Is There Proof the Devil Exists?

Tom:

Thanks, Gary.  You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to him.Our topic is and has been for the last few weeks “the reality of evil.”Today we are going to consider personal evil, in particular, evil entities.So Dave, I’m going to jump right into the first question.I need no further argument against the existence of Satan and demons than the fact that no one in the history of the world has ever seen such creatures.They exist only in mythology.The Bible tries to get around this obvious problem by claiming that they are not physical and are thus invisible spirit beings.Wasn’t this old-fashioned superstition about “spirits” abandoned long ago by thinking people?Surely if Satan existed there ought to be some scientific proof.Where is it?

Dave:

Tom, first of all scientific proof.What does that mean?Scientific proof would I guess, have to involve scientific instruments which are physical and if Satan indeed exists and is a non-physical being, then you are not going to be able to calibrate anything about him with your physical instruments.I mean that is pretty clear.And saying nobody has seen him—well there are a number of people that claim they have.Now whether they actually have or not, the Bible—

Tom:

Jesus claimed to have seen him.

Dave:

It doesn’t say that he saw him, does it.

Tom:

Well the temptation—who was he interchanging with, who was he dialoguing with?

Dave:

Well, yes, but it doesn’t say that Satan was visible.

Tom:

Okay.

Dave:

It says Satan came and took him upon a high mountain and said “If you are God command these stones be made bread.”He took him up on the pinnacle of the temple, and so forth, but it doesn’t say that he saw him.

Tom:

Now Dave—

Dave:

I’m not saying that Jesus couldn’t see him, but he doesn’t have to see—

Tom:

But if you’re interacting with some THING, you have to be able to see it, don’t you?

Dave:

No, not necessarily.I mean do you interact with God?You talk to him in prayer.

Tom:

Yes, well that’s true.

Dave:

And we don’t see him.

Tom:

But it just seems that way.It seems that—

Dave:

Well, okay, but we’re not going beyond the Bible Tom, unless it says that he saw him, but I don’t believe that it does.Well this person is apparently a bit behind the times.

Tom:

Scientifically speaking.

Dave:

Right.I can remember, believe it or not I can remember when I was in high school, even in grammar school, the physicists thought they would be able to explain everything physically, including thoughts and motives and so forth.I don’t think, well I was going to say anybody, but there would still be some hardcore materialists who are determined because they do not want to admit like this person sounds like he doesn’t want to admit the existence of non-physical reality.But there is a non-physical reality, we can’t get away from that and I think in the response we mention first of all, Ken Wilbur, not exactly a Christian by any means.

Tom:

New-Ager to the max.

Dave:

Right and an interesting book, in fact Tom, we deal with this subject in The New Spirituality in depth.

Tom:

Right, correct.

Dave:

In two or three chapters and I think [we] give some really fascinating information about it that we don’t have time to cover here.

Tom:

No, but Dave, I just want to mention to our listeners, you and I wrote that book for Christians to give to their friends who were into the New Age so the apologetics, the arguments, the research and so on really comes more from what these people are telling us about the entities that they deal with.

Dave:

And I think one of the people that we quote in there is M. Scott Peck.Again, some people think he’s a Christian.He is not a Christian.

Tom:

No, he’s a Buddhist.

Dave:

He talks about God, which a Buddhist shouldn’t.Buddha, but anyway he’s not a Christian by any means, but he wrote The Road Less Traveled.

Tom:

He claims to be a Christian with an Episcopal background, but he’s not an evangelical, not a Bible-believing Christian by any stretch of the imagination.

Dave:

No.He does not believe in Jesus Christ, God become man through the Virgin birth, who died for our sins upon the cross and rose again the third day.That he does not believe [or] the forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ.He tells how, I think he was in the Army wasn’t he?

Tom:

Yes.

Dave:

As a psychiatrist and confronted some evil that he could not explain away.This was someone who was demon possessed and here as a skeptical psychiatrist he was face to face with how did he describe this?It was like something that was so ancient and palpably so evil that you could not escape it.It just was there—some presence.But Ken Wilbur in his book, which we’re not recommending, but it’s titled Quantum Questions: The Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists.He quotes any number of some of the great physicists of all time to show that they believed in a spiritual dimension of existence.They don’t think that the physical universe is all that there is.We have a lot of reasons for that Tom.We don’t have time to talk about that, but we do mention in here, thoughts for example.When I say justice everybody knows what I am talking about, but does it have any texture?How much does it weigh?What does it smell like?What does it taste like?It has nothing to do with the five senses, has nothing to do with the physical universe, there is nothing in the physical universe that has stimulated in our minds the response: justice.In fact we often complain that there isn’t any justice.So justice is not part of the physical universe.It is what we would call an abstract thought.Thoughts are not physical.We can prove that very simply and we’ve probably talked about it before on this program.But your physical brain—you see this is the problem we have in the Christian world or the church.They are talking about mental illnesses for example.Now I don’t want to offend anyone out there, but Thomas Szasz for example, again a secular—

Tom:

A secular psychiatrist.

Dave:

A secular psychiatrist, not a Christian by any means, but one of his books was titled: The Myth of Mental Illness.Now why would he say that?Because something that is mental is not physical.You can have physical problems in the brain, but you can’t have mental illness.That involves the mind.The mind—and we quote I think here, a number of top scientists.We quote Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner for his research on the brain and we don’t mention that here, but we have quoted him elsewhere.He says that the brain is like a computer that a spirit can operate.And then he goes through some fascinating research to discover where our spirit interacts with our brain.But here in this particular quote he says, “If there are bona fide mental events, events that are not themselves physical or mental then the whole program of philosophical materialism collapses.Now that our brain does not originate our thoughts is so simple to prove.If my brain originated my thoughts I’m waiting around, what is my brain going to tell me to do next?Obviously I am not the prisoner of my brain.I originate my thoughts, I make my choices.But I as a spirit being living in a physical body have to have some means of operating this body and Sir John Eccles talks about the SMA, the supplementary motor area that he, well you could still get some of his tapes, which any person would find fascinating—the experiments that he has done.But this is where he believes that the spirit makes contact with the brain and then operates the body.By the way Tom, we talk about that in The New Spirituality.This can explain demon possession.It also tells you what happens when someone hypnotizes you.

Tom:

Dave, let’s spell it out very simply for people.You started by saying the spirit, our spirits operate this machine, call it a computer, these analogies are not exact, but they’re close enough for somebody to get the idea.So our spirits tick off the neurons some how, some way.Call it psychokinesis or whatever term you want to use.

Dave:

Alien spirit, there is a connection.

Tom:

Right and that’s the interface.Our spirit to our brain.Now to take it to the step that you indicated—demon possession.If there are other minds out there, call them spirit entities and on the basis of the will, I think that is the door to demon possession.There are drugs, altered states of consciousness, and so on, but I think it begins with the will.Once you turn yourself over to these entities they intervene.

Dave:

Well Tom, I was going to say under hypnosis, and I got involved with this when I was in the military believe it or not.We used to hypnotize one another and you could do incredible things.I can tell you the last time I involved myself in it I was about to leave my body and that frightened me and I renounced that before the Lord.We were experimenting.I mean we could hypnotize a guy and put his heals on one bunk and his head on the other and the guy is stiff as a board.You could sit on him.In the natural state you could not support someone like that.So what happens is if those of you listening out there have seen anyone hypnotized, the hypnotist can control the body and apparently the brain of the person that he has in this state of consciousness.Even give post-hypnotic suggestions and a lot of evil has been done and we talk about that and some fascinating stuff in that book.Okay, so now in an altered state of consciousness if the hypnotist’s mind through commands and so forth can take over, well then what about some other mind out there?Now are there other minds out there?You would be very foolish to suggest that we are the only minds that exist in the universe.We quote Robert Jastrow—

Tom:

Well before you go there, let’s back this up.

Dave:

Okay.

Tom:

Sir John Eccles isn’t the only one.He’s a Nobelist.We have Wilder Penfeld, world famous neurosurgeon.These people who work on the brain, they know this is a machine and it doesn’t operate itself.

Dave:

Let me quote Dr. Penfeld: “The mind is independent of the brain.The brain is a computer, but it is programmed by something that is outside itself, the mind.”And listen to what C. S. Lewis said: “If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry and biochemistry in the long run on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance that the sound of the wind in the trees.”In other words, if what I am saying is simply the result of the antecedent motions of the atoms in my brain and it all goes back to a big bang—forget it.We know that’s not true.So thoughts are not physical and I am not a physical being.I am living a physical body.Now listen to Jastrow, what he says.He was the founder and director for many years of the Goddard Space Institute.He says—now this is an agnostic, an evolutionist actually.“Life that is a billion years beyond us may be far beyond the flesh and blood form that we would recognize.It may have escaped its mortal flesh to become something that old-fashioned people would call spirits.And how do we know it’s there?Maybe it can materialize and dematerialize.I am sure it has magical powers by our standards.”Now here’s a scientist, not a Christian, an agnostic, but he says, wait a minute and he believes in evolution.So actually the quote we don’t give him let me give you a further quote from him.He says that some of these beings, they could have evolved as far beyond man as man has evolved beyond a worm and when we see them they would seem like gods to us, and that’s then when he says, “…And some of them could have evolved beyond the need of bodies.”Well he’s coming at it from that standpoint.We do not believe in that, but we know that mankind makes choices.We are not at the whim of our brain and it is not the motions of the atoms, it is not the electrical current or the chemical reactions going on in the brain that cause me to do what I do.That was the belief of Freud actually.What we called the medical model.He tried to get away from God, from spirits, from moral accountability and I am simply like Pavlov’s dog.Hey you were telling me about your—

Tom:

My fish.

Dave:

You stole a bass out of my pond.I am glad you did, because I don’t want bass in my pond.

Tom:

But Dave, it would never hold up in court because you said there could never be a bass in your pond.Just trout, okay?I just borrowed it for awhile.

Dave:

But, but—

Tom:

And now it’s attached itself to me because I feed it worms and it comes right to the top and takes worms from me, so—

Dave:

Every time you show up here it comes.

Tom:

There he is.

Dave:

Right, okay.So what are we?Like Pavlov’s dog?This is what they would say.

Tom:

Like my bass?

Dave:

Stimulus response mechanisms, B. F. Skinner, come on—we know that’s not true!And you cannot scientifically—that’s the problem with Freud.He was trying to find a scientific explanation of human behavior, but you can’t do that when the subject of your experiment is hopping about capriciously with a free will.You don’t know what he’s going to do next.You can’t make a science out of human behavior.They have tried to do that and they would destroy mankind.Then they throw drugs at the brain, the most complex instrument in the universe and they say you’ve got a chemical imbalance—nobody measured a chemical imbalance.They don’t know where in the brain the chemical imbalance is and we could quote Dr. Peter Breggin one of the leading authorities on drugs and their affect in his book, Your Drug May Be Your Problem.I would suggest maybe some people ought to read that and see what he has to say about it.Every drug that they use—psychiatric drugs are the same drugs that the Soviets used to torture their political prisoners.Anyway, but he says the only chemical imbalances that we know of are the ones that are caused by the drugs that they give you to supposedly stabilize your chemical imbalance.You take your child into the psychiatrist, a normal child when you walked in the door, when they walk out they have a label.They have been diagnosed as have a chemical imbalance and the drug that’s been prescribed—how did they diagnose it?

Tom:

On the basis of an interview.

Dave:

That’s right.They did not check anything in the brain and they cannot do that and I think that’s really tragic that this is going on.

Tom:

Yes Dave, along this line we are trying to encourage caution and to be informed and ask questions to your doctor.We’re not recommending anybody who’s on medical drugs to remove themselves.You do this all on the basis of good questions, good counsel from your medical doctors.

Dave:

Yes, well we talk about another top scientist here.We name not only Jastrow, Eccles, Eddington, Nobelist Eugene Wigner, Sir Karl Popper, the most famous philosopher of science of our age, John von Neumann, he’s been called the smartest man who ever lived, and many others who say hey, there’s a non-physical dimension out there and there are non-physical beings.

Tom:

So much for our questioner’s argument that no scientists believe in this stuff any more.

Dave:

Right.I don’t know where he’s been.Well, let’s go to C. G. Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist who has influenced Christian psychology far more than Freud.Freud is a fraud.He’s pretty well fallen out of favor except for a few loyalists, but Carl Jung—

Tom:

It’s the spiritual dimension of Jung’s writings that attract many people who are religious.Most psychotherapists within the Catholic Church whether it be priests or nuns, spiritual directors—Jung is their mentor.

Dave:

Right.You remember what he used to say?“When I come to a tough case…”, again I am giving you a quote from this other book The New Spirituality which I would certainly recommend and for those who are interested in understand what’s going on in the New Age—

Tom:

Yes, Gary can tell a little bit later how to get a hold of it.

Dave:

Carl Jung would say, “Whenever I come to a really tough case, I consult an astrologer.”Because obviously the stars have a lot to do with this.But Carl Jung—and we document it for you in this other book The New Spirituality, he had a spirit guide.His own personal spirit guide.He called him Philemon (fill a mon).I call him Philemon the Demon.He said he was as real to me as a person.We walked up and down the garden together, he consulted with him.Carl Jung said that a screeching chorus of ghosts filled his house near Zurich.I’ve been there to his library and so forth of C. G. Jung Institute and an awful lot of occult stuff [was] in that library because in fact, this was his M.D. thesis.

Tom:

Sure, these archetypes as far as he was concerned.At least early on.

Dave:

Right.And the screeching chorus of ghosts filled my house he said for three days and three nights under the inspiration he wrote his major work Septum Sermone Ad Mortem (Seven Sermons to the Dead).And this was the fountainhead and most of his theories came from the spirit world.In fact, Carl Jung said he teetered on the brink of total psychotic breakdown for six years and he had to keep repeating to himself, “I am Dr. Carl G. Jung, I am a psychiatrist,” you know to bring himself back to reality.The Holy Ghost he said appeared to him in the form of a dove.He had all kinds of visitations from spirit beings and this is where he got his major theories from the spirit world, from the demonic world in fact.And yet he has heavily influenced Christian psychology because as you said, they love him because he was into spirituality.So I would have to say we have plenty of scientists, psychiatrists, and other people who I think, have come up with some pretty good verification of evil and evil non-physical beings.

Tom:

Dave, you quoted earlier M. Scott Peck.Again, he’s a psychiatrist; he’s been accepted by the evangelical community, but he’s not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination, according to biblical standards.But he did have this experience as you said.Let me quote from his book:He said, “When the demonic finally spoke clearly in one case, an expression appeared on the patient’s face that could be described only as Satanic.It was an incredibly contemptuous grin of utter malevolence.”

Dave:

“Hostile malevolence.”

Tom:

“I spent many hours before a mirror trying to imitate it without the slightest success.”It goes on to say, “More frightening that the writhing body however, was the face, the eyes were hooded with lazy reptilian torpor except when the reptile darted out an attack at which moment the eyes would open wide with glazing hatred.”And then he finishes, “Almost all the team members at both exorcisms were convinced that they were at times, in the presence of something absolutely alien and inhuman.”So this man had an experience.

Dave:

Yes, I could tell you about a few others Tom, but I guess we’ve run out of time.There’s no question that God exists.He is a spirit.He created man in a physical body, but we are spirit beings like him.We can give ourselves to other spirit beings.There is evil in this world and the only solution is in Jesus Christ who paid the penalty for our sins.