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Evil
Christians believe evil exists, but evil spirits?
Many Christians believe humans simply invented evil spirits to personify evil. For such people, in other words, the devil
is not a real person. In contrast, I had intimate contact with evil spirits over a period of many months, and that experience
convinces me they are as real as God.
When I claimed extraordinary encounters with God, I didn’t mention my encounters
with evil spirits. But they happened, and in fact they went on daily over roughly the latter half of the twenty-month period
of my special time with God, after my fasting but before I was drafted into the army.
Looking back, I see that my
relations with the evil spirits, whom I called rebels, were inevitable. People who open themselves to God open themselves
to spirits of all kinds. Striving to increase sensitivity to God can leave a person with heightened sensitivity to other
spirits as well, partly because the psychological process of perceiving spirits is much the same for both God and the evil
ones. There is also the unpleasant reality that people have limited tolerance for what is good. Jesus met the evil spirits
and resisted them. When I came to know them, I gave myself to them as fully as I could.
Having come to know God
in extraordinary ways over a period of a year or so, I knew I was God’s and was secure in his love. But even though I felt
elated and highly favored, the sameness of it all just flickered once in my mind, and in that instant they encroached. The
rebels.
Ever since, I have been convinced that people without knowledge of evil would be unable to tolerate heaven.
At some point just one person would feel just a touch of boredom, perhaps, and he would rebel and take others with him. Enough
people would have to rebel and experience life without God to persuade the remainder to hold back from the same fate.
So
these evil spirits at one point were God’s, but they rebelled and cannot go back now. They rejected him at the same time
they were fully intimate with him, so God can do nothing to persuade them to return. Their sin is unforgivable because they
rejected God while they were experiencing the very best that he had to offer.
I met them mostly one at a time, but
I sensed instantly in every case that each was one of many. They were very much like God. But if any characteristic of God
stands out above all others, it is his oneness. In fact I often thought of God as supremely alone and solitary, as the Only
One. No one could compare with him or compete with him. He is perfectly solitary. Not so the rebels. They are characterized
by perpetual competition, forever jostling one another for an advantage, always trying to outdo one another for personal status.
In my recollection of them this characteristic of perpetual jostling stands out above all others.
They were pleasant
companions in the sense that they knew how to please me, and in some respects they pleased me as effectively as God. In certain
respects more effectively. All the while we knew we were just using one another: I was using them to learn new kinds of
pleasure, and they were using me for both pleasure and status. In all my relations with God the feeling of permanent commitment
was foremost. In my relationships with the rebels we made the most of the moment and let the future be damned.
How
could evil spirits possibly please a man in some ways more effectively than God? Easily. By adulthood everyone knows that
rebellion and perversion can thrill and excite in a way that obeying the rules never can. Such thrills are what the evil
ones give that God cannot.
I learned a great deal from the rebels, things I could not have learned from God. For
one thing, they take great pleasure in perversion, in using people and things in unnatural ways. Although my experiences
of them were exclusively in the spiritual realm, counterparts in the physical world were fairly obvious. Among human behaviors
that give them extreme pleasure are sexual intercourse of a father with his daughter, sexual intercourse of a man with a human
corpse, and sexual intercourse of people with animals. Their all-time favorite might be human sacrifice, particularly when
parents sacrifice a child to appease some god. I can easily imagine also that they had multiple orgasms over Hitler’s treatment
of Jews and other minorities.
How do I know these things gave them pleasure? I know because, when I was with them,
from time to time they brought such things to my mind and reveled in them. No such things ever crossed my mind when I was
with God.
I cite extreme behaviors, because many things that give the rebels pleasure have counterparts among the
things that give God pleasure, and sometimes it is not possible to distinguish the two kinds of activities without going into
detail. For example, both God and the rebels enjoy having people worship them with a certain amount of ritual.
What
does it mean to say that spirits take pleasure in human activities? What happens is that spirits bond with people, and if
the bond is good, the spirits experience the feelings of the people they bond with, and the people can feel the pleasure of
the spirits. Each person is stimulated to greater pleasure and greater intimacy by sensing the pleasure of the other. This
arrangement of mutual stimulation has a potential for positive feedback that can lead to the spiritual counterpart of sexual
orgasm.
Almost all interaction of people with evil spirits has gone on under false fronts. The rebels are masters
of deceit, and they routinely insert themselves as inconspicuously into human affairs as possible, because they know a frontal
approach would offend most people and cause them to erect defenses. I knew and accepted them for what they were, but I suspect
most people who have found pleasure in evil spirits have been unaware of where the additional thrill or excitement has come
from.
Among the rebels’ most successful operations have been the various polytheistic religions that dominated cultures
in nearly all ancient cities and villages. People felt they were practicing acceptable religion, but in reality they were
bonding with the rebels.
Emotional interaction with the rebels begins when they impose themselves on people. People
tend to be most susceptible when beset with uncertainty. In ancient villages and cities without bright lighting people were
incapable of avoiding exposure to them. Christians have been able to fend them off moderately well by calling on help from
God. In modern cities direct confrontation with evil spirits is less a problem for most people because they can insulate
themselves from nature and provide an environment that is nearly always stable and familiar.
Fear is the first human
response to evil spirits. Children know it well: fear of monsters under the bed or in the closet, fear of the dark and so
on. Even adults can feel it if, for example, they go some distance alone at night into an unfamiliar forest. Several of
the soldiers I knew in the army developed substantial “fear of the dark” after standing guard alone at night in isolated wooded
areas of Germany.
Why are evil spirits so effective in the dark? It is because they work on people’s minds through
perceptions. They gain entrance through perversion and distortion, through all things unnatural. In bright light people
can shut them out by fixing their minds on familiar things. In the dark a large part of the familiar world simply escapes
human perception, and the absence of the familiar is raw material for the evil spirits.
The older people get, the
more they become aware that the world does not change much when the lights go out, so susceptibility to direct influence of
evil spirits tends to diminish with age. If one consents to relations with evil spirits, of course, one can readily know them
in broad daylight, as I myself often did. It is just that the initial encounter is something most people would prefer to
avoid. In broad daylight most people can successfully avoid them, but not everyone can consistently avoid them in the dark,
especially in unfamiliar places.
People actually employ evil spirits for entertainment. Some horror movies deliberately
create an atmosphere that distorts reality in such a way that it makes viewers susceptible to immediate influence of the rebels.
It is entertainment because the viewers can turn it off and go back to familiar environments where all they remember is the
thrill. Halloween as celebrated in the USA with spooky costumes and decorations has obvious vestiges of toying with forces
of evil in a controlled way.
It is much easier to have a religious experience with an evil spirit than with God.
To meet God requires a certain suppression of the chaotic and the base in the human soul, while the rebels relish both chaotic
and degraded behavior. They are thus much closer to people in their natural state than is God.
A recipe for meeting
an evil spirit might be to watch a horror movie—I found The Exorcist to be one of the most effective—and then, instead of
suppressing the feelings of fear and returning to a familiar environment, embrace the fear, meet it head on. Go through the
fear to the person behind it. If you do that successfully, the fear will vanish and you will begin bonding with the spirit.
A word of caution: Once you meet an evil spirit, chances are you won’t be able just to walk away. Walls can’t keep them
out.
Although I have described a way that should work for meeting evil spirits, those who love God will not try.
I would never have deliberately joined myself to them, but once I did, I was powerless to resist them.
When my two
children were perhaps seven and ten years old, I made a classic bad decision in taking them to see Poltergeist. The movie
is about evil spirits of the dead preying on young children. Although the movie was not as true to evil as The Exorcist,
something from it reached out and touched my kids. Both of them found staying alone in the dark to be a real challenge for
several weeks afterwards, while before seeing the movie they’d had no such problem.
So the polytheistic religions
of ancient times started when the “local deities” imposed themselves on people, and the people were terrified. But no one
lives indefinitely in terror. Soon someone screwed up the courage to confront his fear head on, and once he did, he realized
that there was a person behind it, a person he could not see but who was nevertheless very real. That brave human passed
through his fear to the person, and by bonding with the spirit he learned, first, that his fear vanished, and, second, that
by performing certain acts of worship he and the other members of his community could successfully work around the fear indefinitely.
So he became the priest, and the rest at his direction placated the local deity by burning their children in fires or visiting
the cult prostitutes or whatever else gave their god pleasure.
Possibly the first priests did not pass through their
fear directly to the person. Poor spiritual vision combined with the deviousness of evil spirits perhaps made it more likely
that they discovered religions by experiment. If they had recognized the true nature of their gods from the start, idols
of metal, wood and stone might have been less prominent. According to this scenario the priests would have experimented with
various responses to the fear until they found behaviors that diminished the fear, such as setting up a pillar and worshiping
it. To have people worship stone pillars and wooden poles, as the ancient Canaanites did, would have been a source of great
pleasure for many of the rebels I knew, especially if the worship included, as the Canaanites’ often did, infanticide and
sexual indulgence.
Throughout the months of my pleasure sessions with the rebels I did not avoid God. I divided
my time from day to day about equally between God and them. I oscillated between God and demons. That was a time of high
tension for me, and I do not remember it fondly. I was not in control of myself but was driven by cravings. God not once
showed displeasure with my errant behavior, but we both recognized that it was a gigantic problem that had to be dealt with.
Although intellectually I knew that the demons were getting me into deep trouble, I simply could not resist them.
I
think my attraction to the rebels was beginning to fade rapidly, however, about the time I got my “Greetings” from the Selective
Service. “Greetings” was the notice to report for induction, so called because of its one-word salutation. Army life succeeded
in destroying my taste for the evil spirits completely, and I have had no desire for them since. God has remained faithful
to me, and I to him.
My adventures with demons seemed less serious than they were because God continued to make himself
readily available to me throughout my months of unfaithfulness. I have wondered from time to time at God’s tolerance. There
was never a hint of hostility towards me, never the slightest tinge of angry accusation.
I think it is this extreme
tolerance at that time more than any other thing that most endears him to me. (More than any other thing, that is, except
his continuing presence!) I understand now that, if he had withheld himself from me because of my unfaithfulness, I would
have panicked and would have cut off all interaction with spirits. I would have gone into spiritual deep freeze. God’s tolerance
instead opened the way for an enduring relationship of profound warmth and intimacy.
So, then, what happened to the
jealous God of the Old Testament? If I have to answer that question, I’d have to say he was putting on a show back then.
To some degree God becomes the sort of person that people require him to be. If your vision of God is such that he is necessarily
a jealous and vengeful person, then for you he will become such a person.
As for me, while consorting day after day
with his sworn enemies and giving myself to them as fully as I could, I never detected the least hint of jealousy in him.
Although from the human point of view one can hardly imagine a more offensive kind of behavior, he invariably took me back
as though I had never strayed. Maybe that was because he was confident of his ability to love, and he knew he would win in
the end.
Theologically speaking, is it true that God becomes the sort of person that people require him to be? Or
is it rather that he overlooks evil in those who commit their lives to him, but not in those who hold back? Biblical teaching
is perhaps more consistent with the second alternative than the first. Consider King David, God’s favored, who murdered a
man to get a woman and got away with it.
Wherever the truth lies, I have never seen God jealous, even though I gave
him perhaps more of a motive than anyone.
In all this I could not help but notice the parallel between my personal
history and the history of the ancient Jewish nation of Judah. From before the time of Solomon’s reign in the tenth century
until the Babylonian captivity in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the people of Judah worshiped God but at the same time
could not resist foreign deities. They already had God, who had proven himself faithful time and again, but they also had
an irresistible craving for idols and foreign deities.
I think their idolatry was more for pleasure than out of fear.
Ultimately Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Judah and marched the survivors off to Babylon, his capital city. After the exiles were
repatriated some years later, they never again, to this day, developed a serious taste for idols, even when under pressure
to do so from foreign kings such as the Seleucid. At the time of Jesus the Jews seem to be the only people in the Roman world
who did not practice idolatry.
My army time was my personal Babylonian captivity. Just as the Jews had a set of
rather arbitrary laws from Moses that helped make them a distinct nation, so I had come up with my own set of laws to keep
myself from contamination by the world. I felt it was particularly important to avoid personal exposure to man-made chemicals.
On an early army leave, for example, I developed such a severe ear infection that I became temporarily deaf in one ear but
still refused medication. Just as the Babylonian captivity forced the Jews to violate many of their sacred laws and traditions,
so my life in the army, beginning as it did with compulsory shots from the medics, forced me to violate my personal religious
laws.
My sessions with the demons were a heavy burden intellectually, but I realized almost from the start that they
were of great educational value. It is as if God deliberately turned me over to them for my instruction.
The experiences
have been of great value. Most importantly, by knowing intimately all the wrong gods, I am sure that I have chosen the right
one. If I had never known the rebels, I might wonder from time to time whether God is one of many or even whether he himself
was a deceiver and had duped me into siding with him against the true God. Having experienced both kinds of spirit, I know
now without a possibility of doubt that God is the Only One. None of the others was remotely like him in transcendence.
He alone is preeminent.
The rebels use fear to win worshipers. How about God? In the old days God also resorted
to fear tactics, but it was not natural for him. What is natural for God, what God prefers, is to impose himself only on
those who actively seek him. Abraham sought God, but some of his descendants did not. God knew that what he had started
with Abraham was too good to let go, so he used pressure from time to time to keep Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, in line.
Jesus since has revealed God to be above all a God of love, so no one needs to be afraid of approaching him now.
As
for me, God has never pushed me or put pressure on me of any kind. It was always I who wanted more of him than he seemed
willing to give. If Jesus had not come and revealed God to be love, I could never have gone after him so boldly. And if
Martin Luther had not so effectively restored God’s accessibility, I would have had a much harder time of it as well.
Time
for a reality check. How much of this talk about evil spirits is true, and how much the invention of an active imagination?
The part about my consorting with evil spirits is all true in the religious sense, in that it is my honest interpretation
of intimate encounters with spiritual persons. Because there was no physical content apart from my body, the interactions
were outside the realm of phenomena that science can investigate. Hence, nothing of that interpretation is true in a scientific
sense.
As for what I may have invented, my imagination frankly has always been of the plodding sort, never very active.
Far from the kind of person that regularly invents things, I require a lot of stimulus just to get me to wake up and recognize
something truly new. Over that 20-month period of intimate interactions with spirits there was plenty of stimulus, enough
to force me to recognize the reality.
While my encounters with evil spirits most certainly happened, the conclusions
I drew are less firm. For example, I don’t really know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ancient polytheistic religions
originated with evil spirits. It’s just that, after my extensive intimate relations with them, the connection seemed obvious.
By seeming to equate false gods with demons, the Bible in Deuteronomy 32:16-17 and Psalms 106:36-37 also lends a modicum of
support to the concept. Today, when I see sculptures of gods from the ancient Near East, such as Hittite or Egyptian, they
inevitably bring back memories; I feel an affinity that defies logic.
In any case, the encounters with the evil spirits
were so compelling that I cannot doubt them. Consequently, it is necessary for me to include the evil spirits and their activities
in any discussion of how the world works. I have had no recognizable encounters with them for many years. It is as if they
have completely disappeared. But I don’t for an instant believe they’ve really vanished.
I offer my interpretation
because it spells out my beliefs about the nature of evil, and the reader is entitled to know where I am coming from. But
for anyone who can accept it, my interpretation also offers insight into human behavior. While the interpretation is not
true in any scientific sense, at the same time it in no way conflicts with findings of science.
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Religion and Science
God as I know him seems
above everyone and everything, but apart from that he inspires no sense of great age or great complexity. He seems as attentive
to me as if I were the only living being, and we both could as easily have come into existence this morning as a billion years
ago. The world also loses complexity in his presence, and problems evaporate like morning dew. When you are with him, it
is as easy to believe that the world is a few thousand years old as twenty billion. Time is irrelevant. It is also obvious
that everything had to be perfect to begin with, and evil could exist only because of a falling away from original perfection.
When you are with God, you know that he is in control, and it is natural to feel the world is comfortably young and small.
So does God lie about the world and about his age? Not really. It’s just that there are different kinds of truth.
The complexities of physical existence largely dwindle to insignificance in a world occupied by spirits, and one way of communing
with God is to become spiritual and enter that world of spirits.
True religion in such a world holds that God made
the first humans perfect, Adam and Eve, just a few thousand years ago. But a world that was exclusively good Adam and Eve
could not tolerate. “We must know evil also,” they insisted. So consciously, deliberately they destroyed paradise just to
broaden their experience.
As science this story is indefensible, but as religion it presents important truths.
The
story is true, but for those who know the discoveries of science, it is inadequate. The story is adequate only for those
still in religious childhood, those who know God but have never ventured very far into the world.
Jesus contending
with Jews said, “You are of things below, I am of things above. You are of this world, I am not of this world.” The creation
story in the Bible is a view from above in the sense that Jesus is from above. Jesus had come forth from God and was ever
in God’s presence. His views had to be from above. “Above” means the spiritual realm of God. Jesus knew what evil was,
but his knowledge was indirect, from temptation and observation, not participation.
Curiously, when the serpent tempted
Eve in the garden, it held out the promise that she would be “like God, knowing good and evil.” In what sense does God know
evil? Or was the serpent simply lying? Certainly our view of God is that he does not know evil by participation. So if
he knows it, it must be second-hand knowledge, or knowledge from observation only.
But what if God before creation
felt a need to see himself from the outside? What if God’s whole purpose of creation was to express himself in a form that
would allow himself deeper insight into his own being? By bringing into existence beings who could rebel against him and
yet be won back and merged again with him, God through such beings would indeed know evil by participation, vicariously, and
he would gain profound insight into himself.
Similarly, although Jesus very likely would not have encouraged scientific
investigation, because his control and knowledge of the world as one from above was already adequate, the physical world offers
people from below an opportunity to investigate and thereby ultimately to provide further insight into the ways of God. Thus,
as God gains insights through his interactions with people, people gain insights by delving into details of the material world.
Scientific investigation is from below: It rejects meanings imposed from above and seeks to learn what the things
of the world tell about themselves. Those from above live by spiritual knowledge and by faith; scientists proceed by doubting
and testing everything handed down as truth. Jesus worked impressive miracles from above. Science with technology works
impressive miracles from below. Which is right? Both are right, but one is from above and the other from below. Who will
win? God ultimately will win, not by defeating science but by engulfing it and making it his own.
Although I was
a professional scientist for several decades, at one time, not long after my first and startling personal revelation of God,
I came to believe that science with technology, along with the philosophical underpinning, was the antichrist. Antichrist
is what Christians call the figure foretold in the Bible who was to be an especially effective opponent of Jesus. The apostle
Paul calls him the “man of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-12). Paul describes him as “one who opposes and exalts himself
against every so-called god or object of worship,” and says later that his coming will be “with all power and with false (‘pseudo’)
signs and wonders.”
Christians enjoy picking out antichrists from among the forces of evil they see. Martin Luther
chose the Roman Catholic papacy, for example. Yet few would dispute that science with technology has done more to undermine
faith in spiritual beings than any other force in history. In pre-scientific cultures there were few unbelievers. As one
can deduce from literature, cultural artifacts and buildings, religion dominated major cultures. Some early cultures acknowledged
literally thousands of gods and put up temples to many of them throughout their cities. Nowadays many people still hold to
a belief in God, but religion typically occupies only small compartments in individual lives and even smaller compartments
in the civilizations of the modern world.
Formerly most events in the natural world and in individual lives had meaning
within a religious context. Rain for crops was a gift from some higher power, and adversity was discipline or punishment.
Science has not only debunked religious myths, it has weakened what remains of core beliefs. The argument is that, if some
beliefs can be proved false, the rest must be in doubt.
For cures of illnesses, some people still look to God, but
almost all rely at least partly on modern medicine. For perspective on man’s place in the universe people look to modern
cosmology and scientific theories rather than to religious myths. Instead of facing divine powers manifested in nature, people
use technology to insulate themselves from nature. Jesus may have cured hundreds, but modern scientific medicine and hygiene
have cured hundreds of thousands, and they have circumvented early deaths of many more. Jesus is from above, and science
is from below. It would appear there was a war, and God lost. Because of science and technology, people now control God.
They keep him locked in his compartment and let him out only when needed.
It is precisely this victory of science
and materialism over God that made my first encounter with him at age nineteen such a tumultuous event. God seemed a foreigner
in his own world. Now I understand that my perception of God’s diminished status was no big deal. God always has been a
foreigner in his own world.
•
Science does not explicitly oppose religious faith, but the many impressive
successes of the scientific method over time have had the effect of mounting a significant challenge to faith. This is partly
because discoveries of science have debunked certain religious scriptures, and partly because the scientific method, successful
as it is, is atheistic.
By saying the scientific method is atheistic I do not mean that science denies God’s existence.
It does not. But the scientific method explicitly makes God irrelevant in any scientific investigation. Science never says
that spiritual beings do not exist, but the scientific method assumes that, if they exist, scientists cannot measure them
or their effects. God’s activity thus is outside the range of things that science can investigate.
A problem
for God is that science has been astoundingly successful compared with other methods of gaining information about the world.
Science has been so successful that many people—not just scientists—have concluded that there is no truth except that which
can be gained through the scientific method. This success has led many people to believe that the principles of the scientific
method are more than just assumptions of a method. For them, the reason God is not relevant in science is that God is simply
not relevant. We can in principle explain everything without him. For such people the atheistic principles of the scientific
method have become articles of personal faith.
The reality is that God does act in the world. He does influence
the phenomena of nature. His acts are miracles. Despite what many intelligent and educated people believe, the success of
science in no way rules out the possibility of miracles. The success of science at most proves that the scientific method
is a very good way to discover how many parts of the world work on average.
It is worth pointing out that not all
sciences have been equally successful in modeling the phenomena of their respective fields. In certain sciences—physics,
chemistry and microbiology, for example—some models have been very accurate and have given humans a level of power over their
environment that our ancestors even of 200 years ago could not have conceived of. In other sciences—the social sciences,
for example—models often have been less accurate and correspondingly less powerful.
An important goal of philosophers
and early psychologists was to understand the nature of consciousness, the nature of subjective experience. In recent decades
great strides have been made in correlating specific perceptions and feelings with neural activity in specific regions of
the brain, but no one yet has come up with anything other than unsatisfying speculation about why electrochemical activity
in neural tissue should give rise to subjective experience. One of the strongest feelings a person has is his sense of selfhood,
the feeling that he is an entity, a person, distinct from the rest of the world.
Because consciousness appears to
be a phenomenon that cannot be derived from other, more elementary phenomena, David Chalmers in the December 1995 issue of
Scientific American proposed that we consider consciousness to be a fundamental, irreducible “feature” of reality, like space-time
in physics. Francis Crick, in contrast, has proposed his “astonishing hypothesis” (Skeptical Inquirer, Jan./Feb. 1995) that
a deeper understanding of the brain will lead to an understanding of consciousness. The fact remains that no one at this
point is making anything but unsatisfying speculations on the nature and origin of consciousness.
Because science
at least for the time being is unable to deal with consciousness, God for the time being is free to act upon conscious beings
at will without running into conflict with any scientific principle or theory. Because many conscious beings have physical
bodies, God thus has a way open to act upon the physical world. But the deeper reality is that the successes of science do
not preclude any kind of miracle anywhere.
•
To understand why science and its successes should not affect
a person’s attitude towards the possibility of miracles requires only a superficial look at the methods of experimental science.
To measure some natural quantity the scientist—at least, if he is a typical physicist, chemist or microbiologist—first
isolates the system he is measuring as completely as possible. He does not want outside influences to affect his results.
Once his system is properly isolated, he proceeds to measure some property of the system, often by probing with a light beam
or electrodes or one of a large number of other possible probes. He may repeat his measurements many times to reduce effects
of measurement errors.
Now suppose that, unknown to the scientist, Jesus were in the laboratory and decided to change
the properties of the scientist’s isolated system by supernatural means. The scientist might then get a result that disagreed
by a large amount with previous results.
Would these anomalous results from Jesus’ miracle ever find their way into
the scientific literature? Not likely. The scientist would note the large discrepancy from previous results and stop to
do a careful check of his probes, instruments and the measured system to find out what had changed.
If he could find
no problem, he might in disgust take the rest of the day off, come back the next day when Jesus was not tampering with the
system and repeat his measurements. If his new answers were consistent with the first set, he would simply discard the results
from the miracle as unexplained bad data and go on to publish only the results that were consistent over several days. His
belief in the consistency of nature would not let him honor the anomalous results. So here he would have seen and measured
hard evidence of a miracle but thrown it out as bad data.
Before a scientist can draw firm conclusions, he needs
lots of consistent data. Conclusions based on just a few measurements are always suspect. The methods of experimental science
thus practically eliminate the possibility that scientists will ever report miraculous events. Hence, no one who wants to
believe in miracles should restrain himself just because scientists have never detected one; they may in fact have done so
without knowing it.
Science, then, says nothing about miracles other than that, if they occur, they don’t cause inconsistencies
serious enough to disrupt scientific investigations. In particular, science cannot pronounce valid judgment on whether or
not Jesus’ miracles were real, and Christians are free to believe.
The other side of this story is that people often
want to believe that certain events are miraculous when they’re merely unusual. In some such cases science can have a role
in clarifying what actually happened.
(Chapter continued on next page)
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