Exorcism and Justified Belief in Demons

Hunt, Marcus William

doi:10.35765/forphil.2020.2502.17

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

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“…Additionally, those who do hold to a demonic realism rarely offer any rigorous defense of it. However, there have been a few recent exceptions to this (Adler 1982;Kreeft 1995;Williams 2002;Wiebe 2004;Guthrie 2018;Hunt 2020;Van Eyghen 2022). The number substantially increases if we include the teeming number of theologians following a conservative and/or supernaturalist tradition (Dickason 1975;Twelftree 2007Twelftree , 2010Heiser 2015Heiser , 2020Gilhooly 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Not to Object to Demonic Realism

Guthrie

2022

Religions

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There are few academics today who actively argue against demonic realism. Much of this is perhaps due to the fact that there are comparably few defenders of such. This has created a vacuum for critics to comfortably object to the existence of demons without sophistication (for it is only in the professional exchange of ideas do bad arguments get weeded out and good arguments gain vitality). Add to this the common perception of demonology as an anti-intellectual superstition and we end up with a threshold for the success of anti-realist arguments to be set quite low. In this paper, I shall survey three of the most familiar objections to demonic realism to arise out of this skeptical intellectual environment: First, and most ambitiously, there is the impossibility of justified belief objection that proffers that belief in demons cannot even in principle be justified no matter how much (scientific) evidence there is. Alternative explanations are always to be preferred. Second, there is the demon-of-the-gaps objection (or category of objections) which insists that demonic realism is hastily posited as a pre-scientific explanation for physical, medical, and psychological mysteries. Third, there is what I call the ethical argument from scapegoating that questions the existence of demons on grounds that, if they in fact exist, such a fact would preclude moral responsibility and the possibility of retributive justice since we could never know if a bad actor was himself morally culpable for his own evils or if he was under the coercive influence of demonic agents. I argue that, despite their rhetorical appeal and kinship with the anti-supernatural sentiments of many academics today, these three arguments are not successful, for these are either based on egregious philosophical assumptions or assumptions about demonology few if any adopt.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Not to Object to Demonic Realism

Guthrie

2022

Religions

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On Angels, Demons, and Ghosts: Is Justified Belief in Spiritual Entities Possible?

Johnson

2022

Religions

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Belief in the existence of spiritual entities is an integral part of many people’s religious worldview. Angels appear, demons possess, ghosts haunt. But is belief that such entities exist justified? If not, are there conditions in which it would be? I will begin by showing why, once one clearly understands how to infer the best explanation, it is obvious that neither stories nor personal encounters can provide sufficient evidence to justify belief in spiritual entities. After responding to objections to similar arguments I have published in the past, I will go on to show that there is at least an imaginable circumstance in which belief in spiritual entities would be justified but then point out that it is not reasonable to think that such conditions will ever be met. In short, if such entities were real, it would be theoretically possible to demonstrate their existence scientifically, and in doing so, one could make belief in their existence justified. But doing so would require and entail a scientific revolution equivalent to proving that the Earth is flat.

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Exorcism and Justified Belief in Demons

Cited by 2 publications

References 10 publications

How Not to Object to Demonic Realism

How Not to Object to Demonic Realism

On Angels, Demons, and Ghosts: Is Justified Belief in Spiritual Entities Possible?

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