.

Years later, Halloran recalled how he, “just about got hit with a holy water bottle that was sitting on the dresser and came flying across the room and just missed me by an inch or two.”6

During one of his periods of lucidity, while the demon was quiescent, Roland was baptized into the Catholic Church. On several occasions, when the priests attempted to administer communion, the voice of the Devil roared back: “I will not let him receive Holy Communion!”7

The great struggle between good and evil at last came to a head on Easter Monday. Roland went into another seizure, but then, a loud, commanding voice overwhelmed the prayers of the priests: ““Satan! Satan! I am Saint Michael, and I command you, Satan, and the other evil spirits to leave the body in the name of Dominus, immediately.—Now! NOW! NOW!”8

And just like that, it was finished.

The demon was expelled. The next day, Roland “participated in Mass for the first time since his possession (and also his conversion), received Holy Communion, and prayed ten Rosaries, in thanksgiving for his liberation from the devil.”

Liberated from the Evil One, Roland “grew up to be a very healthy, responsible family man,” who had “no recollection of anything that happened to him from January 15, 1949, to April 18, 1949.”9

Our Sources

So that’s the story.

Convinced?

First, whether you watched Joe’s video or read my summary, consider how far removed your introduction to this story is from the events themselves. Neither Joe nor I was there with Roland, nearly eighty years ago.

We are both reliant for the narrative on Spitzer’s book. Of course, Spitzer wasn’t there either.

Spitzer himself draws primarily on the 1993 book Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, by Thomas B. Allen.

Allen himself is a secondary source, but Spitzer helpfully lists out the sources on which Allen in turn depended. For the first exorcism, conducted by Father Hughes, Allen relies on the following sources:

1. An interview by Allen with Father Frank Bober, Father Hughes’ assistant pastor who was told about the exorcism by Father Hughes

2. Notes taken by Father William Reppetti, S.J. (Georgetown University archivist) of a lecture given by Father Hughes at Georgetown University (in the Georgetown University archives)

3. An interview with Father John J. Nicola, who had access to some of the secret archives, but was discreet about giving information on the Mannheim exorcism

Notice that still, none of Allen’s sources are themselves primary. Rather, they come by way of men who knew Hughes, or otherwise spoke with him.

For the second, much longer series of exorcisms carried out by Bishop, Bowdern, and the rest, Allen is reliant primarily on two sources:

1. A diary kept by Father Raymond J. Bishop, S.J., who first witnessed events of possession during an initial visit to the family home in St. Louis on March 9, 1949, and was present at events during the second series of exorcisms, assisting during the successful exorcism, and

2. Later testimony provided in an interview with Walter H. Halloran, S.J., who was a Jesuit seminarian at the time and who also assisted during the final exorcism; the interview was conducted by Allen for his book Possessed.

Finally! We have here two primary sources, and they are good ones. In the second place, interviews with Halloran, who personally assisted in the exorcism.

But the gold standard, the very best source we have, is the diary of Father Bishop. It is a contemporaneous source, by an eyewitness, who set his experiences to paper day by day over the month-long course of the exorcism.

As sources go, it doesn’t get any better than that.

So with our sources in mind, let’s look at the story from the beginning.

The Start of the Phenomena

Our earliest written source for the phenomena surrounding Roland is, it appears, the aforementioned diary kept by Father Bishop. While he was not present for the earliest manifestations, he records what he was told by the family of their experiences prior to his arrival on the case.

Spitzer’s book is fairly faithful to this point. In Bishop’s report, we read about the dripping noise, the scratching, the shaking photo, the marching feet, flying fruit, flying bottles, etc. as reported to him by the family (though Bishop would never witness anything like this himself). The family also heard “rapping,” such as was commonly heard in spiritualist séances.

The most striking detail was a claim that,

On one occasion the coverlet of the bed was pulled out from under the mattress and the edges stood up above the surface of the bed in a curled form as though held up with starch. When the bystanders touched the bedspread, the sides fell back into normal position.10

Spitzer tells us further that, ““a vase levitated and moved across the room, shattering against the wall.”11 The source for this is, as for most of Spitzer’s account, Allen’s book. On pg. 8 of my pdf, Allen does indeed recount the vase story. His source in turn appears to be “Diabolical Possession,’ by Nicola.” Nicola “does not mention Robbie’s case directly, and he says he was ‘fabricating, changing and omitting’ details to shield the identity of people involved.” (My emphasis) At least, Allen also checked with Halloran, “who verified having heard of most details, including the description of the flipping chair and flying vase.” (My emphasis, again)

The flying vase, I would say, is not on the most solid footing.

How about the antics of Roland’s demon at school? Again citing Allen, Spitzer tells us, “Several times, Robbie’s desk would ‘lurch into the aisle and begin skittering about, banging into other desks and causing schoolroom uproar’.”12

Allen again, in turn, cites Bishop’s diary. What Bishop tells us (and it’s unclear who told him) is, “R.’s desk at school moved about on the floor similar to the plate on a ouija board.” The notes about “lurching into the aisle” and “banging into other desks” appear to be Allen’s addition of colorful detail.

But now I must introduce you to Mark Opsasnick. In 1999, Opsasnick conducted a thorough investigation into the infamous case of the “Haunted Boy” for Strange Magazine, chasing down what witnesses and sources remained.

One of those he spoke with was Roland’s boyhood best friend, identified only as “B.C.” Regarding the episode at school, B.C said:

One thing happened regarding all of this and I have a hard time clearing it in my mind. We were in eighth grade, it was the ’48-’49 school year and we were in a class together at Bladensburg Junior High. He was sitting in a chair and it was one of those deals with one arm attached and it looked like he was shaking the desk—the desk was shaking and vibrating extremely fast and I remember the teacher yelling at him to stop it and I remember he kind of yelled “I’m not doing it” and they took him out of class and that was the last I ever saw of him in school. The desk certainly did not move around the room like that book said, it was just shaking.13

Spitzer tells is, “The possession and exorcism of Robbie Mannheim is one of the most detailed accounts of a full possession available to the public.”14 This is so, and it is precisely because of this unusual level of documentation and investigation that we can trace developing legend like this step by step.

See how a boy shaking his desk becomes a desk moving about like a Ouija board planchette, becomes a desk “lurching into the aisles and skittering about.”

So much for that.

How about the part played by the Lutheran pastor, Miles Schulze?

Spitzer has Schulze’s experiences like this, after his invitation for Roland to spend the night at his home:

Schulze had Robbie sit in a heavy chair instead of lying in bed; but the chair also began to shake, then moved across the floor to the wall and toppled over, throwing Robbie out of the chair onto the floor. Schulze tried to imitate the feat, but because of the chair’s weight and low center of gravity, he was unable to do so. He then decided that Robbie should sleep on the floor on some blankets between the beds. At three o’clock in the morning, the blankets with Robbie on them, as one unit, began to glide across the floor. When the minister shouted, “Stop that!”, Robbie and the blankets moved under the bed, then began to move up and down, propelling Robbie’s head into the springs under the bed, causing him to be cut.15

In a letter written by Schulze, to Dr. J.B Rhine, director of Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory, about two months after the reported incident, he recounted:

I had him in my home on the night of February 17–18 to observe for myself. Chairs moved with him and one threw him out. His bed shook whenever he was in it. When he was in bed with me, mine vibrated. There was no apparent motion of his body. I then made a bed on the floor for him and this glided over the floor.16

In an interview forty years later, Schulze said:

We had twin beds and his bed began to shake. Next, I asked him to get out of the bed and lie on the floor, and he got on the floor on the rug, then the boy and the rug moved. I asked [Roland], “Are you doing this?” And he responded, “I am not doing this thing.” Also, he sat in the chair, a very heavy chair and the chair turned over.17

When asked if he was able to stop the chair from moving himself, Schulze said, “I did not try.”

Whether any of this is beyond trickery, I leave to the reader.

The Georgetown University Exorcism

Onto the “first” exorcism performed on Roland at Georgetown, by Father Hughes. Recall Spitzer’s portrayal of the incident, wherein “the bed moved across the room on its own and slammed into the wall, in full view of the nuns,” and Roland managed to slash open Hughes’ arm with a loose bedspring.

Recall first Spitzer’s second source for this exorcism, notes taken by the Jesuit Repetti after a lecture by Hughes. Once again, Spitzer is receiving this source through Allen. In Possessed, Allen tells us this concerning Repetti’s notes:

Hughes did not leave a clear-cut record on how he became involved with Robbie and how he conducted the exorcism. Reppetti, notes taken during a Hughes lecture on the exorcism, is hazy on details. It seems incredible that Hughes did not go to the house and talk to Robbie and gain a sense of what was happening to the boy. The confusion about Hughes’s role may well stem from the priest’s own confusion, induced by the shock of the attack. What happened to Hughes would so affect his mind and memory that for a long while he would not have been able to give a coherent account of his dealings with Robbie.18

Allen’s rather squirrelly “it seems incredible” suggests that — according to Repetti’s notes, at least — Hughes didn’t even mention having gone to the house to speak with Roland. Furthermore, in the same citation, and contra Spitzer’s “nuns,” plural, Allen tells us only that “At least one nun witnessed the aborted exorcism.”

As for the telephone table, which broke into “a hundred pieces” as Roland’s mother was on the phone with Hughes, Allen tells us only that he this conversation is “Reconstructed from account in Reppetti.” Considering we have already seen Allen’s penchant for editorialization in the case of the skittering desk, it’s anyone’s guess whether Repetti’s notes contained anything like that.

As for Roland’s supposed greeting of Hughes at the house, “Oh, priest of Christ, etc.” Allen’s sources for this are apparently, an article in the St. Louis Review, and the account by Spitzer’s third source (by way of Allen), Nicola, who as we have seen, openly admits to “fabricating” details for the sake of maintaining anonymity. Repetti, who took down notes during a lecture by Hughes, apparently never mentions it.

But all of this is, in fact, somewhat besides the point. When the family called on Father Bishop, they never mentioned that the boy had supposedly already undergone a prior exorcism by Father Hughes. In fact, they told Bishop, “that Hughes had not met Robbie in person. They also said that they understood that Hughes had taken steps toward performing an exorcism but had not done so.”19

Allen’s speculation is that, “They may not have wished to tell Bishop about the slashing of Hughes at Georgetown Hospital.”

Returning to Opsasnick, he decided to inquire further into the Georgetown exorcism. He confirmed that Roland was indeed admitted to Georgetown University Hospital on February 28, 1949.

Spitzer/Allen tell us that Hughes, “suffered a breakdown, but then resumed pastoral duties—never fully regaining use of his arm”20

Opsasnick’s own investigation is as follows:

I easily located several individuals who were in daily contact with Father Hughes throughout the spring of 1949, the time period that immediately followed his alleged exorcism attempt on Rob Doe. I wondered if the priest showed any signs of injury, any change in behavior, or if any evidence existed of a breakdown or personal hiatus from his busy job. I found just the opposite.

Thomas Kearney, an eighth-grader at St. James during the 1948-49 school year revealed that Father Hughes was the parish’s CYO junior boys baseball coach that spring: “I saw Father Hughes every day at St. James that school year and I don’t remember him being missed and I don’t remember him being beat up or hurt or anything like that. He coached baseball that spring and would pitch us the ball and there was nothing wrong with him.”

Another eighth-grade classmate that year was Joan Flanagan, who recalled: “The recent story going around now was that Father Hughes’s arm was slashed back then. I never heard that at the time. I never noticed a slash or an injury and he was the P. E. teacher for our class. He never missed a class and I remember him pitching us softballs in the spring. Something like that would have been a big story at the time. I just don’t believe it happened.”

The prefect for the Ladies Sodality of St. James for all of 1949 and 1950 was Gloria Nowak, who today is 74 years old and is still a Mount Rainier resident. She told me, “I knew Father Hughes very well because he was director of the Sodality and would come to each meeting and start it off with a prayer. I never knew that he had any kind of arm wound. I had heard about the possessed boy but it was something we didn’t ask about. Father Hughes was a very nice person, very outgoing and friendly and a very holy priest. I never noticed any change in behavior or any absence while I was prefect. He was always there and always in a good mood.”21

Which brings us finally to Allen/Spitzer’s first source for the Georgetown exorcism, assistant pastor Frank Bober, “who has since figured prominently in this scenario, mainly because of his accessibility to journalists and general congeniality. Bober has appeared in literally dozens of television specials, news broadcasts, and printed articles on the subject.”22

Opsasnick tracked down Bober and spoke with him:

Hoping Father Bober would straighten his stories out, I located him in Washington, D.C., where he was enjoying an extended sabbatical. He was extremely friendly and cooperative and told of what Father Hughes reportedly experienced during his time with the boy: coldness in the room, the movement of a phone, the speaking of archaic languages and of course the slashing of his arm by the possessed boy during the aborted exorcism attempt. He claimed that he thought Father Hughes told him the boy had lived in Mount Rainier on Bunker Hill Road. All of this was interesting, but when I presented to him my evidence that the boy never lived in Mount Rainier and attempted to clarify Bober’s original statements to the newspapers he became a bit defensive. “I never did any in-depth investigating, I just accepted his word and that’s what he said,” Bober insisted. “All I know is Father Hughes gave me certain information which I communicated to the press and the Archdiocese and so on and that was his information. You know I was not around in 1949. I was ordained much later in 1969 and was at St. James from 1980 to 1985. When people interview me I just tell what I know and that’s all I can do.”23

Bober also confirmed that, “Father Hughes never went to the boy’s home…Basically it was the mother that brought the kid to the rectory and the thing is she’s the one who gave Father Hughes all the information. Everything that I know of that he shared with me took place in the rectory, not at the house.”

In short, whether there ever was any exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital is very much in doubt. Hughes did not visit the Doe house, where he was not greeted with fluent Latin from the devil-ridden boy. He may have visited Roland at the hospital. He probably did not perform an exorcism. His arm was almost certainly not slashed, and if it was, it was certainly not serious, and did not produce any nervous breakdown. Roland Doe’s bed was almost certainly not telekinetically slammed against the wall in full view of several witnesses.

Father Bishop’s Diary

Now we come to our gold-standard source, the contemporaneous diary kept by Father Bishop recounting the second round of exorcisms which, unlike that supposedly carried out by Hughes, at least actually happened. Long hidden away by the tricksy Jesuits, it is now available online for your ghoulish delectation.

The first thing you will notice in reading Bishop’s diary — taken, it can’t be recalled often enough, day by day as the exorcisms unfolded — is just how unsupernatural the good father’s account is.

On his first night, he reports that:

Shortly after R. retired the mattress on his bed began to move back and forth in the direction of the bed uprights. The boy lay perfectly still, and did not exert any physical effort. The movement in one direction din not exceed more than three inches, the action was intermittent and completely subsided after a period of approximately fifteen minutes.24

When he sprinkled Holy Water on the bed, “the movement ceased quite abruptly, but began again when Father stepped out of the room.”

Whether such a feat is possible for a fourteen-year-old boy to pull off, I leave to the reader.

Let us recall how Spitzer presents these early nights:

A relic of Saint Margaret Mary was launched from Robbie’s pillow into a mirror in the room; scratches of a cross appeared on Robbie’s arm; violent shaking began of the mattress, without any physical cause; a bookcase (weighing approximately fifty pounds) was turned around and moved into the entrance of Robbie’s room; a bottle of Saint Ignatius holy water was thrown from a table two feet from Robbie’s room. At this point, Father Bowdern was convinced—some kind of evil spiritual power was working in and around Robbie.

On the following day, March 12, Fathers Bishop and Bowdern returned at 11:45 P.M. to the house. While there, the bookcase moved from the wall in an arc of about five feet toward the side of Robbie’s bed.”

The way Spitzer frames this, you would be forgiven for thinking the priests bore witness to all of this.

Now let’s see how these same events are recounted in Bishop’s diary.

The relic of Saint Margaret Mary launched into the mirror:

Shortly after R. had retired at 11:00 PM, he called downstairs that he had been frightened by a strong force that had thrown some object against the mirror in his bedroom. With safety pin opened, the relic of St. Margaret Mary had been thrown against the mirror and the sound was like a pallet striking the glass.

The bottle of St. Ignatius Holy Water:

After the above blessing the group if observers went downstairs to review some of the history of the case, when a loud crash was heard in R’s bedroom. The boy was dosing when the bottle of St. Ignatius Holy water was thrown from a table two feet from R’s room.

The movement of the bookcase:

A bookcase was moved from along side the bed and turned completely around facing the entrance to the room. The stool at the dressing table moved from the table to the bed, about two feet. The stool was moved back to its position and in a few moments, it was turned over

In other words, Roland was alone when all of these spectacular manifestations took place.

You will search in vain Father Bishop’s firsthand account for any levitations, any flying dishes or water bottles, any unaccountable knowledge on the part of the boy, or any xenoglossy.

In fact, Father Bowdern interrogated “the Devil” in Latin and demanded answers in Latin. But, “The devil ignored the command, answered in pig Latin, playfully imitated the commands, or used the common expression ‘stick it up your ass.’”25 And “When commanded to give a sign in Latin, he wrote meaningless marks on the paper, not even letters of the Roman alphabet.”26

This, I suspect, is because “the Devil” didn’t know any Latin.

The most supernatural thing you will find in Bishop’s account are the scratches which appeared on Roland’s body in the course of the exorcism. But did the witnesses actually watch the marks appear on Roland’s bare skin?

On the very first night:

During the course of the fifteen minutes of activity a sharp pain seemed to have struck R. on his stomach and he cried out. The mother quickly pulled back the bed covers and lifted the boy’s pajama top enough to show zig-zag scratches in bold red lines on the boy’s abdomen

Bishop notes that “that during the fifteen minutes the boy was not out of view of six observers,”27 but so far as I can tell, there is nothing that prevents Roland having made the marks before those fifteen minutes.

As far as I can tell, Roland was always wearing pajamas, both top and bottom.

On April 7, Bishop wrote:

During the exorcism at the “Praecipio” at least twenty brands appeared on R’s body. Many occurred at the name of Jesus as he recited the Hail Mary. The first mark was clearly a number “4”. Some other marks may have been the number “4” also, but were obscure. Mother marks: single stroke, double stroke, seemingly a pitch fork, several times four strokes or claw marks of various lengths on belly or legs. One set of such claw marks from thigh to ankle tearing off a scab near the ankle. When these marks occurred, the boy’s hands were kept away from his body. One branding occurred on his leg just as he started to lie down after the preceding mark had been observed.

But he also clarifies that, “Most of the branding occurred under his clothing or at least under the sheet covering him.”28

Whether it is, again, so implausible that the boy could have made/sustained the marks himself while thrashing and struggling with several grown men, or made them before the exorcism session even commenced, I leave again to the reader.

Remember that this is our very earliest source, and also the one most conspicuously lacking in ostentatiously paranormal manifestations. All the levitation, the Latin, the Aramaic (yet another story had him speaking in Aramaic, yes), Halloran’s flying holy water bottle, all that comes much later. I find that telling.

The Judgement of the Witnesses

As Spitzer triumphantly tells us, the relevant events involved dozens of people. What did they make of it?

Father Bowdern for his part, was convinced something beyond the natural was at work.29

Remember Halloran (the seminarian, later a priest himself), who “just about got hit with a holy water bottle that…came flying across the room”? How could a man who had witnessed such things have any doubts?

Well, when Opsasnick tracked him down decades later, he wasn’t so sure. So ran their interview:

“Did the boy speak in any languages other than English?”
“Just Latin.”

“Did it appear he understood the Latin he was speaking?”
“I think he mimicked us.”

“Was there any change in the boy’s voice?”
“Not really.”

“When the boy struck you in the nose, did he exhibit extraordinary strength?”
“I don’t know, I never even thought very much about it. It certainly wasn’t Tyson hitting me in the nose or something like that (laughs).”

Opsasnick asked about any inexplicable phenomena Halloran had experienced:

He paused and slowly said, “I saw a bottle slide from a dresser across the room—there was no one near it. The bed moving....” I interrupted and asked if the bed was stationary or on rollers. He said, “It was on rollers like any bed, but I was leaning on it when it moved one time.”

I think you will agree that a bottle “sliding from a dresser” is quite different from a bottle flying across the room and almost nailing him in the head. I suspect that memory confused this mere sliding bottle with the bottle of St. Ignatius Holy Water that supposedly flew from a table in Roland’s room (When no one was looking, of course).

And I would also draw attention to the fact that Halloran was, by his own account leaning on a bed with rollers when it “moved.”

Opsasnick asked also about the markings on Roland’s skin:

Did Halloran actually see them materialize on his skin? Did he feel the boy or someone else was responsible? “I saw them...well, right on the skin...yeah, I did. It wasn’t the boy doing it himself, you know, as far as I could see.” I wanted to know if the markings ever formed numbers or letters or words, as other writers had reported. “It was kind of hard to really tell.” Was there blood dripping from the marks? “It looked more like lipstick. There were just some very clear marks like that.” Continuing on this subject I asked if the priests had ever bothered to check the boy’s fingernails for flesh or blood deposits. Halloran was taken aback. After a long pause he said, “When I was there his hands were nowhere near the markings. No, we didn’t check.”30

Shortly before his death, Halloran was interviewed again by Troy Taylor, author of The Devil Came to St. Louis (and, for what it’s worth, a believer in some paranormal aspect to the case). While he believed Roland was not faking, he told Taylor:

I can’t say whether or not it was valid. At one time, I felt more strongly in one way than another, but I simply don’t know. I have never been convinced that it fits all the criteria of a true possession, but there was something going on there that I could not explain. For this reason and others, I have withheld judgment on the matter. Father Bowdern always believed in the case, but I have never been comfortable with any decision.

When asked if he believed the case could have been explained by mental illness, Halloran gave a rather uncertain answer:

Perhaps…I have always thought that taken one at a time, many of the incidents could be explained as being psychosomatic, but the dilemma comes when you put them all together. I don’t know if a mental illness can explain all of that.31

To his credit, Allen is less triumphalist about the case than Spitzer, who relies so heavily on his account. On pg. 208 in my pdf, we learn that apparently Joseph Ritter, Archbishop of St. Louis at the time, did order an investigation into the whole sordid affair, though its results were never published:

Archbishop Ritter, following Church procedure, appointed an examiner— a Jesuit professor of philosophy at St. Louis University to investigate the exorcism. The examiner had the authority to inter- view participants under oath. According to a Jesuit who is familiar with the results of that investigation, the examiner concluded that Robbie was not the victim of a diabolical possession. Buttressing that report were statements by psychiatrists at Washington University. They said they saw no evidence of the supernatural or preternatural.32

This whole case is, I think, an excellent case study in the way stories and legends grow, from fairly unremarkable beginnings into the totally fantastic. This is why, yes, you can get people testifying (honestly) to flying Holy Water bottles, levitations, and xenoglossy, when almost certainly none of these things ever happened.

The story does not quite end there.

The Death of Roland Doe

“Roland’s” identity is no longer a secret. His real name was Ronald Hunkeler, and he died six years ago, in 2020. Sadly, although he had a successful career as a NASA engineer for for forty years, Ronald lived a troubled life.

His long-time girlfriend told the New York Post, “On Halloween, we always left the house because he figured someone would come to his residence and know where he lived and never let him have peace…he had a terrible life from worry, worry, worry.”33

Despite some claims that he had become a priest, Ronald “shunned religion” for most of his life.

What did Ronald himself make of that long-ago ordeal, when he was a fourteen-year-old boy in 1949?

According to his girlfriend, ““He said he wasn’t possessed, it was all concocted…he said, ‘I was just a bad boy.’”

If Roland Doe himself didn’t buy it, why should we?

We have all been staring at the sun too long.

Ever since Ethan Muse’s post (almost a year ago!) on the “Miracle of the Sun” at Fatima in 1917, a certain quarter of substack has been unable to let it go. Actually, I don’t think it’d be wrong to say that probably more progress has been made in Sun Miracle-ology in the past year than in the century before that.

If you’re reading this post, I assume you’re already at least generally familiar with this whole business. But if you want the backstory, and if you want to the strongest version of the apologetic argument for the veracity of the Miracle of the Sun as a proof of Catholicism, just read Ethan’s essay.

What is really important, before proceeding, is to nail down what a “sun miracle” is for our purposes. Let’s take Fatima as the gold standard. Here are some representative testimonies from the Cova de Iria that day.

Maria Teresa:

The sky was covered with clouds and it rained much. could not see the sun. Then suddenly, at noon, the clouds drew away and the sun appeared as if it were trembling. It seemed to come down. It began spinning like a fire-wheel in the pagan feasts. It stopped for a few minutes and again started rolling, perhaps in a diameter of more than a meter while we could look at it as though it were the moon. Things all around turned into different colors.

Higino Faria:

At one o’clock the clouds gathered into a very thick and dark form, giving the appearance of an eclipse. At that moment I looked at the multitude and had the impression that it was the day of final judgment. The faces of the people looked thin, long and yellow. Then the dark cloud broke into parts, and through the break we saw the sun shining, spinning in the shape of a wheel of fire. It seemed to approach the earth...

Luis Antonio Vieria:

My friends shout to me: look, look, but at first I only saw clouds drifting by, leaving the sun uncovered. Suddenly, I see an intensely pink rim, surrounding the sun, which resembled a disc of dull silver, as someone once said, while giving me the impression that it was moving from its original position. Diaphanous, vaporous clouds, somewhat purple, somewhat orange, permeated the air. At various points along the horizon, contrasting with the leaden hue of the sky, I also saw pink and yellow spots. The clamor grew louder and louder. This didn’t last seconds: perhaps minutes. As I observed these manifestations, which I never doubted for a moment were due to the Infinite Omnipotence of God, an indescribable impression came over me.

Joseph Frazao:

The sky was covered with clouds but suddenly the clouds opened. The sun seemed to be coming down from the sky and looked like a wheel of fireworks, shooting off all colors of the rainbow.

Jacinto de Almeida Lopes:

The hour approaches, and behold, as if by magic, the rain stops, the sun breaks through the dense, black clouds and reveals itself with its luminous rays, which quickly take on the colors of yellow, red, and green, turning the objects that were under its influence the same colors; and soon loses its brightness and colors—able to be seen with the naked eye without hurting the eyes—and takes on a dizzying rotation, seeming to fall toward the earth. And while observing these wonders, all the people are in loud exclamations. This lasted, at most, about five minutes, then returned to its normal state.

I take these testimonies as broadly representative. A basic pattern emerges:

1. The clouds part, and the sun emerges.

2. The sun is found painless to look upon

3. The sun spins, “like a firewheel,” throwing off sparks.

4. The spinning sun casts off a succession of colors, “all the colors of the rainbow”

5. The colors are reflected onto nearby people and objects, usually yellow and pink in particular

6. Yellow or pink spots are seen on the ground

7. The sun seems to “fall” to earth or “approach” the earth

About a month after Ethan’s initial post, well-known blogger Scott Alexander weighed in. He called Fatima “the final boss of the paranormal,” admitted that he found the research process disorienting and somewhat frightening, and registered his deep dissatisfaction with the various skeptical explanations on offer. Scott uncovered some interesting things.

Most importantly, that Fatima is not the only sun miracle out there. This is not exactly a secret, but none of these subsidiary miracles are nearly as well-known as the initial showstopper in Portugal.

They include one in a little northern Italian town called Ghiaie in 1946, and a more recent one in Benin City, Nigeria, in 2017, and a couple more obscure ones. These are covered in Scott’s essay.

He noticed that almost all of the really impressive cases happen in cloudy, overcast conditions, which surely cannot be a coincidence. This is so for Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock City.

Moreover, while not exact parallels, the reported Fatima phenomena bear more than passing resemblance to the strange activity reported by sungazers. Also see Scott Alexander’s essay for details.

He ended with a rough sketch of his hypothesis:

There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day.

The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes.

He admitted that this was only “very tenuous, skeletal draft of a materialist explanation of Fatima,” and that proponents of the miracle need only feel “mildly irritated” rather than “TOTALLY DEVASTATED by IRREFUTABLE debunking.” It is, after all, pretty bold to posit a hitherto totally unknown optical illusion which just happened to occur for the first time in recorded history in the sky over the heads of a crowd eagerly anticipating a miracle.

Well, I still would not say anyone has been totally devastated by an irrefutable debunking, but I think a hypothesis like the one laid out above looks even more plausible now than it did last year.

Sun Miracles Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See

All of the sun miracles that turned up in the initial round of discourse were Catholic, or at least ostensibly Catholic (the Necedah and Heroldsbach miracles being condemned by the church). Ethan and some other Catholics defend a model developed by a priest called Dalleur, that Fatima was carried out by the creation of an anomalous light source in the sky, which was not the actual sun. This model doesn’t really work for some of these other Sun Miracles, and while that add’s some complexity to the hypothesis (you have to posit that these others either weren’t miracles, or God used a different mechanism to prouce the same effect), it doesn’t necessarily wreck it. So the apparently ubiquitous Catholicity of Sun Miracles was certainly a point for the believers. If this is something other than divine action, why does it only happen in contexts that appear to promote this particular religion?

As it turns out, Catholics do not have a monopoly on sun miracles. brought to my attention an old European Christian tradition that “the sun dances at Easter” in celebration of Christ’s resurrection.

John has just posted a more thorough write-up here, but I will reproduce the more relevant points:

It is obscure enough that it does not even have a wikipedia page, and yet it appears to have been remarkably widespread before the 20th century. Andrew Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica recounts a Scotswoman’s sight of the miraculous dancing sun on Easter morn:

The glorious gold-bright sun was rising on the crests of the great hills, and it was changing colour—green, purple, red, blood-red, intense white, and gold-white, like the glory of the God of the elements to the children of men. It was dancing up and down in exultation at the joyous resurrection of the beloved Saviour of victory. To be thus privileged, a person must ascend to the top of the highest hill before sunrise and believe that the God who makes the small blade of grass to grow is the same God who makes the large, massive sun to move.

Suggestive, though we are still missing most of the important Sun Miracle phenomena (no throwing off of sparks, no reflection of color onto onlookers/objects, no noted painlessness). But we do have the sun “dancing” and changing colors.

An Irish Times article from 1998 provides an excerpt from “One John Evans, for example, writing in the 17th century,” who “went up a hill to see the Easter sun appear, and saw it rise, skip, play, dance and turn about like a whale". Impossible to say exactly what he saw, but his vision of the sun “turning like a whale” might plausibly reflect the miraculous “spinning” seen at Fatima and other Sun Miracles.

The tradition is dying out, but it’s not dead entirely. A handful of people discuss their experiences in a facebook thread.

The most telling testimony is this one:

Yes, I remember when I was about 7 years old my aunt and uncle waking me early on easter sunday morning to see the sun dance and it did!! It seems impossible to me now and having thought about it over the years I think it might have been an optical illusion as there was a swirling ground hugging mist over the bog through which the sun was rising red and orange and it seemed to come closer and further back in a sort of dance. Regardless of whether it was supernatural or one of science's anomalies it was quite something and I can see it still in my memory

Well, again, we are missing critical aspects of the phenomena. No succession of colors, no sparks. We do have the sun “coming closer and further back in a sort of dance,” which is certainly reminiscent of the sun “seeming to fall to earth at Fatima and the other sun miracles. And it is surely noteworthy that there was “a swirling ground hugging mist” in the air.

But after all, these are still Catholics in Ireland and Scotland. So perhaps a miracle long-reserved for Easter was repurposed for that day at the Cova.

Now, we leave the Latin west, and cross the European continent to Orthodox Russia:

My first glimpse of a miracle was on assignment from the editorial staff—I was to visit a church before dawn to write a report on Orthodox traditions. I stood there, watched and listened for a while, and then went home. Before bed, I decided to have a cup of tea on the balcony. Just then, the first rays of light appeared over the horizon. But just as the sun rose a few centimeters, it seemed as if someone had covered its blinding disk with a black paper circle. The star refused to accept this: it began spinning at breakneck speed, popping out from behind the circle in all directions, practically wheeling across the sky. Meanwhile, multicolored sparks flew off the sun in a sizable circle, as if it were being “processed” on a lathe. The “mischievous” light lasted only a short time, maybe seven minutes at most. Then the circle disappeared, and the sun majestically crept into the sky…

The following Easter, the miracle repeated itself: just as it was beginning to rise, the sun became hidden behind a dark disk. Only this time, the sun didn’t rotate, but rather darted chaotically in different directions, casting not sparks but multicolored clouds. Each time, as the sun, in its frantic dance of St. Vitus, darted first one way and then the other, pink, blue, yellow, green, purple—all the colors of the rainbow—clouds bounced off it, painting the sky in the most fantastical hues.

If the others were suggestive, this, I think, is unmistakable. Sun spinning - check. Sparks flying off the disc - check. Rainbow colors flying off the sun - check.

The tradition extended to Lutheran Sweden, where Frederika Bremer’s The Rectory of Mora records,

The note about children looking up at the dancing sun through smoked glass recalls people in the town of Alburitel, in Portugal, “darkening bits of glass by exposing them to candle-smoke so that they might watch the sun, with no harm to their eyes,” in anticipation of the 1917 miracle.

I don’t know if the tradition of the Easter sun-dance has any history in Portugal, but considering it appears. in corners of Christendom as far distant as Ireland, Sweden, and Russia, I suspect it does.

Okay, well, if sun miracles are not the private preserve of Catholics, are they at least exclusive to Christianity more broadly?

Apparently not.

In a throwaway comment on an unrelated post a few months back, brought to my attention a highly obscure event known as the “Day of the Crystal Sun.” This took place in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1998. Without going into much detail, a controversial Buddhist sect known as the Dhammakaya had just completed the construction of their massive temple complex.

On September 6 1998, little after 5:00 PM, tens of thousands of devotees were gathered in the open air outside the temple. Someone looked up, and noticed the sun was doing something interesting.

Before we proceed, here’s a selection of testimonies from both Fatima and Dhammakaya, unlabeled and jumbled. Now I admit I have done a little editing, mostly to remove language that seemed a little too archaic (in the case of Fatima) or a little too modern (in the case of Dhammakaya), and thus might give the game away. But otherwise the testimonies are unaltered. See if you can guess which is from which. I have no doubt some of you will get an A, but none of the people I tried it out on got better than a C:

1. I saw the sun as if it were a clear crystal sphere — bright, yet gentle on the eyes…The crystal sphere then changed colors — becoming bright golden, then bright blue, bright green, bright purple, bright pink, shifting back and forth.

2. The sun breaks through the dense, black clouds and reveals itself with its luminous rays, which quickly take on the colors of yellow, red, and green, turning the objects that were under its influence the same colors; and soon loses its brightness and colors—able to be seen with the naked eye without hurting the eyes—and takes on a dizzying rotation

3. The sun started to roll from one place to another place, and changed to blue, yellow, all colors!

4. When I looked at the sun, I saw…unlike anything I had ever seen before, colors changing back and forth.

5. I saw the sun shining and spinning very rapidly…I thought my eyes were deceiving me, so I looked down at the ground…When I looked up again…it was spinning.

6. When I looked at the sun, it… was sparkling…and changing into various colors, beautifully.

7. Immediately, the sun appeared…and began spinning dizzily. Everything became almost dark, and everyone’s features were yellowish.

8. A miraculous phenomenon unfolded: a massive cloud obscuring the sun slowly parted, transforming into a spectrum of colors—blue, red, and yellow—allowing the sun to be viewed clearly with the naked eye…in constant motion, spinning rapidly—whirling clockwise at an incredible speed…there was something else I witnessed. In the surrounding area, the people were bathed in a golden light

9. We…saw the sun, without harm to the eyes. The sun came down, turning on itself, and throwing beams of several colors

10. Suddenly the sun appeared so that we could look at it as though it were the moon. It began spinning…making us all turn into the colors of the rainbow, even the ground itself

11. The sun was both clear and its light was cool to the eyes, visible to the naked eye. We then began to see yellow, pink, blue, and other colors of light emanating from the sun.

12. The sun was spinning and there were clouds of different colors like those of the rainbow.

13. I saw the sun change colors into different shades—red, pink, yellow, blue, purple—like a rainbow.

14. The sun rotated around itself, and lights flickered around the sphere…pink light radiated outwards…the colors changed constantly to gold, blue, and orange,

15. The sun, which had been completely hidden for a moment, left us illuminated by a strange light, with yellow spots visible on the ground.

16. When she bent down to look at the ground, she was even more surprised to see pink spots on the soil, here and there. Her son asked, “Do you see the stars on the ground?”

Done?

No peeking?

Okay, here’s the answer key:

1. Major Klanarong Pairipai Rittidet, Dhammakaya

2. Almeida Lopes, Fatima

3. Dominic Reis, Fatima

4. Dr. Tippawan Srichan, Dhammakaya

5. Sunee Law, Dhammakaya

6. Dr. Wannana Isaradisaiyakul, Dhammakaya

7. Father Manuel Pereira da Silva, Fatima

8. Ampaiporn Sawangdee, Dhammakaya

9. Maria Teresa Charters, Fatima

10. Maria do Carmo, Fatima

11. Anonymous, Dhammakaya

12. Joaquim Vicente, Fatima

13. Anonymous, Dhammakaya

14. Dr. Siriporn Sukhsuttipan, Dhammakaya

15. Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constancio, Fatima

16. Kanda Sunthornwittaya, Dhammakaya

I don’t think this can be a coincidence. It is very clear to me that Dhammakaya and Fatima (and all the lesser sun miracles in between) represent, if not the exact same phenomenon, closely related ones.1 All of the detail is present here. We have the clouds parting, the spinning sun, painless to look upon, the sparks, the rainbow succession of colors, the color reflected on the crowd, even very little things like colorful spots on the ground.

And of course, it was overcast that day.

Is this a unique event? Has such a thing ever happened before in the annals of Buddhist history?

Probably.

Brought to my attention by , there is, in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist “stupa” known as Somawathi. Somawathi has something of a local reputation for miracles. In particular, strange rays of light are supposed to play around the top of the stupa in the evenings.

But in 1981, it seems something else happened. According to this article,

At around 2 p.m…the sky turned yellow and the sun appeared dim, resembling the moon. Multi-coloured rays surrounded the stupa, and the white attire of the gathered crowd again appeared yellow. Although the president had planned to unveil the kotha from the ground using a rope system, he chose instead to climb to the top of the stupa via a temporary worker’s staircase after witnessing the unusual spectacle.

This event is much more tentative than Dhammakaya. I have not been able to find any primary, native language sources. Searching for stuff in Sinhala is even more thankless than searching for it in Thai. That said, I am pretty confident this was a real event, because the detail is so specific and familiar. The pale sun, specifically described as “like the moon” (an analogy some Fatima witnesses also reached for), the multi-colored rays, the reflection of the (yellow) color on the crowd. It seems highly unlikely that this obscure account is intentionally patterning itself after Fatima, though of course that cannot be entirely ruled out.

But I feel fairly confident saying this phenomenon has occurred at least twice in the Buddhist world, and probably more times than that.

There are some videos of the “Somawathi rays” on YouTube. I can’t say what the cameraman thinks he’s seeing, but to my eye, they are remarkably similar to Catholic sun miracle videos you also find on YouTube. i suspect the cameramen are seeing the same thing.

Compare Divine Mercy Hills in the Philippines:

And Somawathi:

In a recent discussion with a Catholic, he raised two possible defenses to account for the evident similarities between Dhammakaya and Fatima (which presumably would also apply to the much obscurer Somawathi): one, that the witness statements had been intentionally altered, and two, that demons concocted it as a counterfeit miracle.

I don’t like either of these explanations very much.

The first: I took the argument to be that, perhaps the crowd at the temple that day really did see something remarkable in the sky, but the temple officials massaged the testimony to resemble Fatima more closely. It is true that Dhammakaya has a shady reputation, and its leaders have been caught up in a variety of corruption scandals over the years. And most of the early testimonies are filtered through official temple publications. But the question is not whether the leaders of the Dhammakaya movement are scrupulously honest, but whether they would have any reason to fabricate or “massage” testimony to resemble the Catholic Miracle of the Sun in particular.

Fatima has no meaning to a Buddhist. I would wager most of the people in the crowd that day had never heard of Fatima. If a nefarious monk is going to tamper with eyewitness statements to make them more impressive, he’s much more likely to shape them in accordance with Buddhist expectations rather than Catholic ones.

More problematic still, is that not all of the testimonies come from official publications. A number were posted online by devotees who were there that day. These online testimonies are not notably less Fatima-esque than the ones that were officially disseminated by the temple. There is not much evidence for pro-Fatima shaping on the part of Dhammakaya officials. The only avenue I can see here is to posit that real eyewitnesses who were there that day nevertheless misremembered their own experiences as more Fatima-esque than they had really been, because of the influence of the Temple.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with appealing to the malleability of human memory to cast doubt on miracle testimonies. But in this case, I think that will prove a double-edged sword.

Moreover, my friend has personally spoken to three Dhammakay witnesses, who confirm what was seen that day.

As for the demonic hypothesis, it’s really not so different, except that the fabricators and fraudsters are unscrupulous unclean spirits rather than unscrupulous Buddhist monks. I can’t really speak much to it except to say it seems very unmotivated. I’m not Satan,2 but I can’t imagine the best use of his resources is to do a spectacular miracle in a 99% non-Christian country to…convince thousands of those non-Christian to keep being non-Christians. Surely he’d get a better ROI doing this in a country with a large Christian population.

Moreover, the Dhammakaya sun miracle actually happened at least three times (and probably at least five) that year. It happened again in October, and once more in November, on Sundays when large crowds gathered at the Temple.

So you would have to say the demons did it multiple times. Which…maybe, I guess.

God Loves You

If not fraud, if not demons, then what?

A few weeks back I was chatting with Amos Wollen about sun miracles. I said that to me, the almost invariably overcast conditions at these sun miracles speak strongly in favor of some kind of optical illusion. If the explanation is somehow paranormal, whether God, or demons, or mass psychic projections, or something else, there’s no obvious reason why the presence of cloud cover would matter. On the other hand, if, as Scott Alexander’s theory holds, it’s some manner of rare but not that rare optical illusion, the importance of cloud cover might be very important. Perhaps it’s the case that thin (almost invisible, to the point that onlookers perceive no clouds at all in their line of sight) clouds screen the eye from the sun, accounting for the well-recorded painless view and the lack of widespread eye damage.

Amos agreed to a point, but held it strange that, if this is some kind of naturalistically explicable optical illusion, it only seems to happen in religious contexts. I agreed with him that this was the biggest weakness for a skeptical hypothesis. Amos’ idea was that, all of the little features of a Sun Miracle can in principle be accounted for by gazing at the sun through clouds in certain conditions, but —taking a pluralist, Ba’hai inspired view that could accommodate miracles in diverse religious traditions — sometimes God tweaks those conditions just right to produce a truly spectacular miracle over an expectant crowd.

I said to Amos that what would strengthen the skeptical hypothesis further “would be a similar event in some kind of unambiguously non-religious setting like a rock concert or something which, granted, has not happened as far as I’m aware.”

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Mary (Or Buddha)

Over the past couple days, I spent a lot of tedious hours plugging key words like “sun,” “spinning,” “sparks,” “clouds,” “rainbow,” and “disc” into google books to see if I could turn up anyhing interesting.

The first noteworthy thing I found was an account in an old (1882) report on the transit of Venus across the face of the sun:

Some suggestive details here. The limb of the sun “appeared to spin.” There was some “heaving, boiling, and…spinning.” The limb of the sun appeared to consist of “filaments of light,” perhaps recalling the Sun Miracle “sparks” thrown off the spinning firewheel. And of course, we have the presence of clouds.

But it’s only suggestive. No succession of colors, no reflection onto the earth, no note that the sun became painless to look upon.

So I looked a little further, and dug up an astronomy periodical from 1916.

On July 30 of that year, there was an annular eclipse visible from Oceania.

The periodical reproduces article published in The Times of London in September, an extract from the letter of a “Tasmanian lady” who witnessed the eclipse from the town of Swansea. The full article is available on the Times archive, and reproduced via screenshots below:

Here we have all the details. We have the clouds parting on an overcast day, the spinning sun, the off-cast sparks, the “approach” to earth, the succession of colors, the reflection of yellow light onto the crowd, even the little colorful spots reflected onto the earth, attested at both Fatima and Dhammakaya.

I expect supporters of the miracle will point out that neither Fatima nor any of the other Sun Miracles happened during a solar eclipses, which is a pretty important difference. True. But it’s also true that these phenomena are not normally reported during solar eclipses. Whatever produced the effect on this occasion will have to be other than the bare fact of an eclipse, because people look at eclipses pretty often, and they don’t usually see all these things.

I think that what produced this woman’s “miracle” was not just the fact of the eclipse, but the fact that she was staring at the sun through a screen of clouds. If she had stared at the sun the day before from the same spot in similar weather conditions, I think she likely would have seen something very similar. But normally, people don’t stand around and stare at the sun, even on cloudy days. Unless there’s an expectation of a miracle. Or an eclipse.

So if we grant (and I don’t expect everyone will grant it) that this is another example of the Fatima-Dhammakaya phenomenon, what to say about it?

I think all paranormal explanations falter here. You could say God did this one, too. But it’s hard to see why he would want to do a sun miracle for a bunch of random people watching an eclipse in Tasmania, a miracle which nobody apparently took as a miracle.

Demons have an even rougher time, because they have as little motivation to act here as God, and moreover, they couldn’t be aping Fatima because Fatima hadn’t happened yet.3

Any idea that this is a hoax deliberately shaped to look like Fatima fails for the same reason.

I think any hypothesis struggles here besides the one sketched above: that this is a natural, rare, but not that rare phenomenon that appears when the sun is gazed upon through certain cloud conditions.

What, then?

I expect most of the skeptics like myself will remain so, and most of the believers will remain so. I never believed in Sun Miracles, that is, I never believed they were divine actions. But I find them a lot less spooky and mysterious than I did a year ago.

I won’t pretend to give you any mechanism on what is actually happening in people’s eyes and heads when they see this. But it does seem to be the case that it can be seen in contexts that are not Catholic, not “apostolic Christian,” not Christian at all, not even religious at all.

Whatever the precise, actual mechanism is, it seems to be a naturalistic one.

Isn’t it still a huge coincidence that this rare phenomenon happened at the date and time appointed for a miracle? I don’t really think so. This doesn’t actually appear to be that rare. It was common enough to be an Easter tradition all over Europe. People see it at pilgrimage sites all the time, and then they come home and keep seeing it.

Generally speaking, people don’t stare at the sun. It hurts and there’s no real point. And on most days, the conditions probably aren’t conducive to a miracle anyways. But if people stared at the sun more often, I think they’d probably see it pretty often.

So was it a coincidence, sure. But not a huge one, I don’t think.

I don’t think this will be by any means the last word on Sun Miracles. But for the moment, this is where I stand.

“your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams”

- Acts 2:17 (KJV)

Sometimes, I like to waste spend time reading through old volumes of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, a number of which are available on the internet archive.

The SPR was founded in 1882, with the aim of investigating scientifically the claims of paranormal powers then proliferating through Victorian society at this high-point of spiritualism, mediumship, and general fascination with the occult.

Primarily, the SPR was concerned with the question of “survival,” whether consciousness and personality persist past death. So most of the case studies and reports in its journal deal with the alleged phenomena of various contemporary mediums, ghostly apparitions, and “poltergeist” incidents, which can all get a little tedious.

Occasionally, though, there will be something a little more interesting. The cases I find the eeriest (and most amusing) myself, are the ones that deal in prophecy, the knowledge of things yet to be. Here are four of those I found especially eerie or amusing, rescued from Internet Archive obscurity for your enjoyment:

1. The Strange Death of Mr. Varis

Our first case takes us across the ocean to the United States. Precisely, to the little town of Cuba, Missouri, population 550.

On November 1st, 1890, a Dr. Suddick published a letter in the Religio-Philosophical Journal. He described a séance conducted at his home on August 29th of that year. In the course of the evening, a Mr. Cottnam inquired of the spirits as to his friend, a Mr. Varis, who was gravely ill:

Mr. C. asked, “Do you know my friend Chris. Varis, of St. James, Mo.?”

“Yes.”

“Is he any better than when I was with him last?”

“No.”

“Is he worse?”

“Yes.”

“Will I have time to get to him before he passes out if I take the next train?”

“Yes.”

“Will he live over to-morrow?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know when he will pass out?”

“Yes.”

Then the table rocked back and forth slowly, the feet striking the floor forty times, making forty distinct raps, much to the surprise of all present, as we were expecting him to pass out much sooner. We counted, and found that the time indicated would be October 8th.1

Indeed,

The prediction about Mr. Varis became an open secret, and was talked of freely through the town from the morning of August 30th until October 8th, when a telegram came over the wires informing Mr. C. that Mr. Varis died that morning at six o’clock.

Undersigned were the names of fourteen people who swore they had heard the prophecy pronounced prior to its fulfillment.

Dr. Suddick’s wife Louise clarified in a letter that not only had the Spirits fixed the date of Mr. Varis’ death, but also its time: in the daytime, in the forenoon.

2. Mrs. C. Exits Stage Right, Pursued By Monkeys

In Vol. 11 of the Journal, published in 1895, we find a letter from a Mrs. C., of Holland Road, Kensington. Mrs. C. had an “intense horror of monkeys.”2 You would think, being that she lived in London, this horror would be quite irrational.

However, one night, she dreamt that she “was persistently followed by one such as [she] had never seen before, but which terrified [her] extremely, and from which [she] could not escape.”

When she awoke, still shaken, her husband suggested she go for a walk to clear her head. So she took her children, not along their usual walking route, but along one which took them past Argyll Lodge, home to the Duke of Argyll.

Alas,

When we arrived at Argyll Lodge, what was my horror to see on the roof of the coach-house the very monkey of my dreams! In my surprise and terror, I clasped my hands and exclaimed, much to the amazement of a coachman waiting outside, “My dream! My dream! “

This I suppose attracted the attention of the monkey and he began to come after us, he on the top of the wall, we beneath, every minute I expecting he would jump upon me, and having precisely the same terror I experienced in my dream.

When a servant inquired later, “She was informed that that morning a rare and very valuable monkey belonging to the Duchess had got loose.”

Letters of corroboration are printed below, confirming that others were told of the dream before the encounter with the monkey. F.W.H Myers of the Society was also able to confirm that the Duke of Argyll did, in fact, have such a monkey.

3. John Lee, the Man They Couldn’t Hang.

For the murder of a Miss Keyse, John Lee was sentenced to hang at Her Majesty’s Prison, Exeter, on February 24, 1885. But the night before the sentence was to be carried out, Lee had a dream, which he relayed to two prison guards:

He said he saw in his dream that he was led from his cell down through the reception basement to the scaffold, which was just outside the door of that basement.

He saw himself placed upon the scaffold, and efforts made to force the drop, but it would not work. He then saw himself led away from the place of execution, as it was decided that a new scaffold must be built before the sentence of the law could be carried out.3

Sure enough, despite the fact that “the drop” had been tried five times the night before in anticipation of the execution, and answered perfectly each time, “on the occasion of the execution, at each successive attempt, the bolt could not be withdrawn from the socket by hardly the eighth part of an inch.”

That Lee had dreamt this dream before his execution was confirmed by the two guards, who made a report to the warden of the prison.

4. Lieutenant Charloteaux Foretells the End of the War

Now we leave the Victorians, and leap forward half a century to the Second World War, and an unassuming French soldier by the name of Jean Charloteaux. Charloteaux was also a believer in radiesthesia, a method of divination popular around the turn of the century. Oftentimes, radiesthesia readings are taken by means of a pendulum.

Charloteaux was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, and spent the rest of the war in a series of Bavarian prison camps. To amuse themselves, he and his comrades occasionally conducted radiesthesia sessions.

At some point in 1941, some of his friends asked him to go ahead and use his talents to predict the end of the war. Charloteaux recounts:

I drew a little sketch which Lemaire, an architect in civil life, transferred to cardboard in Chinese ink. It was a design of concentric circles. The two (outer) circles, of greatest diameter, were divided into 31 compartments, numbered 1 to 31. Between the second and third circles the 12 months of the year were written down. Finally, between the third and fourth circles were written the years 1940 to 1947.

I started the pendulum gyrating at the centre of the dial. After some seconds the movements changed to oscillations along the axis 1945-41. Held above 1941 the pendulum stopped dead ; but over 1945 it moved vigorously.

“Gentlemen, the war will end in 1945! “

We found the month by the same process. The oscillation indicated May-November, the movement gave May. For the day, the choice lay between the 8th and the 24th. The 8th was finally fixed.

“The war will end on May 8th, 1945.”4

As any history book will tell you, on May 8th, 1945, Germany formally capitulated to the Allies, bringing the war in Europe to an end.

Charloteaux published an account in the radiesthesia journal, Revue Internationale de Radiesthesie, which also included the signatures of 27 fellow officers who testified he had indeed predicted the date of the war’s end several years in advance.

Not quite satisfied, the Society research officer wrote to 13 of those officers, requesting confirmation. Nine replied, and each confirmed that yes, they recalled that Charloteaux had shared his prediction with them well ahead of time. Many of the signatories recalled hearing the prediction at different times, and even at different camps where Charloteaux had been imprisoned, but all swore it had been made.

Were it not for her height, and the strange, bluish tint of her skin, the Other who greets them aboard the craft could almost pass for human. Three squat, grey orderlies hold the two humans gently but firmly in place while the Other bends down to inspect them.

“Neither of you has been harmed!” she pronounces. “Excellent! The exfiltration doesn’t always go so smoothly, you know.”

The orderlies release them.

The first few minutes are spent in sputtering, disbelieving shock. But the Other is patient. “That is perfectly normal,” she says. “But I assure you. This is quite real. I can pinch the both of you if you like,” she offers. “I hear that is a custom among your race.”

It’s all a curious coincidence.

You see, only minutes before, in that crowded college auditorium, the two had taken time from the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Fine-Tuning Argument, and the Problem of Evil to briefly discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

The Christian had hedged. He could not discount the possibility, but he was uncomfortable with the prospect, unsure how aliens would fit into the redemptive story of mankind.

But it’s not quite so clear a victory for the atheist as he would like it to be. While he professed confidence in the existence of extraterrestrial life somewhere in the vast cosmos, he was quite sure it had never visited earth.

Nevertheless, he leans over and whispers, “I told you so!”

“Now,” says the Other, kind and smiling, “If you’ll just follow me.”

She turns, and leads them down the vast and winding corridors of the spacecraft, forged in some distant star, inscribed with the weird and spidery writing of her race. As they proceed, she notices the believer’s slight limp, sustained in his college football days. “Ah,” she says. “I’ll take care of that for you.”

With a flick of her finger, the limp disappears.

The believer sputters, “But I can hardly believe—”

The atheist chides him, “Ah, now you don’t believe the lame can walk? Why, their medical technology must be thousands of years ahead of ours.”

“To be sure,” says the Other. “Not that we need it.”

“What do you mean?” asks the atheist.

“There is no sickness among us,” she says. “No injuries, no death.”

“See?” says the atheist. “They have even conquered death, and without any risen Lord to do it for them.”

“Oh, we’ve conquered nothing,” says the Other. “None of us has ever died. Not in the whole history of our race.”

“But how can that be?”

“Because God loves us,” says the Other. “He would never allow his cherished creations to suffer pain, let alone death.”

The atheist stops cold. “You believe in God?”

Now it’s the believer’s turn to gloat. Forgetting his earlier reticence, he puffs up his chest: “I always knew that the love and might of our Creator was to great to be confined to one measly little planet!”

“No doubt about that,” says the Other. “You’d have to be a fool to disbelieve.”

Excited now, the believer rushes to her side and tugs her swirling sleeve, woven from some alien fiber. “Have you seen Him? Has He visited you? Could it be He has incarnated on other worlds?”

“Well, his existence is simply obvious,” she says. “After all—”

The argument is so crisp, so concise, and yet so undeniably sound that both the atheist and the believer must hang their heads. The atheist, because he feels like an idiot, worse than an idiot, for ever having doubted something so utterly crystal clear. The believer, because it is such a wonderful, elegant, and airtight argument, it makes all his favorites look like a child’s fumbling.

When he recovers, the believer is tempted to push his luck. He has wrestled with the Problem of Evil. On stage, he conceded to the atheist that it was the single strongest argument against God’s existence. If the Other can so briskly demolish atheism, perhaps she also has a theodicy that will put the rest to shame.

So he puts the question to her, as they proceed down the hallway.

“I’m not quite sure what you’re asking me,” she says.

“God is loving, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is.”

“So why does he permit us to undergo such suffering on earth?”

The atheist chimes in. “It’s why I’ve never believed,” he says. “And I have to admit, you’ve proven his existence to me beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the Problem of Evil seems as strong as ever. I have the same question as my opponent, here.”

“I don’t understand the relevance. Why shouldn’t he permit you to suffer?”

The atheist says, “Well, you have agreed he is perfectly good, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And all-powerful?”

“Yes.”

“So what gives?”

“It’s just a silly question. It’s like asking, if God is perfectly good, why does he permit ice to melt. It’s a complete nonsequitur.”

“Ice melting is not a moral atrocity,” says the believer.

“Correct,” she says.

“Are you saying,” the believer begins with nagging horror. “That there is no good or evil? That God exists, but moral realism is false?” He doesn’t want to believe it, but if she has an argument as good the one she formulated for the existence of God…

“Certainly not. Our race sees the evidence of God’s goodness every day.”

In desperation, the believer sets forth his best theodicies. It would be a lot clearer logical notation, but he conveys soul-building, free will, and the rest well enough.

The Other laughs. “I know you aren’t the brightest creatures among the stars, but you can’t seriously tell me you find any of those convincing!”

“Then why is there evil?” the atheist demands.

“There isn’t,” she says. “Of course, in theory there might be such a thing, but God would never permit its instantiation.”

Agitated now, the atheist demands, “Of course there is such a thing as evil! War! Genocide! Murder! Cancer! Heartbreak!”

“We know none of those things on my world,” she says.

“But we do!”

“So what conclusions can we draw from that?”

“Well,” the believer sputters. “There must be some reason for God to permit evil! To-to fortify us, to allow the realization of moral goods not otherwise realizable, to—”

The Other laughs. “What ever gave you the idea that you were moral agents?”

Now, the atheist and the believer are in perfect accord: “We suffer! We love! We laugh! We fear! We hope!”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Murder,” the atheist tries again. “Torture. Forest fires. Death—”

“Certainly,” the Other says. “It would be unfathomably evil if such things happened to a morally relevant race.”

Now the believer has his outburst: “How can you claim human beings are not morally relevant?”

They at last reach their destination at the end of the winding hallway. A high-roofed, circular chamber. The moment they step inside, a swarm of the squat, grey orderlies swarms forward, seizes the two, and drags them to the waiting table in the center of the room.

As the orderlies strap them down, the Other says, “It’s a simple syllogism. Even your brains should be able to grasp it. First premise: an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God would never allow evil. Second premise: humans suffer. Conclusion: human suffering is not evil.”

She produces a long, shining blade from her robe and slithers toward the believer and the atheist. “Now, you two just hold still while I dissect the wonders of God’s perfect creation.”

NOTE: This is another essay that has nothing to do with religion or counter-apologetics. Nevertheless, it’s been something kicking around for a while, and the recent shooting in Mexico sadly inspired me to finish it. It deals with the often-disturbing topic of mass murder, so be warned. I hope you get something out of it.

“Son of a gun,

the master of fate”

— KMFDM

The Apotheosis of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

Three days ago, on April 20th, a gunman opened fire at the Teotihuacán pyramids in Mexico. He killed one person, and injured at least a dozen others, before shooting himself. Mexico is no stranger to violent death, but this had nothing to do with the drug war or with common crime.

The killer carried a sacred icon on his person. Not the Virgin of Guadalupe, not Jesús Malverde, not any one of Mexico’s myriad folk-saints. Rather, he carried an AI-generated, framed “photo” of himself posing with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre:

At twenty-seven years old, the gunman would have been at most a few months old when Eric and Dylan marched into Columbine High and murdered twelve students and a teacher, before taking their own lives.

Columbine was not the first school shooting. Wikipedia has a long list of such incidents, going all the way back to the nineteenth century. But if you consult the webpage I’ve linked, you will notice two interesting things:

First, the list is split into two. Before 2000, and after 2000. Apparently, the twenty-six years since 1999 are worthy of the same consideration as the hundred and fifty years before.

Second, if you peruse the “before 2000” list, you will see lots of accidental discharges and interpersonal disputes. Someone brings a gun to school to settle a score with a rival, or with a hated instructor. Fatalities usually number one or two or three, if any at all. Vanishingly rare are the incidents that have become so familiar, when somebody arrives with the intention of killing as many people as possible.

Certainly, the “old-school” type of shooting still takes place. Kids still bring guns to school to settle petty, personal scores. But after 2000, the roster is suddenly replete with Columbine-style indiscriminate massacres, “successful” or otherwise.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that before Columbine, these types of shootings didn’t happen, and after Columbine, they do.

Since 1999, the steady drumbeat of mass shootings has become almost numbing. See, the now infamous Onion headline:

That many, even most post-2000 mass shooters are inspired by Eric and Dylan is not a novel observation. There is a wikipedia article on “the Columbine Effect.” The deification of Eric and Dylan began very early.

In 2004, the South China Morning Post printed an article called “The Cult of the Killer Nerds.” Among the interviewed were an seventeen-year-old Melissa Anderson from Iowa who ran a fan site and said that “Eric and Dylan were really cool to do what they did…because they stood up for themselves.” Another teenager darkly warned that “Eric said he was only the beginning, the first revolutionary. He was right.”

The article mentions Yahoo discussion lists dedicated to the two killers, websites with names like “In Remembrance of Eric and Dylan.” Most of these early forums and websites have vanished into the vortex of time along with the rest of the early 2000s internet.

But the cult soldiered on. In the early 2010s, devotees congregated on tumblr. At its height, the “True Crime Community” probably consisted of hundreds if not thousands of blogs dedicated to a variety of serial killers and mass murderers, but mostly to Eric and Dylan.

Eventually, tumblr cracked down. These days, the cult thrives mostly on TikTok, instragram reels, and private discords.

The phenomenon has been well-reported on in the media. Oftentimes it has been called a fandom, with “Columbiners” as dark analogues to fans of Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift. They have also been compared to the “fangirls” who write letters to imprisoned serial killers, and have for many decades.

My impression is that, while neither of these comparisons is totally off-base, there is something more sinister still to the cult of Eric and Dylan. In their writings, the pair often referred to themselves as “gods,” standing head and shoulders above the swinish multitude. The Nazi-curious Eric even signed off a friend’s yearbook, “ICH BIN GOTT.”

Many of their fans appear to have taken them at their word. My distinct impression is that there was and is a real occultist tinge to the devotion. Fans “joke” about contacting the killers through oujija boards or other such means. Their spirits are thought to be really present in some way. As early as 2001, a failed mass shooter avowed his belief that “Eric Harris is God.” When I was on tumblr in the 2010s, I recall running across a blog whose proprietor had rewritten the Lord’s Prayer to honor Eric and Dylan. On the internet, it is very difficult to tell where a twisted joke ends and sincerity begins. Sometimes, there really is no fact of the matter.

More than fandom, more than serial killer groupies, the Eric and Dylan devotees remind me of nothing so much as adherents to an ancient hero cult.

The cult has its own iconography (see above). It has is own sacraments; some devotees took to eating and drinking the killers’ own favorite foods on their birthdays or on the anniversary of the massacre. It even has its own hymns. The phrases on the piece of “fanart” above are taken from songs by the German industrial rock band KMFDM, which was Eric’s favorite band. “Pumped up Kicks” by Foster the People, which was the big summer pop hit of 2010, has likewise become a favorite. Distreacted by the peppy beat and the instrumentals, few in nightclubs and bars took note of the song’s dark lyrics, which recount a disturbed youth’s plan for a massacre (“all the other kids…you better run, better run, outrun my gun”) But the cult certainly noticed. Once upon a time, YouTube was full of fanmade music videos, clips from documentary reenactments and CCTV footage from the actual shooting cut to “Pumped up Kicks.”

The Parkland shooter watched such a video on his way to commit his massacre in 2018

Most of the Columbine devotees, disturbing as they may be, are ultimately harmless and will never hurt anyone. But occasionally, one will decide to honor their heroes with the ultimate act of worship: the reenactment of their own “apotheosis.”

Here is a graphic tracing the influence of Columbine on dozens of mass shootings down to 2022:

It is not a complete list. Since 2022, there have been more.

It is not even a solely American problem anymore. In 2018, eighteen-year-old Vladyslav Roslyakov killed twenty-one people at a school in Crimea. He dressed like Eric, white shirt, black pants, combat boots, suspenders. He even modeled his own suicide after Eric’s, firing a shotgun through his mouth, dying in the exact same “pose.”

It is not even a problem solely of disturbed young men anymore. In 2024, fifteen-year-old Natalie Rupnow shot and killed two people at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin, before killing herself. Before the massacre, Natalie photographed herself wearing a KMFDM shirt.

This was a notable incident for multiple reasons, besides the fact that female mass shooters are very rare. Natalie was fifteen. Eric and Dylan died ten years before she was born. In her brief, rambling manifesto, she doesn’t mention any Columbine specifics. Unlike Melissa Anderson twenty years before, she does not specify that she idolizes Eric and Dylan for “fighting back” or “standing up for themselves.” In fact she mentions their names only briefly at the end of the manifesto, almost perfunctorily.

All this brings us back down to Teotihuacán, and the shooter carrying his AI-generated Eric and Dylan icon. In few respects does this massacre bear any resemblance to Columbine at all. It took place in a foreign country. It did not take place at a school. It was carried out by an adult, not a teenager. The gunman’s motives are unclear and confused. And yet, he felt obliged to offer the appropriate veneration to Eric and Dylan, perhaps so they would bless his rampage?

Since Rupnow died a little over a year ago, at least nine would-be shooters have specifically referenced her. The “Cult of Columbine” appears to be self-perpetuating at this point. By now, the concrete memory of that long-ago day in April have almost ceased to matter. Eric and Dylan have ceased to be human killers who lived and died in a particular time and place, but become patron deities of mass murder, to be invoked prior to an act of horrific violence as a sort of ritual.

Black Swan

Why does this keep happening?

It’s because of mental illness. It’s because of lax gun laws. It’s because of social atomization. It’s because of white supremacy. It’s because of alienation under late stage capitalism. It’s because we took God out of the schools. It’s because of MKULTRA.

A very old question is, to what extent is history determined by deep, underlying structural factors, and to what extent is it determined by the conscious action of individuals or small groups?

How contingent is history? If Hitler had died at the Somme, would the Second World War have been averted, or would there have been another man to take “his” place in the drama of the twentieth century? Are monsters the fathers of history, or its sons?

The news coverage in the wake of Columbine is almost quaint in retrospect. The recent trend has been to sensibly subject mass killers to damnatio memoriae. “If you do this monstrous thing, you will not be remembered, as a hero or a villain. You will be forgotten.” Back in 1999, they put Eric and Dylan on the cover of TIME magazine. There would be no point in my refusing to name them or post their pictures out of principle. Everyone old enough to remember the ‘90s knows who they were, and so do plenty of us who aren’t, as much as any “superstar” of the Y2K era, up there with Britney Spears and Bin Laden.

But back then, they were already asking the question, “what made them do it?” “Why did this happen?”

What is easily missed in all of this is that when we ask “why does this keep happening?” after the latest mass shooting, we are not exactly asking the same question as was TIME and the whole country asked in 1999, when they looked at Eric and Dylan and asked “why did they do it?”

In many respects, Columbine was very different from the massacres it has inspired. The “main act” of Columbine was not even supposed to be the shooting, but the bombing. The killers’ plan was to blow up the school cafeteria during lunch, killing hundreds outright, before gunning down the survivors as they ran out. If things had gone according to plan, the death-toll would have been many times worse (fortunately, the pair were hardly master bomb-makers). But few of Eric and Dylan’s imitators have sought to imitate this particular part of the attack.

Columbine was also highly unique in that the massacre was carried out by two shooters. Events with more than one shooter are extremely rare. When they do occur, they are generally in the context of ideological extremism, or else involve a romantic couple, such as the San Bernardino shootings of 2015, which was both. Incidents that involve two killers, united only by friendship and a shared sense of grievance and nihilistic rage, are vanishingly rare.

The vast majority of Eric and Dylan’s imitators carry out their attacks alone. Often, these individuals are far more obviously maladjusted or violent than their heroes. Many more recent shooters have long criminal histories, or have been expelled from school for severe dysfunction.

Eric and Dylan were, comparatively, “normal.” They were known among their peers for macabre sensibilities, and Eric in particular had a serious temper, but no one expected them to do what they did. There is something interesting here.

The psychology of a lone mass shooter is, I suspect, different from the psychology of someone who commits such an atrocity with someone else. The sort of person capable of doing such a thing with a partner is not necessarily the same as the sort of person capable of doing such a thing alone, which is not to say nice things about either type of person.

Latter-day mass shooters are trying to be Eric and Dylan, consciously or otherwise. And yet, they are not like Eric and Dylan. If not for the example of Columbine, these people would never have picked up their guns and opened fire. So we can explain them by reference to Columbine. No Columbine, no Virginia Tech, no Sandy Hook, no Parkland, no Abundant Life, no Teotihuacán.

But Columbine itself was not an imitation, it was sui generis. It was, strangely, not a school shooting carried out by the kinds of people who typically carry out school shootings.

If we can explain the monthly and yearly school shootings of today as a function of a particular kind of disturbed mind plus the example of Columbine, we cannot explain Columbine in the same way.

So why did Columbine happen?

The early notion, cemented almost immediately in popular memory, was that Eric and Dylan were outcast loners who snapped after years of bullying by Columbine’s jocks, and shot up the school in revenge. The facts don’t really bear that out. The pair were indeed picked on. Columbine indeed suffered from an especially toxic “cult of the athlete” that allowed jocks to get away with everything from bullying, to sexual harassment, to battery, to crimes like burglary and vandalism. Eric and Dylan indeed deeply resented this. But so did hundreds of other students at Columbine, and none of them ever shot anybody.

In his 2009 book Columbine, journalist Dave Cullen presented an opposite, but equally pat and equally unsatisfactory answer. To hear him tell it, Eric and Dylan were actually popular and well-liked kids. But Eric was a psychopath, born bad, and Dylan was a depressive, born sad. Their peculiar pathologies drove them to kill their classmates and themselves, and the environment at Columbine High had little if anything to do with it. Cullen’s book, despite having become the sort of canonical account of the shooting, has been severely criticized by many of those who knew the killers and their victims. He has been accused of absolving both the school and the local authorities of any responsibility, both for fostering the toxic culture at Columbine and for failing to act on any of the warning signs the boys gave off in the months and years leading up to April 20th.

Eric and Dylan have both been dead longer than they have been alive. We cannot get in their heads or diagnose their exact pathologies. It is clear enough that both were severely disturbed young men. This is almost tautologically true. If they were not, they would not have done what they did. But just how disturbed, just what contributed to the ultimate conflagration and in what degrees, how much of their evil was born and how much made, whether they might have lived “normal” lives if things had gone differently, all that is impossible to know.

As trite and unsatisfying as it is, it seems to be the case that there was no one reason. It really was a “perfect storm.” At any point, anything could have prevented the massacre. If either Eric or Dylan had been a little less disturbed. If they had never met. If Columbine had been less toxic a high school. If either of them had gotten cold feet. If their friend Robyn Anderson had refused to buy them firearms. If parents, or friends, or teachers, or police had acted on any of the numerous red flags the boys threw up. If the school resource officer had managed to incapacitate one or both of them that morning before they could kill anybody.

I do not discount systemic explanations in general, but in this case, systemic answers just don’t satisfy. Do school shootings happen because of the widespread availability of guns in the United States? In one sense, obviously, yes. If it was very difficult to get ahold of a firearm, there would be many fewer mass shooters. In another sense, no. Semi-automatic firearms were not invented in the 1990s. The capability to bring a repeating rifle, pistol, or shotgun to school and massacre one’s classmates has been there since the 19th century. But it did not start happening several times a year until 1999.

Is it because of social anomie, or moral decay, the decline of religion in public life? Maybe. But can we really say that the 60s and the 70s were so much more peaceful and harmonious than the 1990s and the 2000s? Those were the days of the Watts Riots, the Weathermen, Kent State, the Third Klan, the unprecedented spike in violent crime. Terrorist bombings were an almost weekly affair. Crack cocaine turned American inner cities into hellscapes. And yet, no Columbine.

It was one in a million. All the material factors — easily available guns, disturbed youth, incompetent authority figures, social alienation — were there long before. But it did not happen until 1999.

I see no reason to think that, if it hadn’t been Eric and Dylan, it would have been somebody else. At least, not then, and maybe not until very much later, maybe not even today.

It is almost comforting to blame school shootings on some deep-running sickness in our society. Such explanations, at least, do not ground out in random chaos.

This is why I call it a curse. It is something inflicted at a discrete moment in time by particular persons bent on evil. It did not have to happen, it was not overdetermined. Everything went wrong in 1999. Rather, everything “came together” in the worst way. If you could run it all again, I bet ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there is no Columbine.

Some things really are down to structural dysfunction, but I don’t think this is one of them. It didn’t have to be like this. Hundreds of people have died in mass shootings since 1999, and they did not have to die. It would not have taken the uprooting of American society. If something, anything, had stopped those two boys on that April morning almost thirty years ago, hundreds of people would still be alive.

The idea here is, if you walked out of your house one night, and saw that the stars in the sky had been rearranged to spell out the Gospel of John in Koine Greek, that would be at least some evidence for theism. As Tower of Babble says, it’s a very modest claim, not that this would prove Christianity, or prove theism, or even be very strong evidence for either, just that it would be some evidence.

And if you can grant that the sky-gospel is at least some evidence for theism, then you have to admit that we can know something about the kind of universe God would be likely to create, at least in principle.

Nathan suggested that it might be metaphysically impossible for this to happen. I’m not sure about that. And I agree that viscerally, it does seem like very strong evidence for theism, even confirmatory. But when I think about it a little more, is that really the case?

Consider an alternative scenario: you walk out of your house, and the stars spell out “the universe is 6,000 years old.”

Creationists would jump for joy, and why shouldn’t they? Everyone else would probably be pretty uncomfortable. After all, just about every piece of evidence from the physical sciences collected over the past several centuries suggests that the universe cannot possibly be 6,000 years old.

What do we do with that? Do we chuck out all of the contrary evidence and decide that, somehow, Answers in Genesis must be right and every bit of geological, biological, and astronomical work done since the Renaissance is wrong? Surely not. But then what to make of the sky-message? Why would God put that there? Is he lying to us? Surely not, because God is supposed to be perfectly good. Is he somehow testing our commitment to reason? That would still be lying kind of, but maybe?

But we would perhaps be inclined to explore alternative hypotheses that don’t require the author of the sky-message to be God. Like, say, Ken Ham has gotten his hands on a grimoire and cast some sort of glamour over the entire human race.

Here’s another one: you go outside, and the stars spell out “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Would Star Wars, literally written in the stars be evidence for theism? Unlike either the Gospel of John or the creationist claim, there is no apparent theological content at all.

What to conclude? Is God a Star Wars fan? Is George Lucas God? I suspect in such a case, most of us — including and perhaps especially the religious — would be more willing to entertain hypotheses like “we’re in a simulation after all and the simulators are having a laugh” or “we are being pranked by an advanced alien civilization for some reason.”

I want to say that the stars spelling out the opening of the Star Wars crawl would not be evidence for theism.

Perhaps you disagree. But if it isn’t, then why would the Gospel of John be such? The natural answer is “because the Gospel of John is a religious text that talks about God, while Star Wars is a piece of secular entertainment.”

This opens up a whole can of worms. You now have to make the argument that God is more likely to endorse the Gospel of John than Star Wars. It may seem ridiculous to suggest otherwise, but, I don’t actually think that’s clear at all. At least, a lengthy argument has to be made. You would first have to establish that there’s something plausibly divine about the Gospel of John, but establishing that something divine even exists is what the FTA is trying to do in the first place.

There’s an old Mitchell and Webb skit relevant to this debate. Watch it, it’s short:

The joke is obvious. Cutting open a watermelon to find the seeds inside miraculously arranged to spell out a message in intelligible English is the sort of thing most people would naturally take to be strong evidence of design. But in this case, the message explicitly denies the existence of such a designer. It’s almost an empirical example of “this sentence is false.”

A watermelon can be faked, as demonstrated by the prop in the skit. But imagine if “There is no God” was spelled out in the stars instead. Would that be evidence for theism? I think the answer is “no.” Once again, mischievous aliens or simulators are where my mind goes first. Why would a good God explicitly deny his own existence? Some religious might want to blame the Devil, which takes me to my last example:

You walk outside, and now the stars say “AVE SATANI!”

In this case, it seems almost maximally implausible that God arranged the stars that way. Under the Christian view, it’s hard to think of something God is less likely to do. Actually, there’s no religion I am aware of on earth that suggests God would do ever do something remotely like that. This is an example of a star-message everyone on earth could wholeheartedly agree was not written by God, and if not, how could it be evidence for theism?

You could try an end-run, and say that it is evidence for theism, specifically Christian theism, because Christianity believes in an intelligent, vainglorious superbeing called Satan. A lot of Christians would be uncomfortable ceding Satan that degree of power to interfere with God’s creation, but even if we did, it’s not really theistic evidence in the relevant FTA sense, evidence of God’s intervention in the cosmos. In fact, it’s almost negative evidence, it’s the kind of thing God could not possibly have written.

Whether we attribute the celestial “AVE SATANI!” to aliens, simulators, or the Devil himself, we will probably have to say it’s evidence for the action of some intelligent agent that is not God, and therefore not fine-tuning evidence.

And if “AVE SATANI” is not evidence of fine-tuning, why should the Gospel of John be?

I decided to read Travis Dumsday’s recent book on the 1968 Marian apparitions in Zeitoun, Egypt. It’s not very long, so I got through it pretty quick. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

Brief Background

If you are on my substack reading about miracles, you may already know the basic details of the Zeitoun apparitions. The short of it is, beginning in April of 1968 and continuing for about three years, the Virgin was said to have appeared with some regularity hovering over the dome of St. Mary’s Church in Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo.

News of the apparitions brought at least hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of pilgrims streaming in. Not only Coptic Christians, but also Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox bore witness. The apparition generally appeared as a glowing figure in white, almost universally recognized (from iconic artwork and such) as the Virgin. She moved about on the church’s rooftop, occasionally kneeling, waving, or blessing the crowd. Sometimes she was accompanied by flights of doves, or waves of sweet-smelling incense.

Zeitoun is sometimes considered one of the strongest miracle cases on the record. After all, it occurred within living memory and was witnessed by hundreds of thousands.

Dumsday’s Verdict

Dumsday begins by clarifying that he is “not claiming that an adequate scientific explanation for these incidents will never be found, nor am…that they constitute decisive proof of the reality of the supernatural, let alone proof of the truth of the Christian faith.”1 Nevertheless, his thesis is that “the Marian apparitions at Zeitoun…at present constitute powerful (but heretofore mostly unappreciated) evidence for the reality of the supernatural.”2

He proceeds to provide some historical context for the apparitions, before moving on to survey the available eyewitness evidence. One major limitation of his study, as he freely admits, is that he does not speak or read Arabic, and has therefore been limited to secondary sources written in French or English. Being that the relevant events occurred in an Arabic-speaking country, this is a fairly serious drawback.

Nevertheless, after going through the eyewitness reports, and surveying five naturalistic explanations (tectonic strain theory, mass hallucination, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Jungian analytical philosophy, and technological hoax), he judges none of them satisfactory, and concludes that, unless one has the prior commitment that naturalism is almost certainly true, a supernatural explanation is best.

Motives for a Hoax

Dumsday deals with this possibility last in his list of potential naturalistic explanations, saying that “I have not come across any serious, detailed proposals in either academic or popular literature to the effect that the events at Zeitoun were a deliberately staged hoax.”3

In fact, I was reading through the first half, it occurred to me that of all the miracles I’d read about, nowhere have the potential motives for a hoax been more apparent than at Zeitoun.

The apparitions came right on the heels of Egypt’s disastrous defeat by Israel in the Six-Day-War. As Dumsday notes, “The unexpected defeat was a considerable blow to the national pride of the Egyptian populace, and the heavy military casualties they suffered were still fresh in mind.”4 The majority Muslim population cast around for someone to blame, and landed on the Copts, who were accused of having betrayed Egypt. “It got to the point where President Nasser felt obliged to make a public speech praising the patriotic service of Coptic soldiers during the war.”5 Moreover, “the Israeli capture of Jerusalem…meant that the traditional Coptic pilgrimages there for Easter had come to a halt.”6 I think it is safe to say that the mood among the Copts of Egypt was low. A miracle would have been welcome.

Dumsday also makes the interesting note that, supposedly, the apparitions at Zeitoun had been predicted in advance. A story went around that in 1920 or so, the Virgin had appeared to Ibrahim Pasha Khalil, the man on whose land St. Mary’s was to be built in the following years. Supposedly, she promised him that if he established a church on the site, she would return in fifty years to bless it.7 Because there is no definitive record of this prophecy’s existence prior to the apparitions, Dumsday doesn’t make too much of it, and suggests it may have been an ex eventu “prediction.” But let’s say there was such a prophecy? Might someone besides the Virgin have been tempted to fulfill it?

It is also noted, interestingly, that “the Islam of 1960s Egypt was not wholly closed off to Marian devotion.”8 Indeed, in this tense, politically and religiously fraught atmosphere, “The one venue that appears to have provided Christians and Muslims in Egypt a consistent religious bond is the veneration or honor of the persons of the Holy Family, particularly Mary.”9

Once the apparitions began, the government got involved quickly. Unlike at Fatima, there was no attempt by an irritated anticlerical regime to squelch the religious fervor. Quite the opposite. The government’s efforts “included tearing down some nearby buildings (including the municipal transit garage across the street from which the apparition had first been seen), cutting down many of the trees surrounding the church, and organizing outdoor seating areas, including the charging of a nominal admission fee for entry to the areas closest to the church.”10

So, this was good business.

Now, to me, the motives for fraud appear very obvious. Here is an opportunity not only to hearten the Christians of Egypt in a dark time, but to defuse tensions with the Muslim majority by appeal to a mutually beloved religious figure, get the people’s minds on something other than a humiliating military defeat, and turn a profit at the same time. It’s a case of “everybody wins” if there ever was one.

Dumsday disagrees that there are clear motives for fraud. He makes the obvious point that if there was a fraud, the culprits would have been either (at least some faction of) the Egyptian government, (at least some faction of) the Coptic Church, or both in collusion. He also sensibly argues that if Nasser’s government was trying to come up with some scheme to tamp down inter-religious hostility, an apparition at a Christian church would be an unlikely way to go about it. He puts the Copt population of the country at about 10%, but nevertheless the overwhelming majority of Egyptians were Muslim. A religious fraud is likelier to target the religious sensibilities of the majority.11 No real argument there. But he dismisses the possibility of the Coptic Church perpetrating a fraud in a single sentence: “The possibility of a hoax being discovered would have carried far too great a risk of retaliatory violence, clearly outweighing any potential gains,”12 and thus the idea would have been rejected by “any halfway rational actor.”

It’s not clear to me that this is true. Putting aside that people often act in ways that are not halfway rational, if some elements of the Coptic community had attempted such a fraud, they would have been perpetrating it primarily on their own people, not on the Muslims. Were the fraud uncovered, while it may have been extremely embarrassing, it doesn’t seem clear they need have feared violent reprisals from the Muslim majority. Moreover, it seems perfectly plausible that — granting a fraud — the fraudsters might have anticipated only brief and local interest, rather than the national and even international sensation it became. In my judgment, the motives for fraud on the parts of both the Coptic Church and the government remain clear.

One of the things I was most interested going in was what Dumsday could say about the inquiry supposedly undertaken by Nasser’s government. In reading about Zeitoun, you often hear that the government investigated the apparitions and could find no natural explanation. I wondered if Dumsday would elaborate, on the specifics of this investigation, who was in charge and how it was conducted, because I have not seen these details anywhere else. Unfortunately, the following is all we have:

Zaki writes that the authorities conducted a thorough investigation of the entire area surrounding St Mary’s Church, to a radius of fifteen miles, looking for evidence of electronic equipment set up to produce the apparitions artificially; they found no such evidence. This early phase of government inquiry is also briefly mentioned in other sources. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find additional information on the details of this investigation: who exactly was conducting it (e.g., which branches of government were involved), exactly how long it went on, what sorts of methods were employed, or what sorts of internal reports were generated within the Egyptian bureaucracy13

So in other words, we know nothing at all about this investigation, except that there supposedly was one. If you’re going to issue a public declaration that a supernatural phenomena is unfolding in the heart of your capital, you do need to show your work. You can’t just say, “yeah we looked into it lol.” Certainly, the mere fact that there was supposedly an investigation, without any further detail, is not enough to rule out the opportunity for and possibility of fraud.

So much for motive. What about means?

Technical Feasibility of a Hoax

Dumsday thinks a technological hoax is highly implausible. “The first point to be noted is that any serious examination of the eyewitness reports—even of the limited selection available in the English and French sources employed here—makes it apparent that the phenomena were not the product of any standard twodimensional light projection.” He thinks the apparition was simply too mobile, too dynamic, to be accounted for by something like an "ecclesial analogue of the Bat-signal.”14 It moved, it knelt, it gestured to the crowd, it (sometimes) had discernible features.

This being the case, Dumsday suggests that if the apparition was the product of some hoax, it would have to involve cutting-edge holographic technology of the kind unavailable to any relevant actors in 1968 Egypt.

But the first thing to note is that it appears not everyone who came to see the Virgin actually saw her. American anthropologist Cynthia Nelson was on the ground in Cairo, and besides collecting testimonies from many of the pilgrims, she also had the opportunity to witness the apparition for herself.

As we were talking, the crowd began pointing to the palm tree and exclaiming “It’s the Virgin—she looks like a nun, and she is swaying to and fro as if she were blessing us!” When I looked to where the crowds were pointing I, too, thought I saw a light through the branches of the trees, and as I tried to picture a nunlike figure in those branches, I could trace the outline of a figure. But as I thought to myself that this is just an illusion of the light reflecting through the branches, the image of the nun would leave my field of vision. Still, there was no doubt in my mind they there was a light and that if I looked for the image it would come into focus.15

All Nelson saw was a light, and she could make it resolve into an identifiable figure only with some effort.

There were, apparently, others who did not see the apparitions. Dumsday quotes witness Marie Simji:

I went there for several nights, two, three times, and it’s the third time that I saw it . . . on the church . . . about an hour and a half after sunset. Then . . . I was very happy to see it. . . . Before I saw it, I had seen two white pigeons which flew into the sky, and then all of a sudden the Virgin appeared. She remained about five minutes: I saw her very clearly. There were people to the side of me who didn’t see her. I was very happy to see her; and at the same time I cried!16

Apparently, it was possible for one person to see the Virgin, and for others right next to her in the crowd not to. Father Boutros, priest at St. Mary’s, suggested that while everyone had seen the earlier apparitions, “When it came to some of the later apparitions, a smaller number of people (in particular the morally pure) were able to see them.”17

Unfortunately, there are very few, if any extant testimonies from people who did not see the Virgin, besides Nelson’s. But here, there is an inevitable selection effect. Most of the testimonies Dumsday refers to were taken down only some time later, months or years or decades. Dumsday himself laments that there was no one taking random samples from the crowd and questioning them on what they had seen at the time. Naturally, when investigators go around looking for people who saw the Virgin at Zeitoun, they aren’t going to hear from people who went to Zeitoun, saw nothing but some vague, uninteresting lights, and went home.

So, even if most in the crowd saw at least a light, it is difficult to say what proportion saw the things that Dumsday believes rule out a technological hoax (e.g, the clearly outlined, detailed, mobile figure of the Virgin).

At this point, Dumsday or somebody else might object that, okay, even if some people only saw a light, even if most people only saw a light, it’s unreasonable to believe that so much as thousands of people would perceive that light as a woman with recognizable features, making recognizable gestures and movements.

But multiple witnesses described the apparition as being “like a statue,”18 or “a radiant phosphorescent statue,”19or “a statue-like figure.”20 One person clarified that she looked “like a phosphorous statue, but not so stiff as a statue.”21 It’s unclear what that means exactly, but this recurrent description seems to imply that “Mary” was less than a fully articulate, fluid human being.

Multiple witnesses likewise reported first seeing a light, which only then “took the form of St. Mary.” Dumsday interprets this as the apparition actually shapeshifting in veridical reality, but we might bear in mind Dr. Nelson’s experience — that she could see a light, but she really had to concentrate and try to make it look like a woman.

Another detail worth remarking on is the photographic evidence. Going into the book, I wondered what Dumsday would make out of it, as you do see a number of purported images from Zeitoun floating around on the internet. Unfortunately, most if not all of them have been obviously, at the very least, retouched, and so their evidential value is dubious. Dumsday mentions them only briefly in his study. He defers to the expertise of sindonologist22 Dr. John Jackson, who put out a book called A Lady of Light Appears in Egypt. Jackson apparently subjected “three particularly famous photographs—taken by Wagih Rizk Matta, Fawzy Mansur, and Ali Ibrahim respectively—to a penetrating analysis. He argues that Wagih Rizk Matta’s photo is most likely doctored, while those of the other two show no signs of having been tampered with and so might be genuine.”23 Unfortunately, Jackson’s book appears unavailable online, but this seems like quite a qualified endorsement. In his interview on Capturing Christianity, Dumsday skates past the photos pretty quickly when Cameron Bertuzzi brings them up. He states plainly that he has no technical expertise in the topic and places little evidential weight on them.

In his interview with Joe Schmid on The Majesty of Reason, Dumsday says that there are only about ten alleged Zeitoun photographs in circulation, and notes himself how strange it is that, with these apparitions supposedly having continued with some regularity for three years, there aren’t more such photographs, or even film footage. On this point he refers to the work of Catholic priest Francois Brune, who claims he spoke with many people who attempted to photograph the phenomenon, only to find nothing appeared on film when it was developed. Dumsday suggests this might actually be evidence against a naturalistic hypothesis, the idea being that if there was some veridical but natural light source at the church, you would still expect there to be more photographs of it than we actually have. I don’t really follow this logic. It rests on the assumption that, if a photographer went down to St. Mary’s to capture the apparition on camera and saw nothing at all, or at best some vague lights, he would go through the trouble of taking photographs in the first place, let alone developing and distributing them.

Also, recall the initial apparition, the one first seen by Muslim workers at the transit station across the street. Evidently, they first believed they were seeing a woman about to jump to her death. This is strange because, in the later apparitions, the figure is luminous enough that the luminosity is the first thing to strike the eye. Many witnesses reported seeing the light first and only then the Virgin.

But if you saw a bright, shining figure on top of a church, would your first thought be “don’t jump!” or “what is that light?” Surely, the witnesses should have noticed the glow first! That they didn’t suggests that, at least initially, on the first night the apparition wasn’t glowing.

She seemed, “seemed to be of a young lady in white kneeling by the cross at the top of the dome.”24 And only then did “The lady stood up,” and “they all saw her dressed as if in a bright gown of light in a view similar to that associated with the Virgin Mary.”

I’m not sure what to make of it, but it is interesting.

So, the above are important considerations in evaluating the hoax hypothesis. But probably the most important consideration is that Mary never stopped appearing in Egypt.

Later Egyptian apparitions

In his book, Dumsday lists eight apparitions in Egypt since 1971. Edfou (1982), Shoubra (1986), Dronka (1990), Shantana al-Hagar (1997), Sharqiya (1999), Assiut (2000), Birma (2000), and al-Warraq (2009).25

Save Shoubra, Dumsday does not discuss them at all, except to suggest avenues for further research. This is somewhat understandable, as most of these are highly obscure. Despite their recency, Zeitoun is vastly better-known. However, these apparitions are probably very important for evaluating whatever happened at Zeitoun in 1968.

In at least two cases, Assiut and Al-Warraq, photographic and video evidence purported to be of the apparitions does survive.

Let us begin in chronological order. In late 2000, the Virgin appeared over the Church of St. Mark in the town of Assiut, a town apparently known as a “a stronghold of Islamic militancy.”

One woman told the BBC that “She said she had seen the Virgin Mary with outstretched hands and a light emanating from them.” Another said, “I saw Mary, she was beautiful, wearing a blue veil.”26

Here are two stills from a video apparently taken at the church (I have not been able to find the video they come from, if indeed it was ever made public):

These purport to be, respectively, the luminous “doves” reported by some witnesses, and a luminous cross. To my untrained eye, they look more like artifacts or lens flare, even assuming they have not been “brightened” or anything later. The first photo may be real birds, but I don’t think anyone could argue these are clear images of anything. The alleged photographer himself says that “if you ponder the spot of light you will see it as a cross!!” These remind me a lot of UFO photos that just look like vague blurs or splotches of light, though if you squint you can sometimes make them look like alien spacecraft.

There are some actual videos of events at the church:

Again, some of this looks to me like the kinds of flares and other defects common especially with the potato-tier cameras of the early 2000s. In the first video there appears to be some kind of glow first in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and then behind the cross (there’s actually a time-skip of about thirty minutes when the glow “moves” from the corner to the cross.) I don’t know enough to say if it’s a camera effect or if there’s an actual illuminating source there. It looks sort of like a floodlight of some kind to me. In any case it doesn’t look like Mary. In the second video there is clearly some kind of intermittent strobe-like light making the crowd go crazy. Who or what is producing it, I can’t say. But to my eye at least, there’s nothing in those twenty minutes that looks remotely like a recognizable human figure, Mary or otherwise.

Probably the most egregious case is “Our Lady of Al-Warraq,” an apparition that took place in late 2009, in Giza.

You know the story by now. In December of that year, the Virgin purportedly appeared hovering over the domes of the Virgin Mary and the Archangel Michael Church in Giza.

Here are some of the eyewitness accounts:

We saw light coming out and we ran to the church and found the Virgin on top of the door beside the cross, then we saw doves, then the Virgin was walking between the two crosses and the domes.

I saw the Virgin at around 11:20 or 11:30 p.m. on top of the big tree and she was still small, she was going to and fro and at around 1:00 a.m., she appeared in full with a white and blue dress in front

At around 1:00, in the middle of the night, the light gathered around the two steeples at the door of the church, and then the Virgin appeared in the middle of it, complete with white illumined clothing, and she started to move between the steeples and then moved up to the top of the dome of the church.27

But this being 2009, some of the pilgrims had cellphone cameras on hand. Here’s a video.

Does look a bit like the Virgin, with the blue robes and the golden halo. But if you watch the video, you’ll notice that, despite the claims of witnesses the contrary, she never moves. She just hovers there.

This makes sense, because some guy on YouTube pointed out that the “Virgin” in this video is just the lights of a minaret behind the church. Here, there aren’t even any mysterious flashing lights. The “movement” of the Virgin supposedly recorded in some videos was just the cameraman moving and seeing the minaret from different angles.

At this point the natural objection is “do you really think people are so stupid they can just mistake the lights from a building that is literally always there for the Virgin Mary,” an objection which would move me if not for these videos which seem to demonstrate exactly that. If there’s anything actually out of the ordinary happening here, the camera isn’t picking it up. It really does appear to be a case of people in a state of excitement interpreting totally mundane, totally unremarkable lights as a supernatural apparition. If you watch the video to the end, you can even see the lights turn off.

Once again, this was a national sensation. Pilgrims arrived by the thousands. There were round-table discussions on national television between Coptic priests, Muslim scholars, and evangelical pastors. And this was not some kind of brief hysteria before the church hierarchy stepped in to tell everyone to stop being ridiculous. The Coptic Pope approved this apparition, just as his predecessor approved Zeitoun forty years earlier.

Now, it is only fair to point out that at both Assiut and Al-Warraq, it was claimed that the Virgin did not appear every night, and sometimes all that was seen was the nonspecific light. So you could argue that it just so happened no one was filming when she was there. But I find that a little hard to swallow.

Assiut and Al-Warraq are almost perfect control groups for Zeitoun. They involve people in the same country, from the same ethnoreligious group, witnessing almost identical apparitions forty years apart. People at these more recent apparitions reported seeing the Virgin, and yet none of the photographic or video evidence appears to show anything remotely identifiable as such.

Dumsday’s objection to the “hoax” possibility rests primarily on the technical infeasibility of a hologram that could produce the varied and lifelike movements described by the eyewitnesses. But unless we assume the crowds at Zeitoun in 1968 were more level-headed or discriminating than those at Assiut in 2000 or Al-Warraq in 2009 — and why would we? — it seems that people can report seeing the Virgin Mary, even when all they are seeing is at best, nonspecific flashes of light or at worst, nothing at all. If the Zeitoun pilgrims were people who might plausibly mistake the unremarkable lights of a nearby minaret for a Virgin, then we have little reason to think the eyewitness reports of lifelike movement must reflect an apparition that actually exhibited lifelike movement, and Dumsday’s objection mostly collapses.

Secret CIA tech probably isn’t necessary. In view of these later apparitions, it doesn’t actually seem that implausible at all that a primitive, light-show — perhaps an “ecclesial bat-signal,” perhaps something even simpler — could be interpreted by scores of pilgrims below as the Virgin Mary. And such technology would certainly have been available to a hoaxer in 1960s Egypt.

Conclusions

If I had to present the most plausible “hoax” story I could, I would say that it probably originated with some elements in the Coptic Church, presumably close to St. Mary’s itself. It might have involved something no more high-tech or complex than the flashing lights seen at Assiut. Maybe there was, at least at some points, an actual person on the roof, but maybe not.

Likely, the hoaxers never expected the apparition to explode into the public eye the way it did. When the government investigated, the fraud was quickly uncovered, but it was decided, for the reasons laid out above, to let it ride. Nobody except perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood would have benefited from exposing it. It would not really require any active cooperation from the Nasser regime, except for maybe keeping people from snooping around the church roof.

Actually, it’s interesting that apparently no one, at any point while the apparitions were ongoing, did the very obvious thing of going up on the roof while Mary was there to see what was going on. Plausibly, Coptic Christians and Muslims too would have considered it sacrilegious, if not outright dangerous, to try to approach the Virgin in that way. But if you’re trying to rule out a hoax, that seems like the first and most obvious step to take. Perhaps government investigators did do this during the investigation that supposedly took place, but if so Dumsday knows nothing about it, and neither do we.

If it was a hoax, it probably would not have even required the perpetrators to keep it up constantly for the full three years during which it unfolded. As we see at Al-Warraq, it is entirely possible for people to perceive an apparition when there is nothing interesting going on whatsoever. The active hoax may have ended very early on, with the later apparitions being merely mundane flashing lights and reflections from buildings, cars, or celestial bodies interpreted by excitable pilgrims as the Virgin. On this point, recall Father Boutros’ statement that at first, everybody could see the apparition, but later on, only some could.

I don’t know that I would 100% sign off on this theory. It’s fair to point out, at Dumsday does, that this kind of large-scale, nation-wide supernatural intentional hoax would be quite unprecedented in modern history. But I think to the extent his exclusion of a hoax is based on the supposedly advanced technology necessary to carry it out, it doesn’t really wash.

Appendix: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Marian apparitions in the Roman Catholic Church and Marian apparitions in the Coptic Church appear to closely follow two distinct, but consistent “scripts.” Of the apparitions “approved” by the Vatican, nearly all involve the Virgin appearing to some small number of (usually young) seers. Occasionally, it is a single person, like St. Bernadette at Lourdes, or as many as fifteen, such as at Knock, in Ireland. Generally, she delivers messages to these chosen few, urgings of penance, occasionally prophecies or “secrets,” often accompanied by an exhortation to build a chapel in her name. Very occasionally a large crowd of people sees something, such as the dancing sun at Fátima, but almost never does anyone beyond the seers themselves see the Virgin.

Among the Copts, Mary tends to appear to crowds of hundreds or even thousands, and almost always in the vicinity of an established church, and her identity is clearly perceived by the masses. Another motif that appears again and again in Coptic apparitions is the presence of luminous “doves.” Rarely does she say anything, deliver any specific “secrets” or prophecies, though occasionally individuals also receive private visions.

It has been suggested that, on balance, this is a win for Catholicism. In Catholic apparitions, Mary often refers to uniquely Catholic notions like the Immaculate Heart, while in Coptic apparitions, she tends not to speak at all. The idea being, if Mary explicitly affirms Catholicism in Catholic apparitions, but remains silent in Coptic apparitions (presumably tacitly avoiding the encouragement of schism), then Catholic apparitions provide positive evidence for Catholicism, while Coptic apparitions provide evidence for Christianity, but not Coptic Christianity in particular.

I would argue this cuts the other way. If Rome is the true church, and the Copts are in error, then surely it would be more important for Mary to speak to the Copts and encourage them to submit to the Roman Pontiff? The Catholics already have the right theology, so why take the time to affirm it? It’s the Copts who require explicit theological instruction. By remaining silent, she seems to be signing off on Coptic Christianity.

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Shark movies. Red Water, Shark Attack, Twelve Days of Terror, Sharknado, Sharktopus, Shark Attack 2, Raging Sharks, Shark Night, Shark Attack 3…

These movies are all awful. In fact, 99% of shark movies are awful. Awful acting, awful directing, awful writing, awful special effects. Most horror movies — perhaps most movies, period — are not very good. But the shark subgenre seems to be a cut below the rest. It is very difficult to think of shark movies that are actually good. There’s Deep Blue Sea, the one with Blake Lively from a few years ago was okay, 47 Meters Down was alright, and uh…

And yet, despite the fact that shark movies are almost uniformly awful, there are a lot of them. There are not nearly so many movies about killer crocodiles/alligators, killer bears, killer wolves, killer tigers, killer lions. But strangely, I can think of three good movies about killer crocodilians off the top of my head (Rogue, Black Water, and Crawl), despite the much shallower pool to draw from.

So the question arises: why are there 1) so many shark movies and 2) why are none of them good.

One factor is probably that shark attacks are fairly cheap and easy to film. You just have to have the actress thrash around and scream while you fill the water with fake blood. Then you get that final shot when her head goes under and the camera lingers on the now-still surface of the water for an eerie second.

Another factor may be that shark movies tend to be set on beaches, at the height of summer, and so provide a convenient excuse to fill your screen with attractive young people in various states of undress. While titillation is an object of any low-rent horror movie, slasher flicks set in the suburbs can’t really justify their heroes going around their daily lives half-naked.

Finally, the simple fact is that sharks are scary. They are large, alien predators. We can find some points of commonality with a bear or a lion. Even a crocodile has legs. But sharks are fundamentally other. Dead-eyed, razor-toothed monsters from another world.

Okay, so much for the reasons for shark movies, now why do they all suck?

The first reason is the precise opposite of the last point, namely that sharks aren’t that scary. When you watch a movie about a serial killer, or a demon, or a werewolf or something, these are things which could theoretically get you in your bed. When you’re eight years old, you leave the light on because the possibility of your closet door slowly swinging open and Michael Myers creeping out seems uncomfortably real. You can tell yourself “werewolves don’t exist” but that doesn’t stop you from picturing one lurking in the hallway when you get up to go to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, sharks can’t actually hurt you unless you go in the ocean, which is not a place most of us spend much of our time. You don’t look over your shoulder walking down a deserted street in fear that you’ll find a Great White following you.

You have to come up with reasons for why your characters don’t just get out of the water. Sometimes, they’re stranded in the open ocean (Open Water, The Reef), sometimes they’re on a deep-sea submarine (Shark Hunter), but most of the time you just have a bunch of idiots who keep going in the water, which is not very sympathetic.

Also, while shark attacks are easy to film, sharks are not. And while you may be able to get away with the screaming and thrashing in the first half of the movie, eventually the audience is going to want to see the shark, or they’ll feel cheated. And then you have to choose: will you go with the worst CG ever put to screen, will you go with an oversized rubber bath toy, or will you go with National Geographic stock footage. Actually, a lot of shark movies opt for a mix of the three.

In short, sharks are extremely slippery, mobile creatures. It’s not easy to make them look real, especially with the kinds of shoe-string budgets these directors tend to be working with.

To compensate for these inherent drawbacks, filmmakers often try to up the ante. It’s a genetically engineered supershark! It’s a prehistoric shark! It’s a voodoo shark! Usually, this only has the effect of making everything much sillier.

So basically, shark movies are horror movies about a monster that looks bad on screen, and which you can avoid by just going about your daily life, presuming you aren’t a sailor or a scuba diver or something.

By this point you may have noticed a glaring omission in this article, which is that I haven’t once mentioned the most famous shark movie of all time.

Jaws is a rare bird, not only a great shark movie, but one of the greatest movies of all time. And in fact, the real reason there are so many shark movies and not so many crocodile, bear, or wolf movies, is because these movies are all riding on the coattails of Jaws, and there was never any Jaws for crocodiles or bears.1

But Jaws is not actually a shark movie, or a horror movie.

You will certainly find Jaws on a list of shark movies, and also on lists of horror movies, but it belongs on neither.

Not that Jaws didn’t scare anyone. It’s remembered as the movie that made people afraid to go in the water. But that’s not really the primary purpose of the movie, and it’s certainly not one of a kind with the schlocky creature features whose draw is the promise of blood and screams.

The hero of Jaws is Martin Brody, Chief of Police on Amity Island, despite the fact that he’s afraid of the water. He realizes before anyone else that there’s a killer shark stalking the beaches. Brody teams up with young marine biologist Matt Hooper, unfortunately their efforts to convince stubborn Mayor Vaughn to close the beaches fail. Amity after all “is a summer town,” and nothing scares away the tourists like shark attacks. Finally, after one too many deaths, Brody and Hooper enlist the aid of grizzled shark hunter Quint, and the three of them set out to kill the beast.

Most horror protagonists are either imposed upon by the monster in their daily lives (a masked killer stalks babysitters on Halloween night), or else stumble unwittingly into the monster’s lair (a deep space salvage crew lands on a deserted planet and returns to their ship carrying an alien parasite).

Brody doesn’t really fall into either of those categories. At no point in the movie is he in any danger he doesn’t intentionally put himself into. The shark isn’t going to break into his house. When he finally sets out with Quint and Hooper to hunt the shark down, he goes fully cognizant of the danger.

The real risk isn’t that Brody will be violently killed going about his mundane life, but that he won’t pluck up his courage and set that mundane life aside long enough to go out and slay the dragon.

This ties up a lot of the typical “shark movie” problems. Brody can’t just “not go in the water,” because if he doesn’t he fails himself and his town. It doesn’t matter that we barely see the shark, because what the shark is doing isn’t really that relevant, as much as what Brody is doing.

It’s a pretty banal observation that to make a good movie, you do have to make people care about the characters. But more than that, in some movies it is okay to have passive characters. Horror movies especially. “I was just going about my typical 80s teenage life, and now the ghost of a burn-victim serial killer is trying to murder me in my dreams.” Woe is me!

But for above reasons, it’s hard to have passive characters in a shark movie. Because at the very least, you have to make the active choice to go get in the water, and most of the reasons to do that when you know there’s a killer shark (or sharks) are pretty dumb.

This is not the only reason Jaws is a good movie. The performances are all great, the score is classic, the writing is fantastic, and even the shark doesn’t look that bad for something from the mid-70s. But I think it’s a big one.

In closing, shark movies follow the shark instead of the hero, and shark movies fail to give their hero a good reason to get in the water, and that’s why shark movies suck.

You may have at least heard of the TV show Supernatural. The pilot aired in 2005, with a simple hook: brothers Sam and Dean Winchester criss-cross the country in a 1967 Chevy Impala hunting all manner of otherworldly things that go bump in the night.

The show was supposed to end in 2010. But it was successful enough and the fandom rabid enough that it was renewed for another season. Then another. Then another. Supernatural finally ended in 2020, after fifteen seasons and fifteen years on the air.

No need to get into specifics. Suffice it to say, the title is appropriately all-encompassing. If it remotely qualifies as a “supernatural” being, the Winchester brothers have fought it or uh…fornicated with it. The first five seasons are solid horror-fantasy, if not prestige television. Later seasons range from decent to awful, but I loved the show as a kid.

With that in mind, an interesting question that occurred to me as a twelve years old fan was, what is the actual fundamental structure of the Supernatural universe?

It would seem absurd to say that the Winchester brothers inhabit an atheistic, materialist reality. After all, their world is swarming with demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, ghouls, angels, fallen angels1, djinn, witches, psychics, daevas, leprechauns, fairies, gods, and the big-g God himself.

In the context of the miracle discourse, the Winchesters have much better evidence for the existence of the spirit world than even the most ardent supernaturalist would dare claim in our world. It’s their day-job.

When a Supernatural character is exorcised, visible black smoke literally pours out of their mouth as the demon exits their body. If this happened regularly in real life, Chad Ripperger would never shut up about it. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the Winchesters interact with angels regularly. Their best friend is an angel. They’ve met the Devil and God. And they’ve both been to Heaven and Hell. On multiple occasions.

So it seems pretty open and shut. And yet, Supernatural is not a world where Christianity is true, nor one where Islam or Judaism is true.2

There is a being that is called “God,” in the show, who pattern-matches to Jehovah, the Father, Allah, or whatever you want to call him. He is (or was) the ruler of Heaven, lord of the angels, creator of (most of) the physical world. In-universe, when the Abrahamic holy scriptures and prophets refer to God, this is the being they refer to. This was the being that split the Red Sea, raised Jesus from the dead, and commissioned Muhammad.3

But he’s not actually God in the sense that a real-world believer would understand it. He’s not actually the ultimate reality, infinite and all-powerful. He’s very old, but he’s not eternal. He even has a sister. And he’s very powerful, but he’s not all-powerful. In fact, in the final season, having exhausted every other paranormal threat, the Winchesters take on God himself. And win, naturally.

It appears that in Supernatural, while there is (or was) a Jehovah, there is no supreme being in the traditional theistic sense. The very most powerful things in this universe are still subject to impersonal laws of reality, such that they can be defeated and even killed. And most people would say, if there is no supreme being, bound to nothing except itself, that’s just atheism.

The inhabitants of the Supernatural have far better evidence than we do for one or more Abrahamic faiths, and in fact for multiple non-Abrahamic belief systems as well, and yet none of these belief systems is actually correct for them.

So remarkably, despite the fact that this is a world where you can fight a daeva, meet the goddess Kali, and then die and go to Hell after being killed by a ghost, it’s also a world where atheism is true.

We probably do not live in a cosmos configured exactly like the one in Supernatural, but only because that would be a pretty crazy coincidence, not because it’s literally inconceivable.

For me, it serves as a useful way to think about the many ways the world could be that are neither “strict materialist scientistic atheism with nothing ‘spooky’ going on anywhere” or “a major world religion is true.”

So, say you are an atheist who was completely blinded in a terrible accident. You decide to attend a Pentecostal revival on a lark. When you go up to the front of the tent, the preacher puts his hand on your forehead, and suddenly, in an instant, you can see perfectly for the first time in twenty years.

Surely, you have just received very strong evidence that Christianity is true.

Well, what would the Winchesters do?

This is roughly the plot of the Season 1 episode, “Faith.” It turned out what was really going on was that the faith healer’s wife had harnessed a “reaper” spirit through black magic. So when her husband “healed” someone of a terrible malady, she sent the reaper out to reap somebody else and transfer their life-force to the lucky recipient of the miracle.

In real life, faith healers are probably not secretly practicing black magic.4 But they could be. Or it could be that some of them have powerful psychic abilities and, consciously or otherwise, heal people that way. Or…or…or…

Point is, if somebody puts their hands on you, and declares you healed by the power of Jesus Christ, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re healing you through the power of Jesus Christ, even if you are actually healed.

The objection here would probably be an appeal to Occam’s razor. If somebody says “I heal you by the power of Jesus Christ,” and then you are healed, you should probably just believe it was done by the power of Jesus Christ unless you have really compelling evidence to the contrary.

But maybe you do have compelling evidence to the contrary. If you think you have really strong arguments against the existence of God, what happens if you watch a guy levitate or throw a fireball or see a demon fly out of someone’s mouth or something?

I think it should probably should not update you significantly towards the existence of God. It’s not no evidence, but it’s significantly less evidence than most people would think, because there are lots of ways the universe could be that would allow for fireball-throwing and also for the nonexistence of God.

More specifically, if you think you have good evidence and arguments that some specific religion is false, any miracles in the name of that religion, no matter how spectacular, probably shouldn’t update you that much toward the truth of that religion. So if you think the evidence is really powerful that Jesus rose from the dead, and yet you think that for a variety of other reasons Christianity5 is highly implausible, the resurrection of Jesus should not shift you that much towards Christianity. The same holds even if you are standing outside the tomb on Easter Sunday watching him walk out.

If you already think theism and/or Christianity is a pretty plausible account of reality, then maybe a miracle or two is all it really takes to seal the deal. But most skeptics are probably not in that position.

I don’t think I’m really saying anything too novel. Most miracle proponents would probably agree that the argument from miracles couldn’t deductively prove the case. But I think it does much less of the work towards establishing either than most would think.

Establishing that there are powerful non-human agents at work in the world, even specifically powerful non-human agents who evidently want you to believe a certain religion is a very long way from establishing the truth of that religion. Sometimes, in the course of miracle discourse, a skeptic will mockingly say “How do you know it wasn’t fairies? How do you know it wasn’t aliens?” Such objections are generally not taken very seriously, least of all by the skeptics who make them. But I think once we are open to the possibility of the paranormal at all, we should take such possibilities very seriously, among a million other possibilities.

It has taken centuries of arduous experiment and argument for the natural sciences to advance to the point they are at today. Even so, our best theories of the natural world appear woefully incomplete. Why should it be any different with regards to the — all the murkier, all the stranger — supernatural world? Considering how poorly past scientific and pre-scientific paradigms accounted for the natural world, and how poorly ours probably still do, we should have I think very low priors that any religion, whether it be orthodox Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or New Age woo stuff, is anything but a very rough approximation of supernatural reality, once we accept there is such a reality.

The problem with miracles as apologetic tools is in the fact that they are miracles, and miracles by definition are wondrous events that appear unaccountable within the laws of nature as we understand them. But because they are unaccountable, we can know only that some arbitrary degree of power is necessary to generate them. Because their mechanisms are opaque, we cannot say anything about the beings that bring them about, except that they are beings with the power necessary to bring about the miracle in question.

And for that reason, it is very difficult to get a miracle to prove much except that a miracle has occurred.

Again, this is not necessarily true if you are already on the brink of accepting theism/religion for other reasons, or if you are a believer who just needs a boost in faith. In those cases, a miracle might be all it takes.

But for a skeptic who thinks he has no reason to believe, a miracle should not cause him to revise his entire worldview, except insofar as that worldview didn’t allow for the miracle he just witnessed. Nor should ten, or a hundred miracles.

For my part, I think the vast majority of purported paranormal happenings (whether we call them “miracles” or not) are very poorly evidenced. But the reason I find the argument from miracles unconvincing is not because I just don’t think there are enough compelling miracle cases. It’s not like I’m in the position of, “Well, one miracle would get me thinking, five would really make me question things, and ten would make me say ‘Jesus is Lord.’” The problem isn’t the quantity or quality of the evidence, it’s that I don’t think miracles as such prove much of anything. And maybe you shouldn’t, either.

Who knows? You might live in the Supernatural universe.

The very, very short version is that in 1917, a bunch of Portuguese peasant children told a bunch of Portuguese peasants that the Virgin Mary was going to work a big miracle at a particular place, on a particular day. A big crowd gathered on a rainy, overcast morning to see what would happen. Indeed, at about noon, the sun started to display very unusual behavior in full view of tens of thousands, including skeptics. As witnesses report, the sun danced in the sky. It changed colors, revolved like a wheel of fire, and at times threatened to fall to earth. The people were able to gaze at the sun for minutes on end without pain.

Catholics and some other Christians believe that this was a divine miracle which proves, or at least very strongly suggests, the veracity of Catholicism, or at least of Christianity in general. The rest of us don’t.

At the moment, I think skeptics and believers have reached something of an impasse on the topic. Scott provided some suggestive but incomplete evidence that certain aspects of the miracle resembled visual phenomena produced by staring at the sun too long in certain atmospheric conditions. Similarities were also drawn with an episode during the Iranian Revolution when Ayatollah Khomeini’s face appeared in the moon, as well as with UFO sightings and the “Fire Kasina” practice of some Buddhists.

I think enough was there to persuade myself and most other skeptics that, besides other issues with the Fatima story, there is probably a better explanation for the episode than the action of Jehovah and/or the Virgin Mary.

But other Catholic sun miracles followed on the heels of the first, such as those in Lubbock in 1988, or more recently in Nigeria, in 2017. So a strangeness remains. If the Fatima miracle is, as I and other skeptics believe, some form of illusion created by staring into the sun primed with certain religious expectations, does it only manifest in these particular, Catholic, Marian circumstances? Was Fatima “patient zero,” from which all other sun miracles descend?

And despite some suggestive parallels, no one was able to dig up an exact parallel to the Miracle of the Sun, except for those other Catholic sun miracles.

But thanks to a mutual of mine, I believe I may have found just such a parallel.

Earlier today, I made a post about the purported miracles of the Hindu mystic Sathya Sai Baba. My mutual, left a comment, mentioning an obscure 1998 incident in Thailand known as “the Day of the Crystal Sun” (อัศจรรย์ตะวันแก้ว) which she had heard about on a Buddhist podcast.

She linked this Guardian article from 1999. A year earlier, on September 6 1998, tens of thousands of worshippers at the controversial Dhammakaya Buddhist temple in Bangkok purportedly witnessed some kind of miracle in the sky. The article mentions it offhandedly,

Worshippers at the temple even claim they have seen a miracle several times since last August in which the sun became smaller and smaller 'until it was just part of a much bigger image that formed around it, a spinning crystal in a monk's stomach,' explains temple employee Nattaya Chaisawad, who has a masters degree from an American university.

Naturally, this reminded us of Fatima. I was intrigued and decided to dig a little deeper. There appears to be very, very little on the Dhammakaya sun miracle on the Anglophone internet. But I found this article, which touches on it in the context of the controversy the Dhammakaya sect has apparently engendered in Thailand over its supposed commercialization of Buddhist practice.

Here is the important bit, apparently excerpted from an article in The Nation which I’ve not yet been able to find:

During the event, the sun became like a drawing. It was easy to look at it without protecting ones eyes, she said. Then, the image of Luang Phor War Paknam slowly emerged, his saffron robe appearing first. It was not a dream. It was a real experience.2

Now doesn’t that sound familiar?

I plugged the term Sophia gave me (อัศจรรย์ตะวันแก้ว) into google, starting machine translating pages, and was kinda blown away. Unless I’ve missed something big, this appears to be in every respect a perfect Buddhist analogue to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima.

Here is a 2017 article from the Thai news website Matichon, a retrospective on the miracle:

At about 5:30 PM,

After the unanimous chanting of, “We are the conquerors! Closing the core! Dedicating our lives to building the Great Dhammakaya Pagoda! Chitang Me! Chitang Me! Chitang Me!”,  the presiding monk instructed the devotees to sit down. However, a large group of devotees to the east remained standing and chanted loudly, claiming to have seen a large image of Luang Por Wat Pak Nam filling the sky. Within his body, the sun rotated in beautiful colors, without any heat or irritation to the eyes....

Here’s one of the eyewitness accounts:

“The sun I saw at that moment radiated colors unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. The colors shifted as if the sun was moving back and forth. There was a pinkish glow all around, then it changed to blue, then to a purplish-indigo color. And then, it looked like the entire image of Luang Pho Sod, in golden color, in the sky. It was as if the sun was a crystal ball inside his stomach. The sun’s light shifted again and again. I was so happy. I turned to the people next to me and said, ‘Look at the sun! Look at the sun with me!’ Many people who saw it stood and watched, waving flags. I was moved to tears… I’m a science student, and you can’t truly understand something like this unless you experience it yourself…”.

Compare to the testimony of Almeida Lopes at Fatima in 1917:

The hour approaches, and behold, as if by magic, the rain stops, the sun breaks through the dense, black clouds and reveals itself with its luminous rays, which quickly take on the colors of yellow, red, and green, turning the objects that were under its influence the same colors; and soon loses its brightness and colors—able to be seen with the naked eye without hurting the eyes—and takes on a dizzying rotation, seeming to fall toward the earth. And while observing these wonders, all the people are in loud exclamations. This lasted, at most, about five minutes, then returned to its normal state.

Apparently, the miracle happened again…in October, just like Fatima. Here’s another testimony:

The sun rotated around itself, and lights flickered around the sphere quite frequently. Pink light radiated outwards over a wide area around the sun, creating a beautiful sight. The colors changed constantly to gold, blue, and orange, unlike the sun halos we usually see. Suddenly, an image of Luang Por Sod of Wat Pak Nam Phasi Charoen, in a meditative posture, appeared as a golden statue in the sky above the Maha Dhammakaya Chedi. A sphere resembling the sun rotated around the center of his abdomen, and a very large, transparent crystal ball surrounded the image of Luang Por. At the same time, the images of hundreds of monks meditating around the Dhammakaya Chedi changed to a beautiful pink color.

After about 20 minutes, everything returned to normal. The sun, which had been pleasantly and comfortably visible to the naked eye just moments before, became blindingly bright and unbearable, forcing us to avert our gaze as usual, even though the atmosphere had cooled down and the sun was about to set.

These events unfolded before hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered to pray around the Maha Dhammakaya Pagoda. Many people had joyful expressions, and tears welled up in their eyes unknowingly. Upon asking those around me, I found that most had seen similar things, and each described them differently. Only a few said they saw nothing. My family and I returned home filled with immense joy.

Everything from Fatima is paralleled here. The spinning sun, the changing colors, the ability to gaze without pain, even the sight of holy figures. The Buddhist holy man Luang Pho Sod was observed by some sitting in the sun, just as at Fatima and other Catholic sun miracles, some saw the Virgin holding the Infant Christ, or the entire Holy Family. Compare the testimony of Maria dos Prazeres at Fatima:

Near me there was a man and a lady who were looking at the sun through binoculars and who were saying that they saw a ladder near the sun and that Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus were there.

The only thing I haven’t seen yet is the miraculous drying.

At Fatima, a priest refused to believe what he was seeing even as he witnessed it, and as he saw the eerie red light of the spinning sun reflected on the crowd, asked if everyone was wearing red scarves:

Taking his eyes off the sun, he saw the people a very bright red color; and he exclaimed: "Oh, gentlemen, how the people are all red!" And the priest replied: "Are they red scarves?" To which he remarked: "How can that be? So they had all agreed to have red scarves on their backs?!" Then the people appeared the color of gold. The sun's rotational movements were not visible to them.

Unless this is a translation error, even this effect was mirrored at Dhammakaya:

Ms. Suwannee described the scene she witnessed as a true heavenly miracle, a breathtakingly beautiful sight that was beyond words. She then offered a prayer, asking for sufficient funds to complete the construction of the Maha Dhammakaya Pagoda and for the unwavering determination to encourage others to participate in the merit-making. During her prayer, tears flowed uncontrollably, a moment of profound joy that she would never forget—the second such experience since the miraculous event on September 6th.

Then she turned to look at the Mahadhammakaya Pagoda where the monks and novices were sitting. She saw that all the monks and novices were dressed in pink.

Here’s yet another testimony, recorded in Rachelle M. Scotte’s book, Nirvana for Sale:

The ray colours alternated between white, pink, and gold. My hair stood on end and I had an indescribable feeling of great happiness. My body seemed light and as if it were expanding. I had no control over my feelings, tears streamed from my eyes. Th e more I tried to calm myself down, the more I broke into tears. Th ey were tears of happiness indeed, a happiness which I could not put into words. When I looked up at the Cetiya and the Sangha, they were bathed in changing lights of the sun; pink, violet and gold. Nearly all the spectators there cried with happiness. Th e event continued around half an hour and it definitely put me out of doubt about the “miracle” I had heard about on August 30th3

Here’s a forum post by some annoyed skeptic insisting the whole thing is an optical illusion being taken advantage of by religious hucksters, and making fun of all the dupes burning their eyeballs out by staring at the sun.

Oh, and it was even raining:

Around 5:30 PM, after the prayer ceremony at the Mahadhammakaya Pagoda, heavy rain fell. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the sun was setting. As I was walking through the rain to get into my car to go home , I saw a clear, glass-like orb, transparent enough to see the clouds behind it, directly over the sun.

Compare the Fatima witnesses who described the sight as like looking through glass.

But of course, just as at Fatima, there were a handful who saw nothing:

Oh! A Miracle. They viewed this miracle differently than I did. The more I looked, the more my eyes hurt. I did not see any of what the others saw. Even my friend saw the event as the others saw it.’

Here’s a YouTube video of the miracle (or one of them, anyway). Turn on CC and compare to say, Medjugorje:

I could actually feel myself getting a little disoriented the more I read. It really seems too perfect, almost like it was written as an intentional riff on Fatima and other Catholic sun miracles. But it really does seem to have been a real event. The Temple has faced accusations of preying on gullible pilgrims, and there have even been conspiracy theories about lasers, but as far as I can tell no one is claiming this didn’t happen, that these people didn’t really claim to have seen this miracle.

I wish I could have waited longer and made a much more detailed, careful effort post. But I banged this out quickly. Unfortunately, my research is already hitting a dead end because the vast, vast majority of information appears to be in Thai only (and much of it is probably not even digitized), and I don’t even know where to begin.

So this post is more than anything an appeal for help. Anyone who has any leads, who reads/speaks Thai, who might even know someone who witnessed this. Does this still happen? Can anybody dig up any contemporary newspaper reports?

Incredibly, this appears to have been completely missed in the first round of discourse last fall. I checked and double-checked both Ethan and Scott’s posts and the comments to see if anyone mentioned it, and I am quite sure that nobody did.

As far as I can tell, until Sophia left that comment on my essay, this forum post from 20104 is literally the only time on the Anglophone internet that Dhammakaya and Fatima have ever been connected.

I still feel a little disoriented and part of me still feels like it’s too sureal, and it won’t pan out because it’s just too crazy, but if it does, it might be first real advance in Fatimology in a century.5 It might represent an “uncontaminated” sun miracle. The Christian population of Thailand is tiny, and I think it is highly unlikely the vast majority of people in the crowd were aware of the Fatima apparition.

It may very well provide strong supporting evidence for Scott Alexander’s theory that it represents a strange, rare, but reproducible phenomenon, which occurs in crowds charged with religious expectation, and perhaps only under certain atmospheric conditions.

Seriously, help me out. I feel like I’m digging for treasure with a blindfold.

“Oh, what a pity, if it’s all a lie!

Still, I’m sure you can rock the cynics if you try!”

- Herod Antipas, Jesus Christ Superstar

Substack is once again aflame with miracle discourse, thanks to Ethan Muse’s latest essay on the signs and wonders of St. Padre Pio. I had wanted to do a short piece about the Hindu mystic Sathya Sai Baba for a while, and this seemed as good a time as any to flesh out and finish it. I’ll start with a brief overview of the relevant phenomena, follow up with some discussion of the broader miracle discourse and the apologetic argument from miracles in that context.

1. The Man and his Miracles

Sathya Sai Baba’s personal background is of little importance to us, except for the fact that he seems to have been less than a moral exemplar in private, on which more later.

Sai Baba was born in 1926, in the little Indian village of Puttaparthi. By his twenties, he had already developed a reputation as a local wonder-worker and holy man, to the delight of some and the annoyance of others.

Over the next several decades, his fame spread first throughout all India, and then abroad. By the 1970s, at the height of the “New Age” craze in the west, Sai Baba was renowned across the world, and visitors from as far afield as Japan and the United States made pilgrimage to Puttaparthi.

The evidence for Sai Baba’s wonders is “pretty good” I guess. As far as miracles go, anyway. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll be referring to Erlendur Haraldsson’s Modern Miracles as a source, because it’s a pretty complete and handy if not exhaustive resource for typical Sai Baba manifestations. Haraldsson was an Icelandic professor and parapsychologist, who visited India to study the Sai Baba movement on various occasions through the late 1970s and early 80s. He interviewed dozens of witnesses to the holy man’s alleged manifestations. Modern Miracles is the result of that research. You can read it here. Unless you want to accuse Haraldsson of just flat-out fabricating all of this testimony, I think he is probably accurately reporting what people told him. He has been, justifiably in my view, accused of inexcusable credulity and motivated reasoning with regards to Sai Baba, but I don’t believe anyone has ever accused him of outright fabricating materials, which is all that matters for the purposes of this essay. Many of the miracles described in Haraldsson’s book are also described in Howard Murphet’s Man of Miracles, including the teleportation and the transmutation of matter.

But of course, what people say happened to them is not necessarily the same as what actually happened to them.

So what of the miracles themselves?

Sai Baba’s favorite miracle was the “materialization” of trinkets, sweets, fruits, and food. In particular, of vibhuti,1 and ornamental rings (usually with his face stamped onto them). When Haraldsson first visited him, Sai Baba used the metaphor of a double rudraksha,2 and obligingly materialized a double rudraksha for his guest to keep.3

The materialization of little objects like this, also necklaces, bracelets, stones and the like, was his single most common trick, but also the least impressive, since such manifestations ought to be in the repertoire of any halfway competent magician. His supporters have all kinds of reasons as to why Baba’s materializations cannot be compared to a conjuror’s sleight of hand. He sometimes conjures things with his sleeves pushed up,4 that his students handled his robes regularly and never found any hidden pockets,5 that the objects he materializes are too large.6

In any case, he is reported to have done other, rather more remarkable things.

Several devotees reported the guru’s powers of clairvoyance. One reported to Haraldsson how he had once had an argument with his father. When he visited Puttaparthi later, and without his telling the guru anything, Baba upbraided him for speaking so disrespectfully to his father.

Baba used the exact wording I had used to my father. He described the room, the day, the very minute — everything.

The student’s conclusion was rather modest.

What more do I want than that for proof that Sai Baba is God omnipresent?7

Another devotee told a story also regarding his father, who had gone on a business trip to England. While he was abroad, Baba told the man’s wife and children, “Your father has lost his passport, and is praying to me for help.” He also described how “Raja and his party were desperately searching his entire luggage.” Sure enough, when Raja came home,

He told his familv that, much to his distress, he had indeed lost his passport. He, his party and the hotel staff had searched his bags most thoroughly but had found no passport. He had prayed to Baba for help. The next day something had told the Raja that the passport was in one of his bags which had been turned inside out several times the day before. There, much to his relief, he had found his passport.8

Haraldsson heard this story from both father and son.

Another devotee explained how he had begun as a skeptic, and gone to see Sai Baba out of curiosity. On the way, the bus briefly broke down, but was fixed and the journey continued. Later on, the man and his party had to cross a riverbed on foot, and he carried his little cousin’s violin in his hand. When he got to Puttaparthi, Sai Baba described to him exactly how the bus had broken down, including the town where it had done so, and how he had to carry his cousin’s violin across the river.9

An American businessman traveling in India had been unable to get in touch with his pregnant wife while in India. He was told by Sai Baba not to worry, that a healthy daughter had been born two days ago. When he checked with his wife, it was true.10

Back to his materializations, Sai Baba was apparently able to produce various objects on demand, which is rather more difficult for a magician to do.

One devotee remembered,

He often used to go with us up the hill to the tamarind tree. Then he might tell us to pluck leaves from the tree and keep them in our hand and close it. Then he would say: 'Ask for whatever you want', and when we opened our hands, the thing we asked for was there…The older people would ask for an idol, saligram (statuette) or lingam for pujas. The young might ask for chocolate, peppermints, sweets or fruit. We would just close our hands, think and wish, that's all. Where the things came from, we could not see. We just saw it when we opened our palms. The leaves would no longer be there; in their place would be something else.11

Another man remembers this amusing incident, which was independently confirmed by a second witness:

Baba gave me a rather flat stone of irregular size and asked me to throw it up in the air. I threw it high up, and he asked me to catch it when it came down. I was afraid the stone might hurt my hands. By the time I caught it, it was an apple. I gave the apple to Swami, who took a knife and cut it into pieces, and everyone present got a piece of the size into which we normally cut apples. From this one apple he gave pieces to some 25 people. This was a medium-size apple; normally it might have sufficed for 8 to 10 people.12

Many people also remembered occasions on which Sai Baba had ordered his followers to bring empty vessels to a festival, only to miraculously fill them up with food.

At lunchtime - about 12.00 or 12.30 - he asked everybody to bring empty vessels. I saw this incident clearly and with my own eyes, so I can't forget it. Baba just made a movement with his hand right over the empty vessels, and I could see the food rising up from the bottom! I would say that he produced about a dozen varieties of dishes in this way, one in each vessel, and it came up in a matter of seconds .. .. Then Baba told us: 'This is why I told you not to prepare any food. I was intending to give you something divine, prasadam.'13

In fact, transmutation of matter was just another day on the job for this guy. In a machine-age twist on the Wedding at Cana, Sai Baba on at least three occasions transformed water into petrol, and ran his car on it.14

One of his best tricks was teleportation. Sai Baba would be walking with his followers on a path in the countryside, when suddenly, he would vanish from among them in the blink of an eye, and as quickly appear on a hill several minutes’ walk away. Sometimes this was accompanied by a blinding light so bright it caused some to faint.

On many occasions, especially when we were walking by the river, he would suddenly vanish from sight. As he vanished, he would be walking with us in a group and talking to us. We would not see him or find him. But then he would be calling me or someone by name, and when you looked for him you would find that he would be at the top of the mountain (hill). All this would happen within seconds.15

Also,

We would be standing at the foot of the hill on the Chitravati riverbed. For me to get up to the hilltop takes some few minutes. But for him (Baba), he will just go like that, just like a flash. Just in a blink of an eye he is there, just a few seconds. We will be sitting and chatting.16

Once, Baba even had a devotee time him.

On one occasion, when they were down at the riverside, Baba said he would go up to the hill. Mr Parthasarathy was wearing a wristwatch, and Baba asked him to note the time it took him to get to the top of the hill. They were standing close together. Mr Parthasarathy looked at the watch, and Baba vanished immediately. According to Mr Parthasarathy, he had barely fixed his eyes on the watch when he heard Baba calling from the hill and, looking up, saw Baba on the top of the hill. 'The watch did not move even a second'17

Another time, he vanished instantly from among his followers at the riverside to be present with an ailing devotee some distance away, as confirmed by the devotee’s wife on the one hand, and witnesses at the riverside.18

On at least three occasions, Sai Baba was reported by multiple witnesses to have bilocated across the country. Once, a devotee of his was undergoing a surgery she was nervous about. He promised to be there with her. Sure enough, while she was being prepped for surgery, he appeared at her bedside, as witnessed not only by her, but also by a medical assistant. Both were later interviewed by Haraldsson and his collaborator, Dr. Karlis Osis.19

Sai Baba was also attended by a mysterious rosy aroma, which was also sometimes smelled at great distance from the man himself, as again reported by multiple witnesses, including skeptics.20

If you care for a more extensive list, there are more of these in the book, and in H. Murphet’s Sai Baba — The Man of Miracles and Arnold Schulman’s Sai Baba, the Holy Man and the Psychiatrist, but I’ll leave off for there, as I think it’s a representative sample.

2. Verdict

Like I said, I think as far as miracle accounts go, this one is pretty good. Lots of first-person testimonies from named individuals to stuff that is, prima facie pretty hard to explain in a mundane way.

How you get a bunch of people to earnestly believe you have teleported from their midst onto a hilltop several minutes’ walk away in full view, I don’t know.

And with one or two such testimonies, you could always chalk it up to a exaggeration or outright lies, but Haraldsson interviewed quite a lot of people.

I think the miracles are “good enough” that if Sai Baba had been a Catholic monk or a Pentecostal faith healer, the testimonies of his power would be a well-worn weapon in the arsenal of any Christian apologist. In an alternate universe, Hindu Cameron Bertuzzi is cuing up a video, “How Sathya Sai Baba DESTROYS Atheism!”21 But in our universe, nobody really cares about Sathya Sai Baba. Well, there is the Sathya Sai Baba International Organization and the millions of his followers that persist today. But no one who reads this essay is likely to care much about him. I doubt that, after reading this, you’re any more inclined to join his weird cult than I am.

So I’ll invent a Sai Baba apologist and argue with him.

“What, you think these dozens — even hundreds — of witnesses were all just hallucinating or lying or stupid? Even the highly educated doctors, businessmen, and professionals?”

And…yeah…kind of. Am I being a stubborn skeptic? Maybe. But I don’t believe there was a guy who could turn rocks into apples with his mind. I just don’t. You could have ten thousand people claiming he did this and I probably still wouldn’t believe it.

Also…there are videos of this guy on YouTube. Sai Baba only died in 2011.

Watch it. It’s so obviously a cheap magic trick. Not even an entertaining cheap magic trick. I wouldn’t hire this guy for my little sister’s birthday party.

The commentator below also makes a point that’s pretty hard to argue with.

Of course, none of Sai Baba’s more spectacular miracles, his teleportation, his transmutation of matter, were ever been recorded on film. And he pointedly refused to ever submit to scientific examination in controlled conditions. Naturally.

But how to explain the man who, for example, saw the food rising magically out of the empty vessels on Sai Baba’s command? Or the rock-apple guy? Or the teleportation people? I don’t know.

A few months ago I wrote an essay on Victorian psychic Daniel Dunglas Home. Likewise, I am at a loss to explain how Home accomplished the feats that baffled and frightened his contemporaries. The testimony is varied, insistent, and firsthand. His supporters to this day insist he was never conclusively caught red-handed engaging in fraud, and as far as I can tell that is true. If nothing else, he was one of the greatest conjurors to ever live. And yet, all of the circumstantial evidence is like a big blinking neon sign that says “CON MAN.”22 I don’t believe that, while every other Victorian psychic was eventually exposed as a fraud, this one guy was for real. I just don’t.

Peter Lamont ends his study of Home, The First Psychic23 by separating appraisals of Home into those which judge him a charlatan, and those who maintain his feats have never been adequately explained. He threads the needle by concluding that “Home was a charlatan whose feats have never been adequately explained.”24

I think the upshot of my time spent thinking about and reading about miracles is that I am drastically lowering my already low credence in eyewitness reportage, even when it comes from doctors, lawyers, officers, skeptics, and simple, down-home country folk who I have no reason to accuse of dishonesty. No, I do not have a good, ready made mundane explanation for every miracle report. But I am ready to believe that dozens of independent, sober, honest witnesses can be completely mistaken in their belief that they witnessed firsthand a teleportation or the ex nihilo production of matter before I am ready to believe the guy in the above video is an incarnate god. Call it an appeal to incredulity if you like.

3. The Argument from Miracles

I think, if you have reasonably high “supernatural”25 priors it’s hard to dismiss Sai Baba’s miracles out of hand. Once you’ve accepted that miracles can happen, on what grounds do you reject the testimony of the witnesses to these in particular?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Sai Baba really could do all the stuff his devotees said he did.

What would that say?

The argument from miracles goes something like, “If miracles happen, then God probably exists. Miracles happen, therefore God probably exists.”

The vast majority of people who employ the argument from miracles are Christians, who are generally trying to build a case for Christianity in particular. I think most would not say miracles prove Christianity to be true in a deductive way, but that miracles provide strong evidence that Christianity is true.

Sometimes it’s claimed that all or most of the “best” miracles are Christian. I think this is probably mostly a selection effect. Christians are about a third of the world population. Naively, if all religions produce an equivalent number of miracles, we would already expect a third to be Christian, and almost 20% to be Catholic in particular. But account for the facts that we are mostly westerners on the western internet, with access to sources in English and other European languages, and that Christianity unlike most religions is a universalizing, proselytizing faith very much incentivized to propagate any remotely convincing miracle claim. I think these realities are likely to account for much, if not all, of the “miracle gap,”26 even before you account for ESP, precognition, reincarnation research, ghosts, and other supernatural phenomena not usually classified as “miraculous” because it is not obviously religious in character.

Sai Baba is a special case, insofar as he developed a global following, and got western researchers to go and write books about him for western audiences. But Haraldsson mentions plenty of other miracle-working mystics with followings, the vast majority of whose wonders will be totally inaccessible to us.

I have spoken to plenty of Christians who will bite the bullet and say that yes, paranormal phenomena and miracles can and do exist in non-Christian contexts. There are, as I see it, three explanatory frameworks that can accommodate non-Christian wonders from a Christian perspective.

The most charitable and ecumenical is to say that God is very loving and he can work miracles even for nonbelievers if he so chooses. So, no problem.

If you are in more of a fire and brimstone mood, you can say that non-Christian miracles are the handiwork of demons trying to lead people astray.

The third option is to say that “natural” paranormal power exists, which is neither demonic nor directly divine in origin. Jimmy Akin, the Catholic apologist who hosts the podcast Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, believes in “natural” psychic phenomena, including telekinesis and prophecy, which he distinguishes from the genuinely “supernatural” power that comes from Heaven.

So non-Christian miracles don’t really pose any internal problem for Christianity. After all, Old and New Testaments both contain reports of strange things done by magicians, witches, and demoniacs.

But it does, in my view, cut the legs out from the argument from miracles. If miracles are meant to serve as a divine imprimatur, the effect is spoiled when nonbelievers can work the same ones.

Haraldsson even notes, specifically, the multiple parallels between Sai Baba and Padre Pio, who were claimed to have manifested many of the same phenomena, from teleportation, to bilocation, to mind-reading, to healing, to even the rosy “odor of sanctity.”27

If miracles happen and if they happen to and by people of varying, exclusive religious traditions, what is the best explanation for that?

I think the explanation, which I have seen floated around, that Christianity is true but God sometimes “accommodates” people by working miracles within their own religious contexts. Another spin on this is that no religion is strictly true in the exclusive, dogmatic sense, but God works miracles according to the expectations of certain religions. So the “Virgin Mary” might appear on a church in Cairo not necessarily because it’s true that Mary is the Mother of God, but because that’s what those people expected/needed to see. I think this is rather strained. It’s hard, for me, to read it as other than God confusing people.

As for the “demons” explanation, it may be perfectly satisfactory to someone who is already convinced of the truth of Christianity. If you see some mystic whose belief system is flatly incompatible with Jesus’ teachings levitate, it may totally fair to chalk it up to demons. But to someone who isn’t already convinced of Christianity, it just doesn’t wash. It’s painfully ad hoc, and unless you give someone good reason to believe there are such thing as evil spirits the way Christianity defines them, they have no real reason to buy into that hypothesis.

As for the third option, that psychic phenomena and “genuine” divine miracles can coexist, like the demonic explanation, it amounts to an epicycle. If you have two people who can produce similar or even identical phenomena, it is hardly justifiable to assert that one of them can do it by “natural” psychic power and the other by the direct favor of God.

For the argument from miracles to retain any force, it would have to be demonstrated that Christian miracles are somehow qualitatively different from non-Christian miracles, which I think would be difficult to do.

So my explanation for miracles — if I believed in them — would be something like a general “psychic theory of miracles.” No need to invoke God — though it wouldn’t be incompatible with theism — just some poorly understood suite of powers which certain persons may be, for unknown reasons, possess to varying degrees. That these abilities should manifest themselves in apparently religious ways should not be surprising. The vast majority of people have historically been raised, at least tacitly, in some faith tradition. So when someone manifests some psychic ability, naturally that ability is interpreted and ultimately manifests in a way congruent with religious expectation. And when the person or persons are irreligious, then you just get your garden variety psychic.

Like all the best theories, this one is all but immune to falsification. After all, who knows how psychic powers work? Anything strange, absurd, or counterintuitive can be handwaved with “well, we don’t know exactly how psi works.” In that sense, it’s on par with appeals to the mysterious and inscrutable will of God, who surely has good reason to do whatever weird thing he just did.

The advantages over the divine favor theory of miracles are a few.

1. It rescues us from having to assent to various evidently absurd or otherwise disagreeable implications of Christianity, Hinduism, Spiritualism, etc.

2. It neatly explains the manifestation of supernatural phenomena in various religious and social contexts without having to twist ourselves into knots talking about “divine accommodation” or demons.

3. It explains why those of dubious moral character seem no less able to tap into these powers than their virtuous counterparts. Most natural forces are quite amoral. On this point, it should be noted that Sai Baba has been credibly accused of being a sexual predator.

It should be noted, this was the route taken by most of the early Victorian “parapsychologists.” While they studied spiritualists and mediums of the day, and in most cases were quite sympathetic to their claimed abilities, they rarely agreed with the mediums’ own explanations of their powers. Being sober gentlemen devoted to science and reason, they tended to dismiss explanations couched in terms of the spirit world, understanding the strange phenomena in terms instead of “a new psychic force,” as William Crookes judged it after his examination of D. D. Home.

Once again, I do not believe in psychics, miracles, teleportation, bilocation, or transmutation of matter. But if I did, a hypothesis something like this seems to me the most powerful and parsimonious.

“You’re a joke, you’re not the Lord!

You are nothing but a fraud!”

Israel’s insistent “whoring after other gods”2 is perhaps the most recurrent theme in the Old Testament. The prophets continually condemn their people for going “after other gods to serve them,”3 and they have Yahweh saying, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.”4

Without getting into the thorny question of what is monotheism exactly, there is an interesting question of where this strident Yahweh-only ideology came from, even if it was not always honored by the greater part of Israel.

The Old Testament itself is clear enough: it came from Yahweh’s command on Mount Sinai. But stopping there wouldn’t be very interesting.

Israelite religion is often compared with the neighboring civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, all of which great powers subjugated Israel at one time or another, and whose own religious practice and tradition came into inevitable contact with those of the Israelites.

When compared with such nations, Israel’s religion appears fairly unique. Without denying certain strands of quasi-monotheism,5 the peoples and priests of those lands nevertheless saw little issue with the worship of “the whole host of Heaven.”6

So if all of the surrounding peoples were polytheists, from where did Israelite monotheism come from, if we aren’t satisfied with “Yahweh told them so?”

The best “control groups” for Israelite religion aren’t actually the great civilizations mentioned, but Israel’s immediate neighbors in the Levant during the formative period of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age.

To the southeast there was Moab, to the northeast Ammon, and to the north Phoenicia.

The reason Israelite religion7 is so often compared with Greece or Egypt rather than Moab or Ammon despite the latter two being far better comparisons in terms of common culture, language, and location, is simply because Hellenistic and Egyptian religion are much better recorded than the religion of any of the Levantine states of the period.

Israel itself is utterly unique for how much we know of her religion. There is no Moabite or Phoenician Bible. To an extent, this is a chicken or egg problem. Do we know so much about Israelite religion (and indeed, for many of us, practice a developed form of it) because Israelite scribes had the wherewithal to produce scriptures, or was there some third factor which explains both the survival of Israelite religion and the production of the scriptures?

In any case, even if we don’t have anything like the Torah or the Prophets for Israel’s immediate neighbor, that doesn’t mean we are flying totally blind. One potential point of light in the darkness is the corpus of personal names. These are mostly drawn from personal seals and amulets, which served decorative, votive, and political functions. Often inscribed with the wearers’ name, plenty have been excavated from the region over the decades.

I have briefly discussed Chemosh’s striking similarities to Yahweh elsewhere. Was he similarly jealous?

About fifty Moabite personal names have been recovered from inscriptions on personal seals. Of forty-eight Moabite PNs, a little more than half (25) contain a theophoric element; that is, they refer to some deity. Of these 25, thirteen are explicitly Chemosh names. Many of these will be very familiar to students of the Hebrew Bible, as they are exact equivalents to “Yahweh names” found in the scriptures as well as in the archaeological data. The name “Yehoshua,” the name of both the Old Testament hero Joshua and Jesus Christ, means “Yahweh Saves” or “Yahweh is Salvation.” Likewise, in Moabite inscriptions there is a name which translates to “Chemosh is Salvation.” The name “Jehoshaphat,” like the Judahite king in 2 Kings, means “Yahweh Judges.” Likewise, a Moabite name means “Chemosh judges.” The name “Azaziah,” found in 1 Chronicles 15:21 means “Yahweh is Strong/Mighty.” So is there a name in the Moabite corpus which means “Chemosh is Strong/Mighty.” Perhaps most tellingly is a name that simply means “Chemosh is El,” or “Chemosh is God,” a parallel to the Hebrew “Elijah,” and perhaps suggestive of a syncretization between Chemosh and the Canaanite high god El, similar to that between Yahweh and El.

Of the twelve theophoric names that are not explicitly Chemosh names, there are names containing the elements “El” and “Ba’al.” But while El could be the name of the Canaanite high god specifically, and “Ba’al” came to be a name specifically for the storm god Hadad, “El” is also simply the generic for “god” and “Ba’al” a generic for “lord,” both of which were often applied to deities other than the aforementioned two, including Yahweh. Only two names — one referring to the Canaanite/Ugaritic god Horon, one to the north Arabian goddess Rahban — explicitly and unambiguously refer to deities other than Chemosh.8

In their recent study, Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant, Rainier Albertz and Rüdiger Schmitt find that in Iron Age Israel, 67.6% of named persons in the onomastic corpus had Yahwistic personal names, with another 11.1% having El names, which plausibly refer to Yahweh. Another 1.0% had Ba’al names, which also plausibly refer to Yahweh. Only 7.3% had names which explicitly referred to deities other than Yahweh.9

The most monotheistic people in the southern Levant, judging solely by onomastic data were neither the Moabites nor the Israelites — they were the Ammonites. A full 81.8% of Ammonite names refer to “El,” with only 7.6% referencing other deities.10

The contrast to peoples in the northern Levant is stark. Rüdiger and Schmitt write,

Conflating the largely indistinguishable and undistinguished gods Baal and Hadad, both of whom largely shared the singular status of national god in their cultures, names alluding to this compound deity amount to 23.5% of known names and instances in Phoenicia, and 18.7% and 18.1%, respectively, of all names and instances in the Aramaic onomasticon. The inclusion of other weather-gods and related epithets in the group increases these percentages somewhat, to 24.3% and 24.0% in Phoenicia, and 21.5% and 21.4% in the Aramaic onomasticon. These “weather-gods” seem to have been unique to the Aramean and Phoenician family religions, because their names made up only a small percentage of the theophoric elements used in the Ammonite, Hebrew, and Moabite onomasticons (varying between 2.2% and 10.8%).11

The rest of the names referred to a wide variety of other Semitic, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian deities.

The picture seems relatively clear — in the southern Levant, by the early-middle Iron Age, pantheons were on the decline, and reverence for a singular national deity was on the upswing.

The evidence is sadly too fragmentary to make any confident judgments on why this shift took place, or why Israel’s religion survived and thrived, while those of her neighbors dissolved into the mists of history. Nor can we know if there were counterparts to the Israelite prophets in these lands, browbeating their people for failure to reverence Chemosh or El exclusively, but it’s tempting to imagine. Did some forgotten Moabite Elijah condemn Yahweh as “the abomination of Israel”?12

“And it came to pass…”

I grew up in a family of eclectic religious composition. My father has always been a casual nonbeliever1. My mother a casual believer. Much of my mother’s family on the other hand, is and always has been quite religious, and because my parents both worked a lot, I was raised in no small part by them. Largely, they are a mix of low-church evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Watchtower literature my Jehovah’s Witness aunts had lying around was always a source of endless fascination for me. It was very vividly illustrated, and the spread below, found in the book, You Can Live Forever on Paradise Earth, made a particular impression:

So did the follow-up, a harrowing depiction of the rebel angels abandoning their human wives and children to drown in the Flood,

The notion of angelic hybrids with superhuman strength felt less like something from the Bible, and more like something from a video game or a comic book. Especially since all we really get in Scripture itself is this single verse in Genesis.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned Genesis 6:1-4 is a pretty controversial text. Just google “nephilim” or “sons of god genesis 6” to find lots and lots of webpages wrestling with the passage.

For reference, here is the full excerpt (from the King James Version for that old-timey sizzle):

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

The word translated as “giants” is the (in)famous “nəpīlîm,” and the translation has been standard since the Septuagint translated it with the Greek “gigantes.” In his recent Genesis commentary, Biblical scholar Ronald Hendel says,

The word is a passive adjectival construction from npl, “to fall,” and means “ones who are fallen.” In Hebrew, the term “fallen ones” evokes the idea of one who has fallen in battle, for example, “How have the mighty fallen?” (2 Sam 1:19, 25, 27), and “the fallen warriors of old” (Ezek 32:27, reading “of old” with the LXX). This latter phrase may refer to the Nephilim of Gen 6:4, although this is not clear (see Hendel 2004: 22 n. 28). This evocation of death (“fallen ones”) fits the fate of the Nephilim, who are destroyed by the flood2

There are two “mainstream” Christian interpretations of this passage and the Nephilim. The first is the one taken by the Watchtower Society, the “angelic interpretation,” which holds that the “Sons of God” were fallen angels who mated with human women and produced superhuman offspring.

The other is the so-called “Sethite Interpretation,” which takes the “Sons of God” to refer to the righteous line of Seth, while the “Daughters of Men” are the wicked descendants of Cain. Under this interpretation, Genesis 6:1-4 is about the ill-advised mixing between godly and ungodly human beings.

The Sethite interpretation really has nothing to recommend it at all save a discomfort with the idea of divine-human unions. The exact formulation, “Sons of God” (bənê ʾĕlōhîm) appears seven times in the Hebrew Bible.3 In every instance it plainly refers to divine beings, actual sons of Yahweh/El. In Deuteronomy 32:8, the “Sons of God” are even deliberately contrasted with the “Sons of Man” (bənê ʾādām), in a very close parallel to Genesis 6.

The Sethite interpretation also fails to explain why these unions would result in “heroes of yore, men of renown.” On the other hand, heroes with divine parentage are a dime a dozen in Mediterranean myth. You can’t throw a stone in the Aegean without hitting an Achilles or a Sarpedon. The Book of Judges refers briefly to an obscure figure called “Shamgar the Son of Anath,” a mighty Israelite hero who slew 600 Philistines with an ox goad. “Son of Anath” may have been merely a warrior’s epithet, but Judges may also preserve an older tradition of a hero who is literally the son of the Canaanite battle-goddess.

So the angelic interpretation is the clear favorite, although it is not even really appropriate to think of the Sons of God as “angels” here. In the Levantine conception, the divine existed in tiers. At the top sat the high god, and below him his sons, and below them “deities who served in menial capacities. A common task for such gods was to act as messenger, the literal meaning of the English word ‘angel,’” which at this stage is still a function rather than a species.4

To draw a parallel with European royalty, perhaps the Sons of God can be seen as “princes of the blood,” a cut above the angelic dukes and counts and barons who do the Most High’s business on earth.

This little story is passed over very quickly by the Genesis author. But he (or they) is generally concerned with violations of the boundary between humanity and divinity. A few chapters earlier, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of God because they have “become like gods” in one aspect, knowing good and evil, and must be prevented from appropriating the remaining prerogative of divinity — immortality.

Later, Yahweh scatters the peoples at Babel because they transgress by erecting a tower which climbs impudently towards Heaven.

The story of the “Sons of God” is different because in this case, the violation comes from the divine side of the line rather than the human. It’s the gods who go unto the daughters of men. But it accords with the thematic thrust of the overall narrative.

In any case, we hear no more of this affair through the rest of the Hebrew Bible. It stands as a strange little fossil embedded in the greater sweep of the narrative. Robert Alter even suggests it may be “a citation of an old heroic poem.”5

But come the time of Christ, Genesis 6, the Sons of God, and the Nephilim are suddenly all-important.

Hell Breaks Loose in Israel

The Old Testament is conspicuously demon-free. In most English-language translations, the word “demon” appears only two or three times. Deuteronomy chastises the faithless Israelites because “they sacrificed to demons, not God.”6 Psalm 106 makes the exact same charge in the exact same context: “They sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons.”7 In older translations, Psalm 96 sometimes reads, “the gods of the nations are demons.”8 But this is a translation of the Greek Septuagint, which uses the word “daimones.” The Hebrew is “eliim” — idols.

As for the word in Deuteronomy and Psalm 106, it is “šēḏim,” an obscure word that only appears in these two passages. It appears to be a loan from Akkadian, where “šēdu” was a word for minor deities propitiated by offering and sacrifice. Petty foreign gods are probably in view here.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, there is the occasional mention of an evil spirit, like the one that torments Saul9, or the one that deceives Ahab to his death.10 But invariably, these are wicked spirits “from the LORD.”

The Old Testament has no notion of a vast army of evil spirits engaged in a relentless war against the Almighty. With the exception of his primordial slaying of Leviathan, Yahweh’s enemies are always human beings. Even “the Satan” in Job is not a rebel, but a functionary.

But by the time of the New Testament, the Land of Israel — and presumably the world — is totally infested with demons. They’re everywhere. It could be said Jesus was primarily an exorcist.

So what are demons, anyway, and where did they come from?

The standard explanation today is that they are fallen angels. When Lucifer rose against God, one third of the angels followed him in his rebellion. They were defeated and cast out of Heaven by the Archangel Michael, and flung down to earth, where they torment mankind to this day as demons.

This story does appear in the Bible, specifically in Revelation 12. But it’s projected as an eschatological event that takes place after the birth of Christ, not one that took place in primordial history. It is suggested that this has either not happened yet or has happened quite recently, and it explains Satan’s persecuting rage against the people of God, “because he knows that his time is short!”11

In fact, the New Testament never says what Satan is, or what demons are, or where they come from.

So we have to turn to extrabiblical literature of the time for our answer, specifically the wild and weird Book of Enoch. Attributed to the antediluvian patriarch Enoch (famous as the man who “never died,” but was assumed bodily into Heaven), this book is in fact a product of the 2nd century BC. It’s many things, including an apocalypse and a midrash on Genesis 6.

The early chapters of Enoch tell how the “Watcher” angels, assigned by God to shepherd mankind, instead went astray under the influence of their chief Shemihazah. Two-hundred of these rebel angels bound each other to an oath on Mount Hermon, swearing unity in their rebellion and in their ultimate punishment. Then they

took women for themselves from among all whom they chose. And they began to go in to them, and to defile themselves with them until the flood, and to teach them sorcery and spellbindings, and to make-clear to them the cutting of roots and plants. Now the women became pregnant by them and bore to them three kinds. First great giants. But the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born Elioud. And they were growing in accordance with their greatness. And they were devouring the labor of all the sons of the humans, and the humans were unable to sustain them. But the giants conspired to slay the humans and to devour them. And they began to sin against all the birds and beasts of the earth and creepers which creep [upon the earth, and in the waters, and in] the heavens, and the fish of the sea; and they began to devour the flesh of one another. And they drank the blood. Then the earth petitioned against the lawless-ones for everything which was done upon it.12

Besides copulating with human women and producing superhuman offspring, the Watchers “reveal[ed] mysteries to their women and to their children,”13 teaching them sorcery, metalworking, astrology, and even the use of makeup!

Looking down from Heaven in disgust, the Lord declares the only reason he ever made women was, “in order that [humans] might cast seed into them, and, in this way, beget children by them, in order that descendants should never fail them upon the earth.” But as for the angels, “you were existing as spirits, while living perpetual, and are immortal for all the generations of the age; and this is why, I did not make females among you. In the heavens is the habitation for the spirits of the heavens.”14

For their transgression of this boundary, the Lord will destroy the earth and all the evil on it.

“When they and their sons perish and they see the perdition of their beloved ones, bind them for seventy generations in the wooded-vales of the earth, until the great day of their judgment and until the day of the consummation of the consummation, until the judgment of the age of the ages is consummated. Then they will be led away to the chaos of the fire, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined to the age.”15

The giants will be killed, their divine fathers forced to watch, and the fathers themselves bound underground until the end of the age.

As for,

the giants who were begotten by the spirits and flesh—they will call them wicked spirits upon the earth, for their habitation will be on the earth. The spirits which will come forth from the body of their flesh are wicked spirits; for they have come into being from humans, and the origins of their creation and the origins of their foundation are from the holy watchers…And From the day of the time of the slaughter and perdition and death of the giants, the Nephilim, the mighty of the earth, the great ones of renown, the spirits which emerge from the soul of their flesh will continue to cause desolation, uncondemned. This is how they will cause desolation until the day of the consummation of the great judgment, when the great age will be consummated. From the watchers and the godless, It will be consummated all at once

So the “demons” which haunt the earth by the first century, which Jesus and his disciples cast out again and again, are the disembodied spirits of the giants slain in the flood two-thousand odd years before. They are not fallen angels, but the ghosts of the children of fallen angels.

The Enochic worldview provides the backdrop for the whole New Testament. An interesting verse in 1 Corinthians probably refers back to the Fall of the Watchers. Paul urges women to keep their hair covered in Christian gatherings, “because of the angels.” Often read as an admonition not to offend observing angels by immodesty, Paul may instead be warning Christian women not to excite the angels lust and therefore tempt them to repeat the sin of the Watchers. This interpretation was endorsed by Tertullian in his On The Veiling of Virgins.16

Enoch is explicitly quoted as scripture in Jude’s epistle. 2 Peter likewise refers to the story of rebellious angels bound in underground darkness until the judgment day. When the demons in Matthew demand if Jesus has “come to torment us before the time?” they refer to this notion that the wicked spirits have been given free reign of the earth until the appointed day of judgment.

An understanding of demons as the spirits of the giants was also the normative understanding in the early church. In his Apology, Justin Martyr explains that God “committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom He appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons.”

As mentioned above, in On The Veiling of Virgins, Tertullian speaks of angels, “whom we read of as having fallen from God and heaven on account of concupiscence after females.”

But by the first few centuries AD, the Greco-Roman world had come to a more rarified understanding of Divinity. Stories of Zeus coupling with human women could not be reconciled with the refined, highly philosophical notions of God then current.

The anti-Christian polemicist Celsus mocked the story of the Virgin Birth on the grounds that even Christians admit, “God by nature does not love corruptible bodies, he cannot love a woman.”17

In such an intellectual atmsophere, later Christian thinkers came to be uncomfortable with the traditional story.

Early on, Julius Africanus interpreted Genesis 6 as referring to, “the descendants of Seth [who] are called the sons of God on account of the righteous men and patriarchs who have sprung from him, even down to the Saviour Himself; but that the descendants of Cain are named the seed of men, as having nothing divine in them, on account of the wickedness of their race and the inequality of their nature.”

The “Sethite” interpretation was echoed by other giants of the Patristic era like Cyril and Athanasius

Augustine himself wrestled with the question in City of God, while admitting“I dare not determine whether there be some spirits embodied in an aerial substance (for this element, even when agitated by a fan, is sensibly felt by the body), and who are capable of lust and of mingling sensibly with women,” but ultimately decided that, “there is… no doubt that, according to the Hebrew and Christian canonical Scriptures…the sons of God…were according to the flesh the sons of Seth.”18

By the onset of the medieval era, the traditional angelic interpretation had withered, and the “Sethite” view would be standard for the next millennium.

Witches, Warlocks, and the Devil’s Member

The author(s) of Genesis, and of most of the Old Testament, pictured gods and angels bodies and passions like those of men, only they more powerful and glorious.

From such a perspective, there is no problem with “Sons of God” or angels lusting after human women. As already mentioned, this became problematic when, under the influence of Hellenic Philosophy, Christians and Jews developed a much less carnal view of divine spirits, and it was this view which prevailed and dominated interpretation throughout the medieval and modern eras.

In the Summa, Aquinas follows Augustine in interpreting the “Sons of God” as the descendants of Seth.19 He understood angels as beings of “pure intellect, which remains the standard Catholic view to this day. It’s difficult to see how “pure intellect” could lust, or really feel any human emotion at all.

Martin Luther likewise, in his lectures on Genesis, takes the Sethite view as self-evident, explaining that the great sin in view here is that the Sons of God took wives as they chose, “without any regard for God or for natural and positive law.”20

As Moses clearly bears witness, Adam banished the murderer [Cain] from his company. And so Adam undoubtedly urged his descendants also to beware of the church of the evildoers and not to intermarry with the accursed race of Cain. For a time his descendants obeyed this advice or command. But when Adam had died and the respect for the remaining patriarchs declined, the sons of God (that is, those who had the promise of the blessed Seed and belonged to the blessed Seed) also yearned for marriages and affinity with the ungodly race.21

For Luther, “that anything can be born from the union of a devil and a human being is simply untrue,” 22 credited to “the silly ideas of the Jews.”23

In his own commentary on Genesis, John Calvin regarded the angelic interpretation as so self-evidently absurd that it seemed almost to offend him24. He scoffs that the “ancient figment, concerning the intercourse of angels with women, is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity; and it is surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious.”

But the waning of the angelic interpretation did not mean a total rejection of supernatural-human intercourse. In fact, come the close of the medieval period and the schism of the Church, Christian thinkers discovered a new enthusiasm for the lurid prospect.

This was the era of the witch-mania, and probably tens of thousands across Europe were murdered as alleged servants of the Devil. That is a whole other story, but suffice it to say that one of the premier charges leveled against accused (female) witches was that of having had sex with the Devil or one of his demons.

Indeed, Aquinas and Luther did not discount this possibility. In the same chapter of the Summa, Aquinas admits that angels might fashion bodies of subtle material that can simulate sex with human beings. However, “if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (De Trin. iii), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.” 25

Luther takes the same view:

[The Devil] is able to delude people who are irreligious and who live without the fear of God; when the devil is in the bed, the young man imagines he has a girl, and the girl that she has a young man. But that anything could be born from this cohabitation, this I do not believe.26

Actually, the witch-hunters’ obsession with Satanic sex verged on the pornographic.

In the dialogue Strix, sive de Ludificatione Daemonum (The Witch, or on the Deception of Demons), written by the Italian philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico Della Mirandola in 1523, the sceptic Apistius could not understand why sex with the Devil was so pleasurable. The judge, Dicasto, replied that witches claimed that there was no pleasure like it on earth, and for three reasons, he thought: first, because the demons put on a pleasing face; second, because their ‘virile members’ were uncommonly large. ‘With their faces’, he declared, ‘they delight the eyes, and with their members they filled up the most secret parts of the witches.’ In addition, he said, the demons pretended to be in love with them. Probably, he concluded, ‘they can stimulate something very deep inside the witches, by means of which these women have greater pleasure than men.’27

Amusingly, the demonologists held that while devils have sex with women, sodomy as a sin was so grievous that even Satan’s own wouldn’t stoop to it.

It was an assumption that went back to Thomas of Cantimpré (d. c.1270–2), who devoted a chapter of his The Universal Good Concerning Bees to ‘Devils Blush over the Sin against Nature’. William of Auvergne similarly declared that sins against nature were so heinous that demons did not practise sodomy among themselves, nor had ever done so. Aquinas too denied that demons engaged in sexual acts against nature, which included any sexual practices not conducive to procreation. Their disinclination so to do was a residue of the angelic nature in which they were originally created.28

While it could no longer be admitted that Satan or his demons experienced physical passions, they could convincingly simulate copulation with their worshippers, for the sake of defiling God’s creation and leading people astray.29

At the height of the witch-hunting craze through the 16th and 17th centuries, at least thousands were murdered in both Catholic and Protestant authorities for the supposed crime of consorting with the devil, for having cast spells or hexes, worshipped Satan, and participated in the infamous “black masses,” and of course, for having slept with incubi or succubi.

But as the 17th century shaded into the 18th, and the bright light of Reason dispelled the last of the medieval darkness, the world was disenchanted. The fear of the demon behind every stone abated, and tales of diabolic seducers were were finally identified and dismissed as primitive superstition.

Except of course, not really.

Lights in the Sky, and the Return of the Nephilim

When I leafed through those Watchtower publications, I would have been five, six, seven years old, back in the Days of Noah George W. Bush. I think even in the early 2000s, talk of Nephilim and alien hybrids would have gotten you quizzical looks in all but the most fringe and conspiratorial of Christian circles. I suspect that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were unorthodox — besides all the other ways in which they are unorthodox — in the matter-of-fact endorsement of the Angelic interpretation in their literature, without even a nod toward the Sethite view.

That is no longer the case.

YouTube is absolutely full of videos like these, with hundreds of thousands of views. Back in the dark days of Covid, I distinctly remember people claiming that the Pfizer vaccine contained “Nephilim DNA.”

What is happening?

Perhaps the first thing that happened, about three-hundred years ago, was the rediscovery of the Book of Enoch in the 18th century by the Scottish explorer James Bruce. Long lost to western Christendom, Enoch had been preserved for centuries by the Ethiopian Church, translated into the native Ge’ez language.

Almost like a cipher, all those strange little passages in Genesis, Jude, Corinthians, and the gospels were understood now not as aberrations but as fragments of a greater story.

And then we have the general decline of Christianity through the Enlightenment, the age of Revolutions, and the fractious twentieth century. It has been said that when men cease to believe in God, they will not believe in nothing, but in everything. I don’t really buy that, but it is certainly true that the end of a social and cultural consensus on the true religion broke open the dam of orthodoxy and Christendom was deluged a spiritual and mystical flood.

Theosophy, spiritualism, rosicrucianism, ariosophy, esotericism…

More to our point, in the early years of the 20th century, the development of the UFO phenomenon.

UFOlogy is a fascinating and bizarre story in its own right (seriously, if you’ve never looked into it beyond the absolute most casual, pop-culture surface level, it’s way weirder and more ridiculous than you probably think), which cannot detain me here because it would require a whole other series of posts.

Suffice it to say that, beginning in the immediate post-war years, huge multitudes of people — mostly, but not exclusively Americans — became utterly convinced that the Earth was being visited by beings from other worlds. While notions of extraterrestrial life had been cause for fascination since it was established that earth was only one of many planets circling our sun, 1947 was a watershed year. That was the year that saw the advent of the “flying saucers” as supposedly witnessed by American pilot Kenneth Arnold. The United States was gripped by “saucer mania,” and for a time the US military and intelligence services took seriously the possibility that something truly strange was happening in the skies. Theories ranged from a mysterious Soviet technological leap to previously unknown meteorological phenomena, but far and away the possibility which best captured the minds of the public was that the “saucers” were extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Even as the US government decided — officially at least — that there was “nothing to see here,” flying saucers sailed into the popular consciousness and would never leave. The 1950s and 60s saw a deluge of movies like Earth vs The Flying Saucers and books like The Flying Saucers are Real by former Marine pilot Donald Keyhoe. A cheap trading card run entitled Mars Attacks!30 told the story of a Martian invasion of Earth in grisly detail.

Mars Attacks! surely gave a lot of twelve-year-old boys a thrill and suitably horrified their parents, and we can credit it for the entertaining 1990s Tim Burton movie. But there’s one card in the pack that deserves particular attention:

Initially, people only claimed to see alien craft operating in the skies. As the ‘50s turned into ‘60s turned into the ‘70s, people began to claim they had been abducted by aliens.

The first of these stories, from the so-called “contactees” like George Adamski were primarily positive. The “aliens” were beautiful humanoids who took lucky humans for rides in their spacecraft, lectured them on the need for peace and nuclear disarmament, and worshipped the same “Creator of All” as we do.

Later, the experience got darker. Betty and Barney Hill were the first proper “abductees” to go public with their story. They claimed to have been taken by an alien craft while driving on the road, and rather than edified by their contact with a higher race, were deeply distressed by the experience.

The abductee phenomenon reached its apogee in the ‘70s and ‘80s. A “script” developed. People were carried up into hovering alien craft, sometimes on beams of light, laid out in in sterile operating chambers, and prodded and poked by strange-looking creatures , usually bug-eyed “greys.”

Later still, some abductees began to go further. They had not only been abducted and experimented upon by aliens, they had been impregnated by them.

As UFOlogist David M. Jacobs explains,

Usually the woman knows that something is being inserted into her and left there. She receives the impression that she is now pregnant. She does not want to be pregnant, and she certainly does not want to be pregnant under those circumstances. The Beings ignore her objections.31

Bluntly, these people describe being raped.

A whole complex mythology has grown up around this alien “breeding program.” What is the aliens’ purpose in all of this? As UFOlogist David M. Jacobs has it:

Everything the aliens do is logical, rational, and goal-oriented. With the use of superior technology, both physical and biological, they are engaging in the systematic and clandestine physiological exploitation, and perhaps alteration, of human beings for the purposes of passing on their genetic capabilities to progeny who will integrate into the human society and, without doubt, control it.32

Huh. Godlike beings descend from the sky, to procreate with human women and spawn superhuman progeny, who by virtue of their great power and abilities will inevitably dominate the world.

We are back to Shemihazah and the Watchers. This similarity has certainly not gone unnoticed by many Christians.

In certain conservative Christian circles, it is practically orthodoxy that “UFOs” are demonic manifestations, and “abduction” experiences are demonic oppression. Christian physicist and apologist Hugh Ross has written a book, Lights in the Sky & Little Green Men: A Rational Christian Look at UFOs, defending a diabolic explanation for the UFO phenomenon.

But in other circles, things move in a weirder direction still.

There exists a guy named Timothy Alberino, a kind of latter-day, Bible-believing Indiana Jones who has made quite a career out of lectures, books, and YouTube videos explicating his expansive and complex integration of the Nephilim, UFOs, transhumanism, Nietzcheanism, Darwinism, and paganism into a singular formula to describe the impending End of Days.

Alberino is representative of a developing strain of particularly online belief that I guess you could call “spooky Christianity.” Generally conservative Protestant (though sometimes Catholic) in theology and tradition, spooky Christianity is distinguished by its refusal to reject all “weirdness” that is not strictly and obviously within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. Instead, it is embraced and integrates it within. Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs, psi, transhumanism, stargates, dragons, cryptids, lost civilizations, all looking forward to the grand finale, when everything will come together for the final showdown at Armageddon.

Alberino is very much a conservative Christian in his theology. But it all makes for a supernatural worldview of significantly complexity.

While there is no creed for spooky Christianity, no statement of faith, there are certain motifs that pop up again and again. A popular one is that the Smithsonian, in the 19th century, spearheaded a global effort to confiscate and destroy the bones of giants to hide the truth about the Nephilim. Another is when the Antichrist arises to rule the world, he will beguile his followers by means of transhuman and biological hybridization, and the reason that taking the Mark of the Beast will be unforgivable will be that it will literally transform its bearers into something other-than-human. They generally hold to the Hancockian thesis that myths of “golden ages,” the Atlantis of the Greeks or the god-kings of the Sumerians, look back to a genuine era of advanced civilization lost to global calamity (i.e, God’s judgment). The recent UFO flaps before congress have fired a conviction that the government is indeed hiding alien technology, perhaps that bequeathed to man by the Watchers millennia ago.

Alberino himself takes a nuanced view of the connection between demons and aliens, and of the “hybridization” program. He does not believe they are the same. For him, as for the ancients, demons are indeed the spirits of the Nephilim. “Grey aliens” are a genuine alien race (or perhaps, biological machines) under the control of a higher alien race he calls “the insectalins.” Satan/Lucifer he calls “the Dragon” and identifies with the so-called “Nordic” aliens as well as with the god Apollo. Whether the Dragon is working with the greys, or whether they have separate agendas, he leaves an open question, although both certainly plan the conquest of earth. The Dragon may be in charge of the hybrdization program. However, the Dragon and his angels may be also be playing 4-D chess: they will arrive posing as our rescuers from the hybridization-conquest plan of the greys, and so set themselves and their own demigod progeny as rulers of earth, and then lead mankind in a final battle against Yahweh.33

In his book Birthright, Alberino sketches a colorful picture of the Last Days just before the return of Christ, as the Dragon Apollo and his hybrid children rule the earth34:

In the same vein, here is a highly amusing twitter thread with 18k likes, alleging that the true aim of the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq was to secure the body of Gilgamesh (one of the Nephilim, so identified by the ancient Book of Giants) and raise him from the dead .

If it’s not clear, I think this is all completely insane (although quite entertaining when taken as sience-fiction/fantasy), but this stuff is everywhere on the internet, and the Nephilim, the idea of divine-human, or alien-human (but what’s the difference?) are inevitably at the center of it all.

Why has there been such a resurgence in fascination with the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men? I’m sure it has something to do with the general fracturing of consensus — in the realm of religion as much as politics and society — of the past decade or two. The flowering of conspiracism in general has not left the faith untouched. In our resolutely technological age, the impulse to blend the spiritual and the mechanical is irresistible.

And frankly, I can’t blame the Alberinos of the world. This stuff is fun. Who the hell wants to take the boring, lame, not to mention wrong “Sethite” view when you can talk about Atlantean star-portals, CIA resurrection protocols, and dragon princes instead?

So much for the Nephilim. Heroes of old, men of renown, alien hybrids, giants…possibly among us…right now?

Probably not.

But it’d be cool.

For long centuries, even as Christendom was periodically riven by bloody conflict over the correct interpretation of its faith, there remained a broad consensus on a basic moral-theological-cosmological framework. There was a good God and his good angels, opposed by the wicked prince Satan and his wicked angels.

The contending parties in religious wars and disputes might accuse each other of allegiance to the Evil One. Heretics or unfortunate “witches” and “warlocks” might be burned for the imagined crime of Devil-worship. But none except madmen self-identified as servants of Satan and enemies of God.

Some cracks in this edifice appeared in the wake of the tumultuous 16th century. Milton’s Paradise Lost, while still firmly in the divine camp, made Lucifer a hero for the first time. Not a hero in the modern sense, a doer of good deeds, but a hero in the classic sense: a doer of great deeds, be they good or evil.

In the decades and centuries to follow, bolder poets would go a step further than Milton, and present Satan not only as an impressive and tragic figure, but as a virtuous one.

Shelley declared that, “Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”1

In the latter half of the 19th century, European radicals gravitated towards Lucifer as a cosmic reflection of themselves. Just as they struggled against ossified aristocracies, corrupt clerics, and brutal despots on earth, so Lucifer in Heaven had risen against the ultimate cleric, the ultimate tyrant. In 1891, the Swedish Socialist poet Atterdag Wermelin penned an ode to Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, who “did not want to be a lackey of authority,” and whose mission was “to bring light to thralls and ruin to tormentors.”

We do not believe the lies about him

Who for millennia has carried the torch2

As thrones and altars crumbled all around, Lucifer the first sinner was recast as Lucifer the first revolutionary.

The floodgates really opened with the 20th and 21st centuries. As the social and political power of the church(es) went into abeyance all across the west, it was suddenly both possible and exciting to openly question the basic moral framework of Christianity that had gone unchallenged for almost two millennia. Books like Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice, Steven Brust’s To Reign in Hell, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens presented us with sympathetic demons, haughty angels, a heroic Lucifer, and often an evil God. Not all of the stories followed the same pattern. Sometimes Lucifer was still a bad guy, just not entirely so. Sometimes God and his angels were just flawed or aloof, rather than outright evil. Sometimes both Heaven and Hell were enemies of mankind. But in any case, the tidy good-and-evil dichotomy of centuries past had been well and truly shattered.

Up through the 90s and even the early years of the 21st century, there remained some transgressive energy in this inversion of the ancient cosmic drama. As a teenager I got a sacrilegious kick out of an obscure 90s fantasy novel by Matthew Stover called Jericho Moon. While Lucifer doesn’t appear, the novel is an inversion of the Book of Joshua, following a team of rugged-but-lovable mercenaries hired to defend the decent people of Canaan from the Israelites and their bloodthirsty god Yahweh. I was also a big fan of the CW fantasy-horror show Supernatural, which from the start presented Heaven and its angels as morally ambiguous at best, and finally closed out its fifteen-season run with the heroes taking on the Big Man himself.

In 2025, I think we can say most of the juice has been squeezed out of that (forbidden) fruit. It’s to the point where the subversion has become standard. Here’s a reddit thread on r/fantasy asking if anyone has any recommendations for books where angels actually aren’t the bad guys.

This is where Hazbin Hotel comes in.

Hazbin is the brainchild of Vivienne Medrano. It started out as an indie passion project. The pilot was crowdfunded and posted on YouTube in 2019, and almost immediately developed a rabid fandom, even before there was any actual show. It was eventually picked up by Amazon Prime, in collaboration with A24, and the show proper finally premiered in 2024. It’s been a major hit, breaking records for an Amazon streaming show, and doubling the size of its dedicated fandom many times over. A brief summary of the set-up:

Hell is overpopulated (ha-ha). Every year, Heaven sends down an army of exterminating angels to wipe out a portion of the damned and keep the numbers under control. No one really knows what happens to sinners when they double-die, but because Hell in the Hazbin universe isn’t that bad, this is an atrocity rather than a mercy. Charlie Morningstar, daughter of Lucifer himself, has a more humane plan to defuse the infernal population bomb: a halfway house for sinners (the titular hotel) who want to be redeemed. Once cleansed of their sins, they’ll ascend to Heaven, thus freeing up space in Hell and obviating the need for the yearly “exterminations.” Hilarity ensues.

On a purely technical level, Hazbin is…not great. The VA work is top notch, the animation is nice, and some of the songs are fun, but the writing is an absolute mess, and like so many “adult cartoons” its humor relies largely on lazy and ironically juvenile vulgarity.

Nevertheless, it says something interesting about Christianity’s place in modern American culture.

When the show premiered on Amazon last year, it managed to draw the ire of a couple conservative Christian commentators, including Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire, who lashed out in a video entitled “Amazon Prime Calls Satan the Hero.”

(Sidenote: do not allow yourself to be baited by Hazbin Hotel of all things. It’s embarrassing.)

That Hazbin is not exactly “biblically accurate” goes without saying, but it really makes no effort at all to represent anything like an orthodox Christian cosmology. Hell is not even really a place of torment. It’s more of a big red light district. It sucks, but that’s just because it’s full of people who suck — pimps, hucksters, murderers, social media influencers, who just keep doing all the uncongenial stuff they did up on earth.

It’s unclear whether God even exists in this universe. In the first season, we’re told that it was “the angels” who created mankind out of dust and cast Lucifer into Hell, and a council of angels appears to be the highest authority in Heaven.

Despite Knowles’ objections, and despite the somewhat misleading prologue he critiques in the video, Lucifer (“Satan” in this universe is actually a separate character) is not the “hero” of the show at all. He’s really only a supporting character, and rather than a noble fighter against divine tyranny or even a brooding antihero a la Netflix’s Lucifer, he’s an insecure screw-up with an estranged daughter. He mostly serves as comic relief.

Concepts and terminology from scripture and tradition are generally applied without rhyme or reason. Adam the First Man is an archangel(?). There are Seraphim in Heaven, but just two (and “Seraphim” is used as a singular as well as a plural). Saint Peter is here in his classic role as Heaven’s doorman, despite the conspicuous absence of Christ. There are two kinds of demons: “sinner” demons, which are damned human souls, and “Hellborn” demons, which are demons native to Hell. Fallen angels, like Lucifer, are a separate category. Hell is divided into rings/circles a la Dante, but only the Pride Ring is populated by sinners, the rest are exclusively populated by Hellborn. People take on animal characteristics when they die for some reason so everybody in the afterlife is a furry. Certain powerful sinners become “overlords” in Hell, wielding influence over the less illustrious damned like infernal mob bosses or petty nobility.

In the first season, the bad guys are “the Exorcists,” Heaven’s army of exterminating angels that come down once a year to slaughter the denizens of Hell. The leader of the Exorcists, and therefore the main villain of S1, is…Adam from the garden. He’s been in Heaven for a couple thousand years and he’s gotten bored, so for him, “extermination is entertainment.” If you wanted to tweak the noses of Christians, Adam is pretty far down on the list of Biblical characters to villainize. Forget God, Jesus, Mary, or even the Archangel Michael. You’d hit the apostles, Joshua, David, Moses, and any of the prophets before you hit Adam. Adam if anything has a decidedly middling reputation with most Christians. He did get us evicted from paradise, after all, and he didn’t do much to make up for it.

In S1E6 we find out that, while Adam and the Exorcists are jerks, most of the people in Heaven are pretty nice. In fact, they didn’t even know about the yearly exterminations and are horrified when they find out. Moreover, none of the angels even know what gets people into Heaven to begin with. It appears to be completely random.

Hazbin barely even pretends to have anything to say anything about real-world religion. In S1, the show occasionally flails in the direction of making some kind of Point about divine/ecclesiastical hypocrisy (a line in one of the S1 songs, “if Hell is forever then Heaven must be a lie” would make a decent universalist slogan), but it’s all very half-hearted and I think Medrano mostly wants to get back to her dick jokes and fight scenes. The putatively religious setting is mostly scene-dressing for a story that could have taken place in an entirely invented fantasy world. It’s all flavoring.

And while S1 retains an echo of that “Heaven bad - Hell good” inverted framework, with its villainous exterminating angels, Season 2 sheds it completely. The bad guy in this one is a demagogic demon called Vox (as in, Vox Populi) who wants to stir up the damned to conquer Heaven so he can become a god. Heroic and villainous characters come from both Heaven and Hell in about equal measure.

By this point, the two kingdoms of the dead are no longer symbols of good and evil, even inverted or distorted ones. The show just makes Heaven and Hell into fantasy realms with no real moral valence whatsoever.

Hazbin’s hodge-podge of Christian/Abrahamic figures and concepts doesn’t come across as especially pointed or malicious, either. Medrano apparently grew up Christian and has stated that the show has its origins in her “questioning” of what she was taught as a kid, so maybe she does intend for Hazbin to be on some level a cathartic response to the Christianity of her childhood. But if so, this is hardly perceptible. I don’t really get the sense of “take that, God!” To me, it feels more like a kid reaching into a bag and randomly plucking out things that sound cool. “Ooh, archangels! Circles of Hell! Lilith!”

Hazbin treats the Christian mythos like Percy Jackson or God of War treat the myths of the Greeks. No one has any strong feelings about Zeus and Apollo these days. Their altars last smoldered 1500 years ago and now the Olympians are reduced to fantasy fodder for video games and kids’ books. None of that media presents a real critique of Hellenistic religion. Why would it? Who cares?

Stories about evil angels and noble demons pay Christianity a kind of tribute by their acknowledgement of the deep impression it has left on our historic civilization, and the persistent social power of Christian belief even in an age of waning religiosity. What would it mean for us to have been wrong about good and evil for hundreds of years? What if God is not a loving father but a vicious tyrant? And so on and so on.

Hazbin doesn’t even do that. At times, it feels like a show made in an alternate universe, where Christianity died out as a living religion centuries ago, and Yahweh was interred in the graveyard of the gods between Ba’al and Huitzilopotchli.

An illuminating comparison are all the Japanese anime, manga, and video games that likewise play with Christian characters and concepts without any regard for their proper context. Incipient Japanese Christianity was ruthlessly stamped out by the Tokugawa Shogunate four-hundred years ago. Today, a scant ~1% of Japanese identify as Christians. Consequently, Christ does not hover over the Japanese shoulder as he does over the shoulder of even a western non-believer. YHVH (in)famously appears as a boss fight in some of the Shin Megami Tensei games, as does Lucifer (who can also be heroic). Sephiroth, from Final Fantasy VII, takes his name from a Jewish kabbalistic concept, though that concept has little relevance to the character beyond sounding cool. Neon Genesis Evangelion, as the name implies, plunders the Abrahamic mythos for vibes, aesthetic, and terminology. The coloring of Christianity and general Abrahamic religion in such Japanese media is often at least vaguely negative, but it (usually) lacks the sense of emotional rancor that has been so common in parallel western media treating the same concepts. For many Japanese people, Christianity is just a strange, exotic, and somewhat creepy foreign religion with lots of cool ideas and aesthetics. An irresistible conceptual treasure trove for fantasy and science fiction, just as Marvel irreverently plays with the Aesir.

What makes Hazbin Hotel interesting is that it is very much like such Japanese fiction, except that it is an American show, made by Americans, in a once-Christian country and culture.

But Recent polling suggests that a full third of American youth identify as religious “nones”, an absolutely unprecedented number.

More to the point, an increasing number of Americans are not only irreligious but raised irreligious. This year, Pew found that 94% of people born before 1950 reported being raised in a religion, declining to 81% of those born between 1990 and 1999, and 75% of those born between 2000 and 2006. Granted, that’s still a strong 3/4 majority of Americans raised at least nominally religious, but it’s also 1 out of 4 kids who weren’t raised even nominally religious.

Hazbin Hotel is a show for those kids. Ostensibly an “adult” cartoon, a cursory online perusal suggests that kids and teenagers make up the core of its fanbase, and maybe majority. The colorful characters, incessant swearing, zany fantasy, and fairly simplistic storylines are almost tailored for the 10 - 18 crowd.

That 25% that not only are irreligious, but have never even had any real experience of religion as an active force in their lives, will approach Hazbin not as an edgy rebellion against mom and dad, but just as a fun fantasy full of filthy jokes and cool fight scenes, devoid of any real-world significance. I don’t doubt that for some, Hazbin may represent their very first real exposure to concepts like Heaven, Hell, damnation, angels, and demons.

Hazbin is a show that probably could not have been made even a decade or two ago. Certainly, for most of the twentieth century, it would have been a non-starter. It might have been okay for pugilistic science fiction and fantasy writers like Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven to blaspheme and subvert Christianity in their stories, but a mainstream hit cartoon doing the same would have incurred the still-formidable wrath of Moral Majority types.

Even in the 90s or the early 2000s, it would have faced substantial pushback. But more importantly, that core demographic of hereditarily irreligious twelve-year-olds did not yet exist in sufficient numbers to form a rabid fanbase. Kids who could and would not only watch such a show, but who would watch it without guilt, without any thought that Lucifer or Adam might actually be anything more than myths, and whose parents wouldn’t care if they did watch it.

For better or for worse, and entirely apart from whatever artistic merits it may or may not have, Hazbin Hotel is truly a show for our times.

Consider this horribly compressed, artifact-ridden, watermarked meme. It’s snarky but I think boils down the basic apologetic argument for the Resurrection pretty well. Something like this:

Naturalistic hypotheses explaining the origins of Christianity are strained and ad hoc, while the Resurrection hypothesis neatly accounts for all of the data. The only real reason to reject it is if you set your prior probability for the possibility of divine miracles at zero.

Intuitively it seems kinda fair. Isn’t “God raised Jesus from the dead” simpler than “grief hallucinations, uh some more hallucinations, uh, maybe tomb robbery, uh cognitive dissonance”? If we grant that miracles can happen, even with a fairly low probability doesn’t the Resurrection emerge as far and away the best explanation?

No, I don’t think so.

The proposition “God raises Jesus from the dead” is deceptively simple.

What does it mean to “be raised from the dead”?

Again, this seems pretty simple, but it really isn’t. We could rephrase the apologetic argument as “the relevant data are best explained by the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

What are the relevant data? Mostly, the accounts found in the New Testament, in particular the gospels and Paul’s letters, in which the subjective experiences of the disciples that Jesus had been raised are reported. So once again, we can rephrase it as, “the reported subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The problem here is that there exists no other instance of a bodily resurrection in all of human history. In fact it is Christian dogma that no one before Jesus was ever raised from the dead, nor will anyone be after until the Judgment Day, at which point all of this arguing will be superfluous.1 So I can agree with a Christian that no one who isn’t Jesus has ever been raised from the dead, I just go a little further and say Jesus wasn’t, either.

If there are no other examples of bodily resurrections against which to compare that of Jesus, then how can we possibly say that the subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by a bodily resurrection? We don’t know what a bodily resurrection looks like.

How do we know Jesus was raised from the dead? Because the subjective experience of the disciples is best explained by a bodily resurrection. How do we know what a bodily resurrection entails? Because Jesus was raised from the dead.

Well, maybe even if no bodily resurrection has ever occurred, there are certain things we could say a priori about what a bodily resurrection would look like if it did happen.

Let us say that, if Jesus was bodily raised, then at one time he was alive, at a later time he wasn’t, and at a still later time he was alive again.

Simple enough, right?

Again, no.

What does it mean to be “alive”? In the case of human beings we use various criteria to discriminate between life and death. If a man is walking and talking, it’s a safe bet he isn’t dead. If a man’s heart is beating, he isn’t dead. If he’s breathing he isn’t dead.

The gospels say some interesting things about Jesus’ “resurrection body” (henceforth RB). When Jesus appears to the disciples in the “locked room,” his body still bears the marks of his crucifixion, and he famously invites “doubting Thomas” to stick his fingers into the spear-wound in his side. He sits down and eats fish with the disciples. However, when he enters the room, it is apparently by a kind of teleportation, since it was, after all, locked. Finally, Jesus floats up into the sky, ascending to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father until he returns to judge the earth.

What can all this tell us about the RB?

Consider the holes in Jesus’ hands and feet, and the spear-wound in his side. If God has simply restored Jesus as an ordinary human being, the Resurrection wouldn’t have lasted very long, because he would have very quickly bled out again, assuming he didn’t instantly die from the shock of having a massive puncture wound through his torso.

Apparently, these wounds don’t bother Jesus at all, either by causing him pain, or by impeding his movement through the damage to tissue, bone, nerves, etc. For Jesus to feel no pain from these wounds, and for them not to hamper him at all, his bodily must be radically different from ours indeed. A normal person would not be able to take a piece of fish and eat it, nor to embrace anyone, if he’d had nails hammered through his wrists, because the nerve damage would render his hands unusable. So if Jesus can move his fingers despite the holes in his wrists, his fingers cannot be operating by the usual channel of signals from the brain and through the relevant nerves.

Likewise, someone who’s had a spear thrust through their side, up into their chest cavity, is not going anywhere, let alone walking around and sitting down to lunch. It’s been suggested the soldier’s spear pierced Jesus’ heart. If so, that’s it, game over. You die instantly. Even if it didn’t you would be unable to draw a breath as your lungs filled with blood. Depending on where exactly it struck, it would likely cause further damage to nerve and muscle that would render you unable to move. So if Jesus is moving around and eating food, clearly his body is not functioning in the matter of an ordinary human body.

So if his body moves, but not by the usual channels, how does it move? Are his nerves, his skeleton, his muscles now entirely superfluous — decorative, if you will — while some mysterious supernatural power animates his limbs?

Why isn’t Jesus gushing blood through his open wounds? Is his heart still pumping? If it is, is there some kind of invisible, supernatural seal on the wounds that redirects the blood back into the vessels when it tries to pour out? When Thomas touches the wound, does it hurt? If not, why not? Are those nerve endings still functioning? Are any of his nerve endings still functioning? Does he have nerve endings anymore? Could he feel pain, even in principle? Have the pain receptors been “shut off”? If so, can he still feel physical pleasure? A warm hug from a friend, a cool breeze on his cheek? If he can, does that mean his pleasure receptors are still in operation, or is there some entirely new mechanism by which the same subjective experience is generated?

On that note, what is Jesus’ subjective experience? Even if we admit some immaterial component to the human mind, human consciousness as we understand it is dependent on its physical substrate. Our subjective experience is thoroughly shaped by the physical stimuli we receive from the outside world and interpret through the physical bodies we inhabit. Considering the drastic alterations to consciousness that can be induced by means of physical intervention (drugs, damage, etc.) it is difficult to imagine what it would even really mean to be “conscious” apart from our physical bodies. How could we remember anything, when memory appears to be reliant on a functioning brain? How could we formulate thoughts when that likewise appears to be reliant on the brain? What would it even mean to be a human separate from his body?

And though Jesus has his RB, these questions remain unanswered, because as we have seen, his RB is utterly unlike a normal physical body in almost every respect. Does he have a functioning brain? It cannot function the way a normal brain does, unless the rest of his body is also in ordinary working order, and it doesn’t appear that could be the case. If his brain doesn’t function like an ordinary brain, what is actually happening when he says “peace be with you” to the disciples? Are the signals flowing from brain to lips? The disciples see him, but does he see them? Do his eyes still operate by taking in light? Is there, again, some completely different process that somehow still generates the exact same subjective experience of “sight” that in ordinary human beings is generated by the ordinary functioning of the eyes and brain?

What is it like to be the Risen Christ?

Paul also tells us that Jesus has been raised “incorruptible.” Presumably, he is now immune from death and decay, unlike any living being that presently exists. Is he then, still composed of carbon atoms? That seems unlikely, because if he was he would still be subject to entropy, like all other carbon-based lifeforms. So is he composed of something else? Paul perhaps believed the RB was made out of pneuma. So what is pneuma? Whatever the RB was “made” of, it could apparently be perceived by the ordinary senses of the disciples. I guess? Unless, there was, again, some entirely different process by which the subjective experience of vision and touch was generated in the minds of Peter, Thomas and the rest. Could it have been caught on film? If you turned an IR camera in the “upper room,” would Jesus show up?

How about when he floats into the air to ascend to Heaven? Any ordinary human would asphyxiate before he left earth’s atmosphere. Presumably, this didn’t happen to Jesus. Did God miraculously transmit air into his lungs? Or does he simply not need air anymore? Are his lungs, again, now purely decorative? Or does he have lungs?

And now he sits in Heaven, at the right hand of the Father. What does that mean? Most Christians do not understand God to be a physical being. So what does it even mean for Jesus’ somehow-physical body to be in some spatio-temporal location with the non-physical and timeless God, the non-physical angels, and perhaps the non-physical souls of departed Christians?2 Is that even coherent?

At this point you may be saying, “This is all ridiculous nitpicking. That’s the point. Of course we can understand the Resurrection only dimly this side of Judgment Day!”

I think there’s not much a problem here if we view the Resurrection as a false belief that emerged through a mix of wishful thinking, embellishment, and a hallucination or two. None of these questions actually have answers because the early Jesus followers running around proclaiming the End of Days didn’t really think it through.

But if the Resurrection really was a real event in history, then these questions are problematic. Because if Jesus’ RB turns out to be a total black-box, utterly incomprehensible, what can we say about the nature of the Resurrection at all? Ultimately, nothing, except that it is the sort of thing that would produce a belief in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is shaped like itself.

Understood this way, the Resurrection emerges as the most ad hoc explanation of all.

“God raised Jesus from the dead.”

“Why didn’t he die again from the spear wound in his side?”

“God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

“Why didn’t the holes in his wrists paralyze his fingers?”

“God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

“Why didn’t he suffocate when he ascended to Heaven?”

“Well, God fixed it so that wouldn’t happen.”

The Resurrection isn’t really one big miracle, it’s countless miracles in a trench ccoat.

I think the move here would be to to argue that this isn’t ad hoc, because these aren’t disjunctive modifications introduced only to salvage the hypothesis, but rather expected on the condition that God wants to raise Jesus from the dead, so the hypothesis survives Occam’s Razor.

But I don’t think this really helps because once again, to accept the proposition “God wants to raise Jesus from the dead,” we have to establish what it even means to raise Jesus from the dead, and all of the million questions noted above spring forth again.

Naturalistic hypotheses are typically subject to unfair scrutiny. If someone suggests, for example, that Jesus’ body was stolen from the tomb, he immediately has to answer a score of questions. Who? When? Why? How? But the Christian is excused from answering those same questions as they apply to his own hypothesis, simply disposing of them all with a blanket “well, God can do what he wants.”

Imagine if, when challenged to explain the origins of the Resurrection belief, the skeptic just said, “it can be explained by naturalistic processes,” and when challenged to elaborate, he just dug his heels in: “it can by explained by whatever naturalistic processes would explain the Resurrection.”

Not very convincing.3

“My friend the witch doctor, he taught me what to do”

— Alvin and the Chipmunks

The other day I saw a tweet from a mid-sized account that mostly posts about politics. I can’t find it now, but it was something along the lines of, “my atheist skeptic dad was in stationed in Haiti years ago and came back saying that he saw a guy levitate and that the Devil is real.”

Assuming this guy’s dad is real and really reported this, he wouldn’t be the first person to report levitating Haitians. Last year, late conservative activist Charlie Kirk likewise claimed that he had heard second-hand reports of supernatural phenomena in Haiti:

I think part of the country is literally under a spiritual oppression. I’ve talked to missionaries and missionaries that have gone there, and they say they’ve seen the darkest stuff that a human being can see. In fact, I know people that have come -- that went to Haiti passively as, like, agnostic atheists, and they came back searching for Jesus because they saw, like, legit demonic activity…here are claims that people have seen, like, quasi-levitation stuff. Like, almost head-spinning type stuff…when Andrew was in Haiti, there were common stories about people turning into cats at night, which I don’t know. They all knew someone that turned into cats.

Slovak adventurer and travel writer Douchan Gersi visited Haiti and described his experiences there in the 1991 book Faces in the Smoke1:

All the worshippers were dancing in a frenzy, jumping and violently shaking their bodies. Suddenly the body of one of the dancers stopped wriggling and began moving as if in slow motion. Then the man, his body completely vertical, slowly started to rise into the air as if he were weightless breaking away from the rest of people, who were still dancing frantically. Once he was above the crowd, still in a vertical position and dancing in slow motion, he slowly began to turn upside down.

Okay, so apparently sometimes people levitate in Haiti. Weird. What’s interesting here is the apparent reactions of these witnesses to the supernatural. The father of the tweeter came back believing in “the Devil.” Kirk says that agnostics and atheists who bore witness to these strange things in Haiti came back “searching for Jesus.”

Now consider the quite-popular argument from miracles. It’s gotten a lot of play lately. Basically, if miracles are performed and apparently attributable to Yahweh, then the probability that Christianity is true increases significantly. The Fatima apparitions. Zeitoun. The Amazing Re-Growing Leg of Calanda. Any number of miraculous healing miracles. And perhaps most relevant for our purposes, St. Joseph, the levitating monk of Cupertino, who has been held up as a particularly powerful miracle case.

What’s interesting here is that if a Christian saint levitates, that’s evidence for Christianity. But if a non-Christian holy man levitates, that’s…also evidence for Christianity?

Why? What about seeing some Haitian houngan levitate five feet off the ground would make one conclude that the Devil is real or that he should believe in Jesus?

If one asked the witch doctor, he would not claim to derive his power from Satan. Voodoo is not devil-worship. A Christian might claim that practitioners of Voodoo are really worshipping Satan and his demons, even if they don’t realize it. But it’s certainly not how voodooists conceive of their own religion. Voodoo is not merely “Christianity, but we side with the other guy.” It has its own conception of the divine, of man, and of the universe that — despite extensive syncretism with Catholicism — is ultimately exclusive of the Christian worldview.

So if the levitating witch doctor doesn’t claim to do what he does by the power of Beelzebub, why think he does?

If one is already a Christian, it’s probably the best explanation. After all, the voodooist is an infidel, so the possibility that he derives his power from Yahweh/Christ/the angels is right out. And in the Christian cosmology, supernatural power either derives from God or from Satan. So by process of elimination, Satan is the one levitating the levitating witch doctor. QED.

But for twitter guy’s dad, or Kirk’s agonistic atheists, I think the proper response to the levitating voodooist — assuming you’ve seen it for yourself — is to interpret it as evidence for voodoo. At least, that’s the way to interpret it if the argument from miracles is any good at all. Otherwise, it’s a clear case of a double standard, privileging a Christian model of reality before the evidence is considered.

If an atheist should not be convinced of vooodoo by a houngan’s powers, neither should he be convinced of Christianity by a monk’s powers.

I think what is going on here is an unconscious presupposition, even by nonbelievers, that Christianity and atheistic materialism are the only two plausible models of reality. So if a materialist sees something spooky, his first instinct is to run to Jesus, even if the thing he’s seen takes place in a non-Christian context and is not immediately attributable to any of the various supernatural actors that populate the Christian cosmology. The possibility that voodoo could be true just doesn’t register as a live possibility.

And this gets at the heart of why I don’t think the argument from miracles is very good, even if these bizarre phenomena really do occur.

If Joe Christian sees an apparition of a giant serpent that says “I am Damballah, and I demand offerings of rice and alcohol,” he’s likely to scream and run in the other direction rather than reconsider his prejudices about Voodoo. The mere existence of some non-human intelligence that presents itself as “Damballah” is not taken to be evidence of the truth of the Voodoo cosmology as a whole. Rather, the Christian will take it as evidence that he is being deceived by the evil non-human intelligences (Satan and/or his demons) he already believes in. Instead of rupturing his worldview, “Damballah” reconfirms it.

Then why, if John Atheist encounters an apparition of a young man in white robes wearing a crown of thorns who says, “I am Jesus Christ, come and follow me,” is he expected to react in quite the opposite manner and believe the apparition?

It should be pretty clear that something calling itself Damballah, even if that something can do things which humans (presently) can’t, falls far short of proving the top-to-bottom truth of Voodoo cosmology. By the same token, something calling itself Jesus, or Mary, or the Archangel Michael, falls fall short of proving the top-to-bottom truth of Christian cosmology.

Strange things do seem to occur in all sorts of religious and non-religious contexts. Christians have no monopoly on them.2 Levitations, healings, ghostly apparitions, future-telling. In October, I wrote an essay on Victorian medum Daniel Dunglas Home, who was reported by dozens upon dozens of contemporaries to have been capable of a wide range of extraordinary phenomena, including levitation.

In my opinion, if these things really do occur (and I’m not convinced that they do, but not convinced that they don’t), the best explanation for them is simply that there are dimensions to reality we still don’t understand very well, but it’s highly unlikely any theological/cosmological system has correctly mapped out all of these dimensions of reality we don’t understand, even if we sometimes perceive such dimensions and their attendant phenomena through the lenses of pre-existing religious belief.

There is an interesting paradox that results here. The argument for Christianity from miracles is only any good if only Christianity can boast supernatural phenomena. But a Christian should believe that non-Christians are also capable of supernatural phenomena, by the power of demons. So someone convinced of Christianity by the argument from miracles should no longer find the argument convincing.

I raised two possibilities:

A) conditional on theism, the arguments for Christianity are so good they compel any theist to eventually become a Christian.

B) Christian philosophers of religion are mostly Christian for reasons besides logical argumentation, and the philosophical arguments are developed and marshaled to defend a Christian faith held for other reasons.

I received solid engagement from a few people, in particular Alex Spieldenner who publishes the newsletter “Aquinas and Beyond,” Mary M., and Patrick Flynn, who publishes the newsletter “The Journal of Absolute Truth.” Generally, they argued for something like option A. None of them argued that conditional on theism, the evidence for Christianity is so good that it compels one to adopt Christianity, but they seem to argue that, given theism, Christianity becomes at least quite plausible.

Here, I want to lay out my reasons for doubting that this is the case. In the following essay, I’m going to be talking about Christianity. Because that is the religion I am most intellectually and personally familiar with, it is the one that interests me the most, but I suspect much of what I say here would apply as well to Islam and Judaism, and perhaps other religions as well.

Generally, when I get into apologetics/counter-apologetics, I prefer to write about history rather than philosophy, both because I am much better read in the former, and because I find it more interesting. I am writing this because I got more engagement than I expected on a quick throwaway post. I am still very much a beginner when it comes to philosophy, so don’t take me too seriously, and give me a little grace if I make any egregious errors. If I have misrepresented anyone’s position, it is by accident.

1. We are more charitable towards Christianity than we should be

I expect that a majority of people reading this essay will be westerners. As westerners, we grew up in a society that is either Christian or post-Christian, depending on our specific circumstances. Even if you grew up in an unbelieving household, and had no close believing friends or family, you are still an atheist fish swimming in Christian water. You have doubtless had countless encounters with Christian acquaintances, classmates, coworkers, and strangers. You have driven by hundreds of churches. You have watched characters engage seriously with Christianity in movies and TV shows. You have heard politicians and public figures praise or condemn Christianity.

Christianity to us is normal. Even if we ourselves are not Christians, Christianity seems to an unremarkable thing that is unremarkable to believe. If somebody tells you that he believes in Zeus, you will probably think him attention-seeking or eccentric. If somebody tells you he believes in Jesus Christ, you won’t think anything of it at all.

Imagine a young man raised in a believing Protestant Christian family. He says the sinner’s prayer at five years old. He goes to church on Sundays, and attends Sunday school. He says grace before dinner. He has a book of Bible stories for kids. As he grows up, he agonizes over the eternal fates of his unbelieving friends. In his teenage years, he begins to question the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Towards the end of high school, he drifts into a fuzzy agnosticism.

In college, he takes a Philosophy 101 class. Classic arguments for God are raised and summarily passed over. But his interest is piqued. He had never really known you could make a rational argument for God. The faith of his childhood was fideistic. Whenever he asked relatives how they knew God and Jesus were real they just said things like, “because the Bible says so” or even “we just do.”

So our hero digs into the philosophy of religion. One late night, he is sits awake in his dorm, pondering the cosmological argument, when it suddenly bursts in his mind like a thunderbolt. The argument is sound! God exists!

He may have been engaged in cold, rational contemplation, but as soon as he embraces the proposition “God exists!” his mind will fly beyond the bounds of reason, towards the Garden of Eden, Mount Sinai, the Cross, the Empty Tomb…

Because he has grown up hearing people use the word “God,” and when they use that word they refer to a figure called “God” who did very specific things in specific places at certain times. All his life, when someone said “God exists,” it was always in the context of something God supposedly did. “God exists, and he created Adam and Eve.” “God exists, and he raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” That little proposition, “God exists,” almost implies these things as a matter of necessity. The same word used for the being that is supposed to have done the aforementioned wonders is used for the being whose existence he has just accepted through philosophical argument. It is inevitable he will conflate them. No one in his life ever said “God exists” and left it at that. They said, “God exists, and…”

“God exists, and…” seems almost more plausible than “God exists” alone.

He will soon engage in a rational investigation of the claims of Christianity, and it may be very fair and open-minded, but before he even sets off on that journey, Christianity will have already benefited from an unjustified plausibility boost, thanks not to any argument or logic, but to an unconscious cultural priming.

2. θεός vs. יַהְוֶה

Note: this section is a summary of a longer essay I wrote on the topic. If you have any objection to anything here, or if something is insufficiently clear, I recommend reading the lengthier piece to see if I’ve answered or clarified things there.

So with all that in mind, Patrick Flynn says something interesting in his post:

It isn’t crazy, after all, to think one might be interested in the notion of God from a purely philosophical perspective but not entirely interested in whether that notion connects to any religious tradition. That isn’t crazy—though I would contend it’s odd. It strikes me as strange that one could think so much about God while paying so little attention to religion, which itself talks so much about God.

There is a hidden assumption here, which is that when philosophy talks about God, and religion talks about “God,” this word “God” is univocal. As a test case, let’s take a paradigmatic example of philosophy — Aristotle’s Metaphysics — and a paradigmatic example of religion — Moses’1 Book of Exodus. Jerusalem and Athens.

In our English translations of Book VII of Metaphysics, we do find the word “God.” Aristotle says certain things about God. He says,

God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.

He says, furthermore, that

is evident from the foregoing account that there is some substance which is eternal and immovable and separate from sensible things; and it has also been shown that this substance can have no magnitude, but is impartible and indivisible (for it causes motion for infinite time, and nothing finite has an infinite potentiality; and therefore since every magnitude is either finite or infinite, it cannot have finite magnitude, and it cannot have infinite magnitude because there is no such thing at all); and moreover that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other kinds of motion are posterior to spatial motion. Thus it is clear why this substance has these attributes.

And that,

the primary essence has no matter, because it is complete reality. Therefore the prime mover, which is immovable, is one both in formula and in number; and therefore so also is that which is eternally and continuously in motion.

Lofty stuff. Turn to our English translation of the Book of Exodus, and in the very first chapter, verse 17, we find that same word again:

But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

The god called “God” in Exodus is also sometimes called “the LORD.” So when Moses refers to “God” and Aristotle refers to “God” are they referring to the same being?

Well first of all, neither Aristotle nor Moses wrote in English, so in the original autographs, the Germanic word “God” naturally doesn’t appear.

The word translated as such in Metaphysics is the Greek “θεός.” The word translated as such in Exodus is the Hebrew “אֵל,” and the word translated as “the LORD” is the Hebrew “יַהְוֶה.” Since the words are different, what cause have we to believe that θεός on the one hand and “אֵל/יַהְוֶה” on the other refer to the same being?

Prima facie, it appears that Moses’ “יַהְוֶה” is not compatible with Aristotle’s “θεός.” The Israelite god יַהְוֶה is not timeless, changeless, passionless, immaterial, nor is he all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-good2. How could these terms describe a god who descends physically to earth to show Moses his “back parts,” and to argue face to face with Moses and be bested in argument by him?

When Patrick says it is strange for one to think much about God, while not being interested in religion, which talks about God, I think the whole framing is wrong. If I was convinced of the existence of Aristotle’s θεός, my instinct would not be to run to Exodus to see what it says about θεός. Because Exodus manifestly does not say anything about θεός, it talks about a very different being, a capricious Levantine sky-god called “יַהְוֶה.” It would make as much sense as running to the Iliad to see what it says about God.

But the Iliad doesn’t talk about God, right? It talks about Ζεύς. Except, sometimes the Iliad does call him θεός. For all that Ζεύς of the Iliad seems as incompatible with Aristotle’s θεός as does Moses’ יַהְוֶה, there is at least a linguistic correspondence that does not exist in the Israelite case.

If God is Aristotle’s θεός, then Moses does not talk about God, he talks about something else called יַהְוֶה — Yahweh.

Now if I had prior reason to believe that Yahweh and God should be identified, I could work some eisegetical magic to force them into compliance. I could say that his argument with Moses is not really a real argument, because God cannot have his mind changed, so when Yahweh has his mind changed, then we know it cannot be meant literally, because God = Yahweh. I could say that when Moses talks about Yahweh’s “back parts,” this is merely metaphor or analogy for the merest part of God’s glory.

If I was so inclined I could run the same harmonization on the Iliad, to reconcile God and Ζεύς. Indeed, some pagans did so.

There are all motivated harmonizations which presuppose the conclusion that these ancient Mediterranean sky-gods ought to be identified with God. I submit that there is no good reason for such an identification.

But perhaps there is good reason to identify Yahweh with God? After all, people have done it for a long time.

There is a certain narrative, which goes something like this:

Yahweh, as described in the scriptures, is radically unlike the “gods of the nations.” He is no Zeus, no Ba’al or Marduk or Thor. So it goes, these heathen gods are capricious, limited, fallible creatures, really more like super-charged human beings than anything. Meanwhile, Yahweh is utterly singular other; transcendent, perfectly good, all-knowing, all-powerful, immaterial, the works.

The Israelites had their stories describing this god that was like no other god. And when they came into contact with the Greeks and their philosophy, they found that, through reason alone, the Greek thinkers had derived the existence of a Supreme Being who had these very same qualities as the god they already adored. What they had already believed by faith was confirmed through reason.

By the same token, the Greeks had groped their way toward an understanding of the Supreme Being — all-powerful, all-knowing, absolutely singular, ultimate, immaterial, and transcendent. Very much unlike their own murderous, tempestuous, philandering gods. When they came into contact with the Jews and Christians, they realized that these people had scriptures that described such a being already, not derived through natural reason, but revealed directly from Heaven.

So the faith of Jerusalem and the philosophy of Athens snapped together like two puzzle pieces.

This is, bluntly, false top to bottom.

What really happened, more or less, is this:

The Israelites had stories of this god, Yahweh. They worshipped him because he was the god of their fathers, who was supposed to have shepherded their people since time immemorial. This god was not much different from the gods of the peoples that surrounded them. In the stories they told, Yahweh was a volatile, passionate god. He sometimes lied, sometimes lost his temper, sometimes failed or fell short. He was a god with a body that could walk and eat. A warlike god who, like his divine peers, enjoyed the smell of burning flesh and burning cities.

Greek culture diffused through the near east in the wake of Alexander’s conquests. The Jews came into contact with Hellenistic philosophy. They — the more cosmopolitan set, anyway — were deeply impressed with the learning of the Greeks. And the Greeks had much to say about θεός, or God. They said that he was transcendent and perfect, changeless, immaterial, all-powerful, without passions or defects. Those intellectually inclined Jews accepted this picture. But they also believed in Yahweh, not because of any argument or philosophy, but because he was the god of their fathers. If Yahweh was the greatest of the gods, and the θεός of the Greek philosophers was also the supreme god, then they had to be the same being. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, the word θεός was used to translate אֵל (El), which of course the translators took to refer to יַהְוֶה. So men like Philo set themselves to identifying Yahweh and God. This was not done because there was anything inherent in the scriptural description of Yahweh or the philosophical description of God that suggested they ought to be identified or were even compatible. It was done because they were committed to believing in both, because of ancestral faith on the one hand and because of reason on the other. Forsaking one was not an option, so they had to be identified.

To reiterate, there was nothing about Yahweh that suggested he ought to be identified with θεός of the philosophers. He was not a “better fit” than was Zeus (who was, in fact, also identified with the philosophers’ θεός by many Greeks) or Ba’al or Amun. The identification was a necessary reconciliation of clashing religious and intellectual commitments.

By the time Jesus came along, there was already a tradition of identifying Yahweh with θεός, same as the Greeks and Egyptians had done with their favorite chief deities. So Christians inherited this project of accommodation from the Jews. They refined and developed it, and it reached its apex with thinkers like Aquinas.

Hopefully my thinking is somewhat clear. Not only do I not view “bare” philosophical theism as implying or suggesting Christianity, I view the two as almost orthogonal. If we establish God exists, there is yet no reason to identify him with Yahweh of the Jews and the Christians. Unless one has some independent reason to think that Yahweh exists and that this identification should be made. The identification is not a natural fit, but rather Frankenstein stitchwork.

The only reason so many do seek to identify Yahweh and God is because they are unconsciously thinking in a centuries’ long tradition which has taken that identification for granted. But that identification only came about, not because anything in the description of Yahweh or God demanded identification, but because certain persons had independent reasons to believe in both, and were thus obliged to make the identification.

3. If God exists, should we expect something like Christianity?

Patrick says something else interesting:

I am not just a theist but a classical theist who subscribes, rather enthusiastically, to a particularly rich—and particularly neo-Platonic—way of looking at the world. This worldview, because of its commitments, builds certain anticipations, as it were. The second is that Christianity, and in particular Catholicism, connects quite fittingly with this paradigm—in certain respects even seems like its natural completion, the fulfillment of those anticipations, if you like—without which the whole story feels worryingly incomplete.

Alex said something similar in the replies to my original post:

I think that, once you believe in God, it seems likely, and even necessary, that that God would reveal himself to his creation in some way. At that point, it becomes a question of which revelation claim is the most plausible. I’m a Christian, so obviously I think that its revelation claim is by far the most plausible. But in any case I suspect that’s why there are so few “bare theists.” Deism just seems pretty unlikely once you’ve decided that an all-good, all-powerful being exists.

A common idea here: if God exists, we might expect him to reveal himself. And that expectation is plausibly met in Christianity.

First, it’s unclear to me what “divine revelation” even really means. The distinction between what can be known about God through “revelation” and what can be known about him through “reason” seems to me to be largely arbitrary. Usually, divine revelation is defined as that which we could not have known by natural reason (though after the fact, we may be able to see through natural reason why the revealed truth is true, or at least plausible).

But that which can be known about God through reason seems to me a form of revelation in itself. After all, God did not have to endow us with rational faculties such that we could formulate and comprehend philosophical/logical arguments for his existence or attributes. Indeed, many people probably cannot formulate or comprehend the arguments. That God chose to order reality in such a way these arguments could be made, understood, and accepted is revelation of a kind. One can imagine other things that might plausibly be divine revelation. If all goodness flows from God, then the various good things we experience (friendship, romance, sensual beauty, intellectual beauty) are themselves a form of divine revelation. Because, after all, God did not have to give us these things.

A Christian will have to admit that, whatever God has revealed to us through prophets and apostles, he could have revealed more to us if he so chose. To give one trivial but famous example, nowhere in the gospels are we told what Jesus was up to between his eventful childhood and the start of his ministry.3 If God had wanted to, he could have given us a detailed history of those years, but for whatever reason, he didn’t see fit to do so.

So the question is really not “did God reveal himself or no?” The answer to that question, granting his existence, is definitely yes. The real question is, “in what way did God reveal himself?”

If Christianity4 is false, it is not the case that God has not revealed himself, it is merely the case that he has not revealed himself in a particular way.

Framed that way, the objection is much weaker:

If God exists, it seems likely he would reveal himself in the way Christianity says he has

But that doesn’t seem likely at all. Unless we have some independent reason to believe — beyond the claims of Christianity — that God might be likely to reveal himself in such a way, and I don’t think we do.

A Christian might say that the things I’ve mentioned — human intimacy, natural beauty, and all the goodness of the world in general — may indeed count as a kind of revelation, but that, in Christianity, he has revealed himself to us more fully still.

The claim, as I take it, is that if Christianity is true, God has revealed himself to us in a way that is more satisfying and more complete than would be the case if Christianity was not true.

Or perhaps, worded differently, there are certain spiritual expectations and/or needs that would be fulfilled if Christianity is true, but unfulfilled if it were not.

But why think this? It’s hard for me to think of any aspect of Christianity that is an apparent fulfillment of some otherwise unfulfilled need or expectation, unless you assume a priori that Christianity or something like it is true. So for example, we are told the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus was necessary, or at least fitting, to save us from our sins. But unless we assume the Christian framework to begin with, we have no reason to believe there is even such a thing as “sin” that we need to be saved from.5

Or take the example of the Mass, which Catholic answers tells us is a unique opportunity to encounter God that is not available anywhere else. And if Catholicism is true, then the Mass does indeed present a unique opportunity to encounter God which would be unavailable outside the Catholic Church . But if Catholicism is not true, then Mass presents no such thing, it is an empty performance for a nonexistent deity.

Imagine if I told you I’d had a revelation from God. Turns out, he’s not a Trinity, but a Quadrinity. There’s actually a fourth person of the Godhead. We’ll just call him “IV” for short. The religion he suggests is called IVianity. So we have to revise the Nicene Creed to refer to “The Father, The Son, the Holy Spirit, and IV.” We have to baptize in the name of “The Father, The Son, the Holy Spirit, and IV.” It’s not clear what IV does exactly, but he’s definitely up there. Everything else is pretty much the same. Jesus is still God the Son, he still incarnated and died on a cross for our sins, is still returning to judge the world…

I don’t actually have an argument for this claim, but I tell you, a Christian, “look, if God exists, isn’t it plausible at least that he has revealed himself to us?”

You say, “What do you mean? God has revealed himself to us through Christianity!”

I say, “Yes, but in IVianity, we have the fullness of God’s revelation.”

You say, “but Christianity is the fullness of God’s revelation. This IV nonsense doesn’t actually add anything unless I grant your assumption that IV exists to begin with.”

In a private discussion, Alex summed up his argument like this:

1) If God exists, then he created beings capable of personal, reciprocal and intellectual relationship.
2) If God created beings capable of personal, reciprocal and intellectual relationship, then it is plausible that He seeks to have a relationship like that with those beings (us).
3) If it is plausible that He seeks to have a relationship like that with those beings (us), then that adds evidence to the claims of any religion that claims that God has, in fact, sought that relationship with us.
4) If that adds evidence to the claims of any religion that claims that God has, in fact, sought that relationship with us, then you should seriously examine those claims.
Therefore, you should seriously examine those claims.

As you may expect, point 3 is where I object. There seems to be an unspoken premise: if Christianity6 is true, then God has sought a personal, reciprocal and intellectual relationship with us, and if Christianity is not true, then God has not sought a personal, reciprocal and intellectual relationship with us, or at least is less likely to have done so.

But I reject that. Even if Christianity is untrue, I see no reason why the goodness of the world, and the exercise of our intellectual and emotional faculties, would not in and of themselves represent God seeking a personal, reciprocal, and intellectual relationship with us, nor why it would represent a lesser or somehow impoverished relationship with the divine than that posited by Christianity. It’s true, there would be no genuine prophets, no genuine scripture, no genuine priests or temples. But I contend we have no reason to think that God seeking a relationship with us would entail prophets, scripture, priests, or temples. Nor that a world in which God has spoken to us through prophets, scripture, priests, or temples is necessarily one in which he has spoken to us more fully or more intimately than a world in which he has spoken to us through natural beauty and goodness. Anymore than the world where IVianity is true would be a world where God is seeking a fuller and more intimate relationship with us than the world where Christianity is true.

Now, Alex says that because Christianity claims that God has sought a a personal, reciprocal and intellectual relationship with us, we should investigate its claims. I agree. We should investigate all sorts of things.

But does Christianity claim that God has sought a personal, reciprocal, and intellectual relationship with us?

Now we loop back around to section two, and all the confusion, conflation, and distinction between God, θεός, אֵל, and יַהְוֶה. When Christianity claims that God wants a personal, reciprocal, and intellectual relationship with us, to which of the foregoing does it refer, Aristotle’s θεός, or Moses’ יַהְוֶה? Well, the Christian would say, they are one and the same.

But as we have seen, the identification of θεός and יַהְוֶה is purely accidental, unmotivated by anything except the conviction, prior to any rational consideration, that יַהְוֶה exists, and that to avoid giving up belief in יַהְוֶה, he must be identified with θεός.

All of the particulars of Christianity — that which differentiates it from any other belief system — refer to יַהְוֶה, not θεός. We are told that יַהְוֶה made the world, that he brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and that he raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And then we are told, “Oh, and by the way, יַהְוֶה = θεός.” But this is an artificial bolt-on. We have no real reason to accept the equation. That being the case, weird as it sounds, it is questionable whether Christianity talks about God at all, anymore than did the religions of the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Norse.

I didn’t crawl out of a pond or swing down from a tree;

Adam is my ancestor and not a chimpanzee!

God created everything, in six days he was through;

So the Big Bang Theory’s just a dud, and the million years are too!”

— Buddy Davis, “I Don’t Believe in Evolution”

About a month ago I wrote an article called “Creationists are right, therefore Christianity is false.” The basic argument was that when creationists claim that Genesis teaches that the earth was created a couple of thousand years ago, that human beings and animals were formed in their present states by the direct action of Yahweh rather than evolving from earlier lifeforms, and that there was a massive global deluge about 2,000 years after that, they’re completely correct. And obviously, if your supposedly-inspired Scripture teaches a bunch of falsehoods about the origins and nature of life and the universe and about recent history, that’s a pretty big problem.

I got some substantive pushback from Christian writer Michael, who runs the newsletter “Philaletheia,” and more recently from Catholic substacker Ethan Muse. My essay was further referred to in this essay by a gentleman named Ash, which approached the question of Genesis’ historicity from a Jewish perspective.

I focused on the Flood in particular, for the sake of brevity, but the thrust of the argument applies just as well to the Creation Week, or the Tower of Babel. And that primary argument was that no Christian interpreter before the modern era interpreted these stories as anything but real, true history. The conclusion was that the accommodations made by later Christians (e.g, that the flood was regional) are purely ad hoc, unjustified moves meant to rescue Scripture from falsification, and these ad hoc moves should cost Christianity a lot of probability points.

All three of the people above conceded that non-literal interpretations of the Primeval History1 have been, at best, in the decided minority through history. Nevertheless, they bite the bullet that Genesis 1-11 should be interpreted in a non-literal fashion, and that the literalistic readings2 which have predominated through history are simply wrong.

Michael and Ash both made the points that Genesis 1-11 belongs in the genre of myth. The purpose of these texts, then, is not to represent literal history, but to make broader theological, social, and political points, such as establishing the sovereignty of God, his relationship with mankind, and perhaps responding to the myths of rival cultures like the Babylonians. Ethan referred to the work of John H. Walton, whose basic argument is that the Creation account is concerned with functional ontology (that is, what role things have been appointed to play in the cosmos), rather than material ontology (that is, how the material existence of things was brought about.)

So what to make of these arguments?

1. True myths

“Genesis is myth, not history” is not really the escape hatch it appears to be at first glance. Of course, “myth” and “history” are not categories in which the author(s) of Genesis thought. These are modern categories imposed upon ancient text to facilitate study. It is probably the case that most Biblical scholars would categorize the Primeval History as “myth.” But what does that actually mean? “Myth” does not mean “something that didn’t happen.”

In his recent commentary on Genesis, Ronald Hendel identifies four functions of myths: explanation/etiology, legitimation/orientation, sacred narrative, and repetition.

Legitimation/orientation, do the work of “grounding social and religious institutions in the order of creation.”3 As sacred narrative, myths “describe the shape of reality and prescribe the right position toward it.”4 As repetition, myth “projects the world backward into the era of origins, which it then reconstitutes, in fragmented form, in the present.”

But it’s the first function that we’re interested in: etiology, which “explains a phenomenon by explaining what caused it.”5 Genesis explains:

The daily cycle of light and darkness (i.e., the divisions of time)

The spatial domains of sky, land, and sea (i.e., the divisions of space)

The heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and stars)

The kinds of living things (plants and animals)

Food (vegetarian and carnivore) and food laws

Religious practices and rites (altars, prayer, sacrifice)

Human lifespan

The rainbow

Wine

The multiplicity of languages and peoples6

An etiology is supposed to satisfy human curiosity about a real feature of the world in a pre-scientific age. An etiology that did not happen is a worthless one, because it leaves that curiosity unsatisfied. A real feature of the world cannot be explained by a fictional cause. If we suppose that the author(s) put these etiologies to paper believing they had not really taken place, then we suppose they put them to paper for no reason at all, since they would thus fail to fulfill the function of etiologies.

If the author(s) of Genesis did not believe that the reason for the diversity of human language was the dispersion of peoples at Babel, why did they write it down? Did he believe the diversity of human language was actually due to some other reason? If so, why did he not write that down, instead? Did he take a position of agnosticism on the matter, acknowledging he simply didn’t know the reason for the diversity of human language? If so, why write down a false story they knew to be false? A false story, again, explains nothing.

The obvious answer is that they wrote down the story of the Tower of Babel because they believed it was the cause for the real diversity of human language, and it could only have been the cause of a real diversity if it had really taken place.

Hendel says that, “From the standpoint of modern science, most or all of the etiologies in Genesis 1–11 belong to what [Bernard de] Fontenelle calls the history of error. None of the explanations listed above is plausible in the modern age.”7

He chides those who “still zealously affirm the explanations of Genesis 1–11 and reject the explanations of science,” as well as those who “reject Genesis 1–11 as a farrago of falsehood,” because “myths do more than explain,” and “the model of myth as explanation is necessary but insufficient. Myths, whether true or false, are more than explanations.”

True, but for present purposes, irrelevant. The other three functions of myth are, after all, unfalsifiable. We are interested in whether Genesis teaches falsehoods about the natural world.

Genesis is indeed myth (at least, some of it), and one of the functions of myth is to explain various features of the natural world. The explanations Genesis gives for those various features have all been falsified a hundred times over. So Genesis teaches falsehoods about the natural world.

In his earlier and more popular-level book The Book of Genesis: A Biography, which is a history of Genesis’ reception, Hendel goes a little further. Far from being unconcerned with the nature of material reality, far from the insistence of many apologists that “the Bible is not a science book,”8 “To the extent that [the account] is an analytical and descriptive model of the cosmos, we may call Genesis 1 a work of ancient science,” though of course, “it is not compatible with modern science.”9 So maybe we can even commend the author for giving it his best go with the information available to him at the time. But it was only his best go, and so the account he produced was, and is wrong. It does not lie, because there was no intention to deceive, but it nevertheless still teaches untrue things.

Old Testament scholar John Day is blunt in his book. From Creation to Babel, saying “Contrary to what is often said by some popular apologists, there is no reason to doubt that the original writer of Genesis 1 intended his account to be taken literally,” and that, “there can be no doubt, if we follow the Priestly and general biblical chronology, that the world is envisaged as having been created about 6,000 years ago.”10

The date of Creation is, of course, calculated by the ages of the men in Adam’s generations. Late Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham, in his commentary on Genesis 1-11, says that

the problems posed by [the ages of the patriarchs] are formidable for anyone who wishes to relate them to history. The longevity of these patriarchs is unparalleled in modern times, while the date for the creation of Adam (ca. 4004 B .C .) implied by their genealogy and the subsequent data (e.g., 11:10–26) in Genesis is hard to correlate with archeological discoveries about the origins of mankind and his civilization.

He considers and dismisses many proposed solutions, such as the theory that there are unidentified gaps between various patriarchs, or that the ages are symbolic. But Wenham concludes,

If they are symbolic, it is not clear what they symbolize. If they are to be taken literally, we are left with the historical problems with which we began.11

This is only troublesome if, like Wenham, one is a believer who needs to rescue the text from error. Without presuming the inspiration of scripture, the second horn of Wenham’s dilemma need not bother us at all. The ages are not symbolic, they are literal, and their literal accounting demonstrates the account to be false.

Moreover, Wenham affirms that,

The genealogical framework of [Chapter 4] as well as the introductory formula in 2:4 which covers 2:4–4:26 shows that the editor considers his account protohistorical: he is describing real individuals from the primeval past whose actions are significant for all mankind.12

Mark S. Smith, perhaps the chief scholar of the Old Testament currently working, answers the question of whether Genesis is “myth” thusly:

Yes and no. From the perspective of its content, it is certainly very mythic. At the same time, the issue is complicated by its position (and perhaps also by its overall lack of anthropomorphism). It is not a self-standing narrative. Its place as the head of Genesis as well as its label as “generations of Heaven and Earth” (in 2:4a) shows an effort to link it to historical time.

Moreover,

We might say that religious readers who view the Bible as God’s inerrant word and as Genesis 1 as historically true follow the view that the priestly tradition itself intended.13

So defining the Primeval History as “myth” does not rescue it. When someone suggests that Genesis is myth, not history, we imagine a scribe sitting down and thinking to himself, “ah, today I shall write not history, but myth,” as if he was thinking in those categories. As if, had he so chosen, he could have instead written a rigorous work of history in compliance with the standards of modern academia. But of course “myth” just is the word we use for the stories pre-modern peoples told about their gods and the origins of the world they lived in. The fact that those stories were the best they had doesn’t excuse them from falsification, it just means that the best they had wasn’t good enough, which is why they were wrong.

It reminds me of a parallel strategy used to defend the contradictions and apparent historical inaccuracies in the gospels. Apologists like Michael Licona will point out that it was completely routine for Greco-Roman biographers to alter details, shuffle events, and even to construct entire speeches and place them in the mouths of historical figures, and thus we should not penalize the gospels for adhering to standard practice of the day. But something being standard practice doesn’t make it good practice. If the defense of the evangelists is that all the other ancient authors were also playing fast and loose with the facts, that shouldn’t strengthen our confidence in the evangelists, it should weaken our confidence in everybody else.

One move here is to say that, yes, Genesis presents a false ancient cosmology and a false prehistory, but it doesn’t really matter, because these falsehoods are incidental to the primary purpose of the text, which is to communicate deeper truths about God, Creation, mankind, and so on.

So, in his own recent Genesis commentary, Jan Christian Gertz writes,

Needless to say, the authors of the Priestly Creation account drew on the knowledge of their time concerning natural science. Like their contemporaries in Ionia or Mesopotamia, they sought to mediate this through preexisting mythological ideas. However, their knowledge of natural science has proven without a shadow of a doubt to have been a product of their time and has been overtaken by the modern natural sciences – which are also on their part a product of their time. At first sight, this inescapable conclusion is difficult to reconcile with the normative claim of the biblical texts in their current religious use. Thus, it is easy to explain why supporters of Creationism (or its variants, such as Intelligent Design) have sought to position the biblical natural science against modern geology and evolutionary biology. The Priestly Writing is based on the knowledge of natural science from its time and successfully endeavors to mediate it. Yet, it is for exactly this reason that the invocation of timeless, revelatory knowledge for the sake of upholding outdated, ancient understandings of natural science against the insights of modern natural sciences actually contradicts the intent of the Priestly Writing itself. Nor can the Priestly Writing be used to justify using the biblical texts in order to crusade against scientific explanations of the origin of the world and challenge them despite better insights. On the other hand, those who declare the biblical claims about the world as God’s Creation to be obsolete in light of modern understandings of the scientific errors in Gen 1:1–2:3 miss the fact that the Priestly Writing is not primarily about cosmology (otherwise, the underworld and the heavens above the firmament would not be missing from the narrative). Instead, it is an interpretation of the living, experienceable world that draws on contemporary natural science. In this respect, the Priestly Creation account is more “enlightened” than many of its modern critics. Although the professional distinction between explaining the world and interpreting it should be expected for antiquity only rudimentarily at best, it is nevertheless present in its basic form. The Priestly Writing does not demand any sacrifice of rationality or the renunciation of a progressive, scientific theorizing or explanation of the world. Rather, it demonstrates how a world understood through natural history can be interpreted through the idea of the universality and transcendence of God.14

Though this is an ostensibly “secular” academic work published by a secular press, Gertz nonetheless writes here from a confessional standpoint, taking as a given that the Creation account is in fact “timeless, revelatory knowledge.” The basic argument here is that while the the account may presume a false cosmology, its primary concern is not that cosmology, but rather the transcendence and power of God.

We could maybe sum up the argument as, “God created the firmament, therefore he is sovereign.” So the goal of the argument is to establish the sovereignty of God, not to establish the reality of the firmament, and therefore it’s unfair to charge Genesis with obsolescence or falsehood, because while science may have disproven the reality of the firmament, it certainly hasn’t proven God is not sovereign.

The unspoken implication here is that the Genesis account could only be rightly accused of falsehood if it was a blunt series of false statements about the world recounted for the sake of recounting, without any theological or ideological intent or overlay.

But if you assert a falsehood in support of a broader (and conveniently unfalsifiable) point, you’ve still asserted a falsehood. The problem remains untouched. It may be that Genesis can tell us other interesting, and perhaps true or at least unfalsifiable things, but that does not touch the fact that it makes claims about the world which are empirically disprovable and have been empirically disproven.

2. On John H. Walton’s non-functional argument

The work of Old Testament scholar John H. Walton is very popular with Christians who reject Creationism but nevertheless wish to rescue Genesis from modern science. Walton has an interesting strategy: He wants us to stop thinking in terms of “material ontology,” which is the way we tend to think about things in the modern west. Material ontology is concerned with the actual material origin and constitution of things. On the other hand, the ancients — including the Israelites — were unconcerned with material ontology, but quite concerned with what Walton calls “function ontology.” In his own words,

people in the ancient world believed that something existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its having a function in an ordered system. Here I do not refer to an ordered system in scientific terms, but an ordered system in human terms, that is, in relation to society and culture. In this sort of functional ontology, the sun does not exist by virtue of its material properties, or even by its function as a burning ball of gas. Rather it exists by virtue of the role that it has in its sphere of existence, particularly in the way that it functions for humankind and human society. In theory, this way of thinking could result in something being included in the “existent” category in a material way, but still considered in the “nonexistent” category in functional terms (see the illustration of the restaurant mentioned above). In a functional ontology, to bring something into existence would require giving it a function or a role in an ordered system, rather than giving it material properties. Consequently, something could be manufactured physically but still not “exist” if it has not become functional.15

Through the book, Walton proceeds to demonstrate that the Genesis author(s) did not believe in creation ex nihilo, which is true enough but irrelevant. He also demonstrates that the Genesis author(s) did have a strong interest in explaining the functions of the created things and beings. But as for the idea that they were unconcerned with material ontology, he doesn’t even really make that argument, he just sort of assumes it, as if the Israelites could not have been interested in both.

Walton makes much out of the Hebrew word “bārā,” usually translated as “create,” and the fact that it is rarely if ever used to indicate what we would call “material” creation. But then there is the word “ʿāśâ,” which is also used in the Creation account. Now, “ʿāśâ” is often used through the OT to indicate material creation (e.g building an altar, making clothes), but Walton insists that it doesn’t HAVE to mean material creation, because it can also mean “to do” or “to act.” I can’t read Hebrew, but as far as I can tell, there is no Hebrew word that exclusively refers to material creation 100% of the time. Certainly in English, I do not believe there is such a word. “Make, create, form, shape, spawn, fashion, forge, build, develop, construct” — all of these words can be used for other than physical, material creation. Perhaps it is different in Hebrew, but I have not seen any evidence to that effect.

Moreover, ʿāśâ appears to be the most commonly used word through the OT for what we would call “material creation.” So one has to ask if there is a more likely word for the author(s) to select if “material creation” is in mind? Walton’s argument shades into unfalsifiablity. If there is no word that exclusively 100% of the time means “material creation,” then no matter what word the author(s) used, Walton can jump in and say, “but it doesn’t have to refer to material creation!” One wonders, if the author had wanted to refer to material origins, what word Walton thinks he should have picked.

And even in the face of all that, this is largely besides the point. Let us take Walton’s “functional” approach as correct. In Genesis 1:16, God makes “two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.” So we’re not interested in what the sun and moon are made of, or whether they were made out of preexisting matter. This verse merely describes God establishing the functions of the sun and moon in the cosmos.

So what? To “establish the function” of the moon is the same thing as creating the moon, because the moon fulfills its function (lighting the night), by virtue of being the moon. If the moon was, prior to this moment of “functional creation,” not lighting the night, then that must mean the moon was not there. Perhaps the formless matter from which God created it was there, or perhaps he just popped it into existence fully formed, but in either case, prior to the establishment of its function, there could have been no moon.

Of course, I can’t read Hebrew. I’m just some guy on substack with an axe to grind. But far as I can tell his argument has been received pretty poorly by his fellow Old Testament scholars. David T. Tsumura, cited in The Lost World of Genesis One, wrote a rather scathing review of Walton’s work, saying that16

Walton’s view does not overlap with mine at all. He has simply used a part of my statement arbitrarily.

He also calls Walton’s reference to his argument a “misuse,” and notes,

the ancients were certainly concerned with the material origins of the world, though their cognitive environment and their linguistic descriptions were different from those of the moderns

Professors Nathan Mastnjak and Dennis Pardee say,

It appears that Walton has illegitimately concluded that since the ancients showed little interest in the origins of matter, they were entirely uninterested, or only secondarily interested, in the realm of the material. A more nuanced view of the relationship between material and function for these ancient cognitive environments would have been desirable.17

And on a more specific point,

Walton’s treatment of the verb ʿāśâ, ‘to make, do’, also merits a brief remark. While he correctly asserts that as well as having the sense of ‘to make an object’, this verb can also mean ‘to do an activity’, he ignores the fact that the latter is only possible when the direct object of the verb is actually an activity, such as melakah, ‘work’. In the course of this discussion, Walton’s avoidance of translating verses like Exod. 20:11, where he claims ʿāśâ must mean ‘do’ rather than ‘make’, disguises the weakness of the argument. The preference among most interpreters for ‘made’ here reflects the fact that the entities listed as the direct object of the verb, ‘the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them’, cannot be construed as activities.

Despite finding Walton’s thesis persuasive insofar as it establishes an interest in functional ontology, Kyle Greenwood cautions that,

one may question whether the Genesis 1 account of creation is purely functional, or if it may entail both functional and material ontology. For example, although fish, birds, animals, and humans were created for a specific purpose, it is hard to envision their function without the presence of the material. Similarly, the lights and the firmament seem to be created as physical properties. In other words, while W. may be accurate in his assessment of the priority of functional creation, it is important to recognize that the text is also interested in the physical formation of many of these same components.18

The late Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham, in his brief volume Rethinking Genesis 1-11, says

While it is certainly true that some of the divine fiats in Genesis institute the active roles of light, the land, the heavenly bodies, and so forth, it would seem to be going too far to argue that no material creation was involved. The creation of the firmament, plants, and animals, and even man…definitely seems to involve a divine manufacturing process.19

In the book earlier cited, John Day takes the time to critique Walton specifically. He is worth quoting in full:

John Walton has recently argued that Gen. 1.1–2.4a is not to be understood as an account of the creation of the material universe but rather as a narrative setting out the functions of the various aspects of creation, usually for the benefit of humanity. Moreover, he assumes that the account understands the world to be a cosmic temple, with God’s resting on the seventh day implying his taking up residence in his temple. However, although Walton is right to emphasize that there is a functional element in the narrative, he is certainly wrong to understand it wholly in such terms, and it is quite unnatural to deny that Genesis 1 gives us an account of the creation of the material universe. That is the only natural way of taking the text, as is shown by the fact that this is the way all other interpreters have read it over the past two thousand years. For example, we cannot envisage the description of the vegetation on the third day as merely functional, since Gen. 1.11 declares, ‘let the earth put forth vegetation’, which can only refer to its creation, and it is only on the parallel sixth day (Gen. 1.29-30) that its function as food for humanity and animals is declared. Exodus 20.11 also provides a problem for Walton in that it states that God made (ʿāśâ) the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them in six days, since ʿāśâ cannot here mean ‘do’, as Walton claims. Finally, the idea that the world is here depicted as a cosmic temple is something that Walton has read into Gen. 1.1–2.4a20

None of the more recent Genesis commentaries I’ve consulted make use of Walton’s framework, and as far as I can tell it has had little to no impact on Old Testament scholarship.

3. The interpretative history

In my initial post, focusing on the Flood specifically, I made the point that I couldn’t find a single Church Father who dissented from the view that the Flood was global. This is not to say that allegorizing Genesis was unknown prior to the present age. But it is all but unheard of to find an interpreter who takes the allegorical sense in place of the literal sense, rather than alongside it. So of course the Ark is a type of Christ, but that does not mean there was no Noah or no Ark.

There was Philo, who rejected the six-day Creation on the grounds that “it is natural that God should do everything at once, not merely by uttering a command, but even thinking it.”21 Augustine followed him on that. But neither projected an age of the earth beyond a few thousand years or rejected a global flood, and Jewish or Christian interpreters who do either are, if not nonexistent, vanishingly rare. Even Josephus, a mostly sober historian, wrote of the Flood and the generations of Adam as history. The Book of Jubilees, written sometime in the second century BC, meticulously chronicles history from the time of Adam down to the time of the Exodus, firmly within historical time, according to a system of “Jubilees of Years” (sets of 49 years). At the conclusion of the work, which pretends to have been written in Moses’ days, we are told “there are forty-nine jubilees from the days of Adam until this day,” which places creation at about 3,800 BC.22 The first century Assumption of Moses tells us that Moses died “two thousand five hundred years from the Creation of the world,” which would put said creation at about 3,900 BC, just a little off from Ussher’s famous chronology.23

As usual, the good folks at Answers in Genesis have done the heavy lifting in collecting citations from the Church Fathers relevant to the Age of the Earth.24 I shall reproduce some of the quotes here:

Irenaeus:

For in six days as the world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded. For that day of the Lord is a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year

Theophilius of Antioch:

All the years from the creation of the world [to Theophilus’s day] amount to a total of 5,698 years.

Lactantius:

Therefore let the philosophers, who enumerate thousands of ages from the beginning of the world, know that the six thousandth year is not yet completed

Origen:

After this, secretly wishing to attack the Mosaic cosmogony that the world is not yet ten thousand years old, but is much less than this, Celsus agrees with those who say the world is uncreated, although he hides his real intention.

And of course, St. Augustine:

Unbelievers are also deceived by false documents which ascribe to history many thousand years, although we can calculate from Sacred Scripture that not 6,000 years have passed since the creation of man

The Catholic “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ,” traditionally chanted on Christmas Eve, declares that Christ was born “In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world.”25 In 1994 this was changed to “unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth.”26

So one has to ask, if Genesis was not to be taken as recounting true events that really happened in the past, when was this forgotten? There is no contemporary witness to the initial reception of the Genesis text, whose final redaction is probably to be dated to some time in the post-exilic period. But a few short centuries later, the “Primeval History” is being taken as real history. So when, between, oh, 400 BC or so and 150 BC (about the time the Book of Jubilees was composed), was the non-factual intent of the Genesis author(s) lost to history? If no one can present any evidence that this (exclusively)27 non-factual intent ever existed, then I submit we have no reason to think it did.

4. What does it even mean to “say” something anyway?

In an infamous interview, Jordan Peterson he answered the fairly straightforward question “do you believe in God?” by demanding definitions for the words “do,” “you,” “believe,” and “God.”

These approaches to Genesis strike me similarly. “Does Genesis say the earth is 6,000 years old?”

“What do you mean by ‘does’ and what do you mean by ‘Genesis’ and what do you mean by ‘say’ and what do you mean by ‘the’ and what do you mean by ‘earth’ and what do you mean by ‘is’ and what do you mean by ‘6,000’ and what do you mean by ‘years’ and what do you mean by ‘old’?”

Will we deny that ancient Israelites cared about truth or falsehood at all? That seems unlikely. Even animals do. If you told an ancient Israelite that his father was dead when in fact he wasn’t, he would correct you that, no, his father was still alive. If you stole an ancient Israelite’s sheep do you think he’d shrug and say, “eh, sheep, no sheep, what’s the difference really?” Of course the Israelites could distinguish between truth and falsehood in their daily lives. You don’t have to know anything about ancient Israel to know that, except that it was a nation composed of human beings.

So perhaps they had a care for such a distinction in their daily lives, but they did not extend such a care into the realm of history. The Israelite might think there was a difference between having a sheep and not having one, but such a concern for truth vs. falsehood didn’t extend beyond the moment of his own birth. When it came to stories of the past, he was indifferent on whether they “really” happened or not.

But I think it is pretty plain from the Bible itself that Israelites could conceive of a distinction between history that had occurred and history that had not in the same way they could conceive of a distinction between a father that was dead and one that was alive. Or the distinction having a sheep and not having a sheep. Again and again through the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh’s covenant with the Children of Israel is justified by his having “brought them out of Egypt.” Implicit here is a recognition of the distinction between Israel having come out of Egypt, and Israel not having come out of Egypt. If Yahweh had not brought Israel out of Egypt, then there would be no covenant. Precisely because it is true that Yahweh brought Israel out of Egypt, and because the contrary is not true, the covenant is justified. So we can fairly say the Israelites cared whether their ancestors had come out of Egypt or not.

Now can you object that the Israelites had a care for the distinction between “happened” and “didn’t happen” with regards to the immediate past and to recent-ish history, but that they didn’t extend this care into primeval history or “prehistory.” But as we have said, the sharp bifurcation of “myth” and “history” into separate categories is a modern imposition onto the past. Indeed, mythic elements do not disappear from the stories that even modern believers do not doubt to be “historical.” In Genesis 19, we read the infamous story of Lot and his daughters. After Yahweh destroys of the cities of the Plain, Lot’s daughters get him drunk and have sex with him. The incestuous union produces a son, “Moab,” who would go on to father the nation of the same name.28 This story has obvious mythic elements. It is an etiological polemic against a hated enemy people. And yet it is set in a time that even moderns recognize as firmly “historical.”

So what is the justification for claiming that the Israelites had no care for the distinction between “happened” and “didn’t happen” in the realm of myth/prehistory? If they appreciated such a distinction in their own lives and in the recent past, why think they ceased to appreciate it for the distant past? They recounted and wrote down etiological stories to explain various features of the world they lived in, and I submit there is no reason to think that an Israelite did not believe these stories had either happened or not happened in the same sense he believed it had either happened or not happened that his father had died or someone had stolen his sheep.

And if an author wrote down some stories, in Genesis, which he believed to have happened in that sense, then what does that mean? If the scribe sits at his table, and scratches the words “the earth is 6,000 years old” onto his tablet or his papyrus sheet29, while fully believing “the earth is 6,000 years old” in the same sense that he believes his father is still alive, then the only reasonable conclusion is that the tablet likewise “says” that the earth is 6,000 years old.

And so if we can establish by modern scientific inquiry that the world is not 6,000 years old, that there was no Great Flood, and no Tower of Babel, then Genesis “says” something that isn’t true.

If we deny that Genesis “says” these things, or insist it “says” them in some sense that doesn’t require them to be “true” in the way we understand them, we enter some kind of strange nihilism where words don’t really mean anything beyond what we need them to mean at a given moment.

5. The Eric Cartman approach to apologetics

There’s an old South Park episode where the boys are playing ninjas. They each pick a superpower for their ninja alter egos, but Cartman keeps coming up with new powers on the fly as convenient. When Kyle claims the power to see into the future, Cartman remembers that he actually has another power, he can “see into the future too, but better than Kyle.” When they insist he pick a power and stick with it he says, “I have the power to have all the powers I want.”

This is what the accommodationist approach to Genesis reminds me of. If we had discovered that the world is in fact a flat circle with a big dome on top, created about 6,000 years ago, then undoubtedly the accuracy of the Genesis account would be trumpeted from the rooftops (and to be fair, it’d be a slam-dunk). But since we discovered that none of that stuff is true, well we can just decide it doesn’t matter that Genesis got all that wrong.

The Bible, and Genesis in particular, are thus safeguarded from empirical falsification. If our knowledge of the world conflicts with the scriptural picture, we’ll just reinterpret the scripture on the fly so it doesn’t conflict anymore! Hey presto!

The Christianity I grew up with30 was very much of the “evolution is a Satanic lie” variety. When I found out that evolution is actually true, my conclusion was that Christianity is probably false. This is a very common story. It causes apologists like William Lane Craig much angst. He says,

[Young Earth Creationism] is doing tremendous harm to the Christian faith by portraying this intellectually indefensible view as essential to the truth of Christianity and of the Gospel and prevents people from coming to know Christ by erecting unnecessary obstacles in its way.31

I say, Craig is right and wrong. Right that Creationists do tremendous harm to the Christian faith. Wrong that there is a reasonable version of the Christian faith severed from Creationism.

Creationists are totally right to believe modern biology, geology, and history undermine the foundations of Christian faith. They very much do. Whatever version of the faith accommodates our modern knowledge about the natural world is not a refinement, but a strategic mutilation.

Besides calling it an “intellectual embarrassment” as he does above, I remember WLC calling Creationism “braindead,” which to me feels like calling many of my Christian relatives morons when the only difference between them and someone like Craig is they lack the intellectual flexibility to engage in these ridiculous mental gymnastics. Yeah, Young Earth Creationism is pretty ridiculous. You know what’s even more ridiculous? This:

No, Adam was not Homo heidelbergensis. The author of Genesis didn’t know what Homo heidelbergensis was. Adam was the Man formed out of dust by Yahweh in his garden in the East. That’s who Adam “was.” The hypothesis that Adam and Eve were two specimens of Homo heidelbergensis endowed by God with rational souls after millions of years of Evolution is seven-fold more absurd and risible than planting your feet and saying, “Hell yeah Adam had a pet T. Rex.”

This is the sticking point for me. Unless it can be shown that Genesis does not teach all these absurdities, then I will not even consider as a live option any faith which takes Genesis to be in some sense divinely inspired.

I think it’s quite interesting to compare Genesis to the apologist’s favorite miracle, the Resurrection of Christ. WLC won’t defend Creation 6,000 years ago, but he will happily go to bat for the Resurrection. Whether the earth was created 6,000 years ago is a claim much easier to test than whether Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. For the first, we can consult a dozen different lines of scientific evidence all leading to the conclusion that the earth is much, much older, that life did not emerge in the way or the order Genesis has it, and that there was no Flood and no Tower of Babel. It’s just indefensible. No serious person can believe it. The Resurrection of Jesus is quite different. Even on maximally charitable assumptions, the claim relies on the testimony of a handful of people who died 2,000 years ago. We cannot directly test the claim Jesus rose from the dead. If Christianity was true, we might expect its most testable claims to be the strongest, and the less testable to be those most subject to doubt. But it’s the precise opposite. The bolder and more falsifiable is the claim, the more falsified it has been.

I am California Indian on my father’s side. There is an old story of how, Prometheus-like, Coyote stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. This story may tell us interesting things about the worldview, environment, and society of the Pomo and Miwok peoples. Doubtless these stories were not told with the bare intention of recounting past events. Like all myths, they were pregnant with sociological and theological meaning. And yet, our first instinct is not to jump up and say, “Well, who’s to say that’s wrong really, you know, myths are multi-faceted and and and…” We do not hesitate to say that, whatever else can be said, those stories were simply not true. Man did not receive fire from “Coyote.” There just is no Coyote. It’s not true.

I am always a little reticent to write about philosophy because it’s an area where I am, at best, a neophyte. Nevertheless, it is interesting to me to observe how few “bare theists” there are in philosophy of religion.

Off the top of my head: Ed Feser, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Alexander Pruss, JP Moreland, Eleonore Stump, William Lane Craig, Joshua Rasmussen, Robert Koons, Peter van Inwagen, John Lennox.

Now, I’m not saying anything about the work of any of these people, mostly because I haven’t read anything by half of them, and probably haven’t understood what I have read. But you will note they are all Christians. And of course these are just “big names.” How many scores of small fry for every notable?

There are a small handful of atheist philosophers of religion, like J.H Sobel, Graham Oppy, and J.L Mackie.

I’m sure there are at least some who are “bare” theists, but no one is coming to mind off the top of my head. In the west, it seems “philosophy of religion” is close to identical with “philosophy of Christianity.”

Oftentimes, “bare theism” seems like little more than a way station on the way to the cross. Ed Feser spent a brief time as a bare theist. Philip Goff is a recent convert.1

Why might this be the case? No one except presups claims to be able to demonstrate the certain truth of Christianity without recourse to empirical evidence.

One possibility is that these philosophers are first convinced of the existence of God based on philosophical argument. And perhaps it’s the case that the evidence for Christianity is strong enough that, conditional on theism, Christianity is almost certain to be true.

Maybe you could say that Christianity is the most likely religion to be true.2 But is the evidence for Christianity really so good that, granting the existence of God, the truth of Christianity follows almost like a logical consequent? So good that bare theists are like unicorns?

As someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about the historical arguments for Christianity I am…highly skeptical to say the least. I call myself an atheist, though more properly I’m an agnostic. Still, when I evaluate arguments for Christianity I generally am happy to grant the existence of God, and to my mind, the evidence is still not nearly good enough to clear the bar. I think even if you grant a benevolent, interventionist God, the evidence for Christianity is still quite poor.3

Maybe I’m wrong about that. But I can’t shake the feeling that there should be more people who think the arguments for God are good enough to make his existence probable, and yet don’t think the evidence for Christianity is good enough to justify belief.

Shouldn’t there, moreover, be some people who think that if God exists then Christianity may be no more likely than it is if atheism is true? Say you are convinced by philosophical argument that Hell cannot possibly exist, might you not conclude then that Christianity, whose foundational scriptures and tradition teach eternal torment, must be ipso facto false, because God would never cause or permit such suffering? And yet, if someone is driven to reject Hell, it seems normally they recourse to Christian universalism rather than rejection of Christianity in toto. Or perhaps you are convinced God exists, but decide the picture of Yahweh in scripture is too crude, limited, and anthropomorphic to possibly a proper description of the Author of Creation.4 But again, there are precious few philosophers who take such a position.

Another much less charitable possibility is that many or most of these Christian philosophers believe or want to believe in Christianity first, and then formulate or adopt arguments to justify a belief held for fundamentally non-rational reasons. That still wouldn’t make them wrong necessarily. You can hold a true belief for bad reasons. And of course, at least some of these people (like Feser) were initially convinced only of bare theism, before accepting Christianity.

I don’t know how well-developed the study of philosophy of religion is in parts of the world (East Asia, the mid-east, south Asia) that are neither Christian nor post-Christian, but I would be interested to see what the scene looks like there.

Nevertheless, occasionally one comes along that manages to buck the trend, at least a little. One such is 2016’s Risen, which deals with a personal favorite topic of mine, the alleged Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The plot is inspired: our hero is the grizzled, world-weary Roman military tribune Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), posted to Judea in the service of the cynical governor Pontius Pilate. He ruthlessly enforces Roman authority upon the restive province at swordpoint.

In the opening scene, he leads a small detachment of legionaries in battle against Jewish rebels led by Barabbas himself (making good use of his pardon). The Romans win pretty handily, and after the battle a captive Barabbas is dragged before Clavius. Defiant to the end, he mocks him: “it must pain you to know that the one true god chooses us over you.” Clavius deadpans, “Not today, he didn’t,” and then sticks the rebel with his gladius.

He reports to Pilate, who doesn’t even give him a chance for a bath before he dispatches him on his next assignment — the Nazarene prophet Yeshua (Cliff Curtis), who’s been making a stir in Jerusalem these past couple of days, has finally been shut up. Permanently. He’s hanging on a cross out by Golgotha, and Pilate asks Clavius to “do him a small mercy” and break his legs.

Clavius goes and sees that it’s done. The Nazarene is taken down and buried. Another would-be Messiah taken care of.

Until three days later, when the body goes missing. Clavius is dispatched to investigate. When he gets there, he finds the body gone alright. Along with the two soldiers posted as a watch. Only the graveclothes remain. And strangely, the ropes which fastened the governors’ seal to the mouth of the tomb are not cut, but rather frayed, as if they burst.

A rumor spreads like wildfire through the city — the Nazarene has risen. Neither Pilate nor the Jewish priesthood is pleased with this development. So poor Clavius is saddled with yet another unpleasant task: track down the source of this rumor, and more importantly, find the body “before it rots.”

The rest of the movie is a detective story, as Clavius and his men hunt the mean streets of Jerusalem, kicking in doors, interrogating disciples, and all on a schedule, because the Emperor Tiberius is about to make a visit to Judea, and God(s) forbid he arrive to a province in open revolt.

Like I said, the movie is actually pretty good. Fiennes puts in a good performance as a kind of Roman Sam Spade. Firth is great as the caustic, over-it-all Pilate, and Tom Felton does fine as Clavius’ aide Lucius.

The film is not a documentary. As is standard for Jesus movies, the Roman troops stationed in Judea are depicted as actual Italian legionaries from Italy — at this stage, there was no Legion stationed permanently in the province. The nearest was in Syria to the north. Pilate’s troops would have probably been local auxiliaries, perhaps Greeks from Capernaum, and perhaps Arab and/or Samaritan elements.1 The depiction of Judea as a warzone in the 30s AD is more typical of the very early part of the century, which saw the revolts of Judas the Galilean and his sons, and the later period that culminated with the Jewish War. I’m far from an expert on Roman military equipment or Palestinian clothing in the first century, but I suspect a nerd could pick out some problems there too.

Overall, the movie has at least an authentic vibe that a lot of Jesus movies lack. Largely this is because Jesus himself is mostly absent from the movie. The filmmakers need not fear upsetting their target audience by taking too many liberties with the gospel accounts.2 The main characters are all pagans, so it’s okay to portray them as occasionally cruel, cynical, and doubtful — in other words, human. We get to see Jerusalem as an actual city of bazaars and brothels, rather than a lifeless backdrop for Christ to preach against. There are some good jokes, like when Clavius tries to bargain with Yahweh by offering to have games held and sacrifices made in his honor if he will withdraw his protection from the disciples.

Clavius’ investigation gets weirder and weirder. There are the aforementioned burst ropes at the tomb. There’s the story of the watchmen, when he finally tracks them down — that all they saw was a bright light, and all they heard was a voice like thunder — before they fled in terror. The fact that, when he interrogates the Nazarene’s disciples, they refuse to bend on their story, even when he threatens them with torturous deaths of their own. Slowly, he comes to wonder…could it be?

It’s fun, fresh, a little creepy…and then act 3 hits, and the movie falls apart. Clavius tracks the Twelve to the “upper room,” expecting to find the hiding place of Yeshua’s corpse at last — and he does find Yeshua, alive, sitting down to breakfast with his disciples.

The rest of the movie is kind of silly, as Clavius Forrest Gumps along with the Twelve through the Forty Days before the ascension, and finally bearing witness to the Ascension itself. Rudely, none of the disciples ever bothered to tell the gospel authors about this guy.

So all ambiguity is removed. Yes, Jesus really rose from the dead. Clavius, our audience surrogate, is left with no room for doubt. He gets to have a chat with the risen Christ!

There are some other things I didn’t really like about the movie. The insistence on calling Jesus “Yeshua” — something a certain brand of evangelical goes crazy for — is fine…if they hadn’t kept the Hellenized/Latinized versions of everyone elses’s names. So Jesus is “Yeshua” but Peter is not “Kephas,” John is not “Yochanan,” Mary is not “Maryam,” and so on. Instead of adding to the sense of authenticity, it’s just distracting. Moreover, the picture of the disciples is a little…cartoony. They’re all just big, lovable goofballs. There should be something of the flinty fanatic about them. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But there should be a sense that these are men living in expectation of the imminent Eschaton. They’re also too old. Especially the greying, balding, Peter, who looks like he’s in his forties, if not fifties. Jesus himself was in his early thirties. His disciples would have been even younger. Little more than boys. But the film has opted for the white-bearded sages of icon and stained glass rather than the young dreamers they must have surely been.

But my main problem is the removal of all ambiguity in the final act. That’s fine for most Jesus movies, because most Jesus movies are just adaptations of the gospels to various degrees, and the gospels do indeed leave no ambiguity that He is Risen. They were written in fact “so that you may believe.” But Risen purports to tell the story of Easter “through the eyes of an unbeliever.” And no unbeliever is supposed to have borne witness to the Risen Christ during his forty days on earth. The sense of eerie doubt cultivated in the first half of the movie is great, that, “Could it be? Maybe…but no…but…maybe?” because that is indeed what must have been the thought process of any contemporary pagan contemplating this strange new faith, and indeed what must be the thought process of any prospective convert today, because regardless of what you believe, no Christian convert today will get the chance to walk with the Risen Christ and ask him questions before he makes his decision.

So Clavius is meant to represent the unbeliever who ultimately believes in Christ, but instead of representing the doubt and uncertainty any such unbeliever must really wrestle with all the way to the grave, Risen decides to salve the conscience of its already-Christian viewers by assuring them that yes, there’s no doubt at all, it’s 100%, completely, undeniably true. Relax.

The idea of “grizzled Roman soldier investigates the Resurrection” is good enough that I kick myself for not coming up with it first.3 I would have ended the story with Clavius never seeing Jesus. He steps into the tomb, he hears the disciples’ stories, but he never sees for himself. Finish the movie at his point of decision. What choice will he make? There’s evidence, but is it enough evidence? Roll credits.

Of course, there was no real chance the director would ever take that route. Because Risen is, after all, a Christian Movie™ and Christian Movies™ are afraid of ambiguity.

Still, if Risen isn’t a great movie, it’s certainly great for its genre, and worth checking out if the perennial Resurrection debate holds any interest for you.