I diagnose mental illness. And, sometimes, demonic possession.

I invite you to read the above. Bottom line: An Ivy League educated clinical psychologist has spent 25 years assisting the Catholic Church in determining whether purported cases of demonic possession are authentic. The overwhelming majority of cases he's encountered are not. And yet, he's personally encountered phenomena in certain patients which have no rational, traditional scientific explanation (levitation, perfect use of dead languages, or saying things completely unknowable like how relatives have died and what secret sins people have committed--basically many of the supernatural abilities outlined in William Peter Blatty's masterpiece The Exorcist).

This is a man of science who will only accept conclusions based on a strong preponderance of evidence. And in a tiny minority of his cases, that evidence leads him to conclude that certain patients suffer from demonic possession. So what would the resident materialists of this forum conclude in the face of this evidence?

In a nutshell: people are easily fooled, memory is highly unreliable, narratives are strung together in incorrect/confirmation biased ways, and one man's opinion or even solemnly stated experience is basically worthless.

People tend to reject these ideas because it doesn't fit with our experience - when we talk to others we generally talk about reliable shared experiences and memories. Yet, spend any time in a court listening to witness testimony, and you'll soon realize how all of the above is true.

Let me put it this way. Which do you think is more likely? Choose from the following options:

a) A man you don't know whose psychology you have no insight to, but who seems articulate and nice and genuine, claims to have witnessed levitation, but got no video or other evidence of this incredibly important phenomenon, and is some combination of deluded [common], confabulating [common], has an unreliable memory [common], making things up for publicity, business, book sales, or to advance a religious position [very common].

b) True demonic levitation was actually witnessed by this man

How, precisely, do you know this? This is an example of making up a narrative for which you have zero evidence. If you construe this from his profession, realize that psychology/psychiatry is basically pure quackery, and the people who practice it, usually confirmation biased quacks (some of whose members are so evidence-free that even create false memories in their clients). Psychiatrists aren't evidence-based scientists like physicists or engineers.

Let me put it another way. Approximately 1 in 100 people are pathological liars - they tell detailed, fantastically constructed, believable lies about all manner of things, often for self interest, lies which they maintain for years, with zero shame or care. Pathological liars span all walks of life and all professions, from scientists to psychologists to bricklayers to doctors. These numbers mean there are 3 million pathological liars in the US alone, including thousands of psychologists/psychiatrists and non-fiction book authors.

In a world where demonic possession does not exist, we would have multiple claims exactly like what you linked, purely from the prevalence of pathological liars in society. Thus the existence of this claim is utterly worthless. This is just pathological liars and excludes all the mental flaws that people are subject to, or combinations of them. Even people who aren't pathological liars embellish, misremember, create narratives which become fact over time, fail to look for contrary evidence, etc. Or simply make things up for publicity/to make money.

I realize this is unsatisfying. It's human nature to accept claims at face value, and believe they are reliable, or at least, they're not entirely made up or deluded or "filled in" on key areas. Yet the evidence is strongly that they often are.

If you ever run into a pathological liar, and discover how deep the web of deceit can run and how plausible it is, or spend time dealing with witnesses, you'll come to a very different view of the reliability of personal testimony.

Odds are good they will just reject the credibility of the author.

For good reason. The author stands to gain from telling these stories, so he's automatically suspect.

I grew up in Indonesia and have been all over Southeast Asia. I've heard a million stories about demonic possession, and people being able to eat glass, stick knives through themselves without bleeding, etc. But every time i've gone to see the show, i don't see these things. Others do. I believe it's because they WANT to see them and are easily fooled by the illusions.

Whenever i ask to get up close to make sure the guy is doing what he claims to be doing, they say that it's going to "disturb" him and i can't go that close. If he's that possessed, then he's not going to be disturbed by me.

It's all BS until they are willing to go under the camera and lights to ensure it's not a trick.

Well I reject the claims as false on their face. So it's just a question of whether the person is being deceptive, or was deceived. We know both have occurred many times before.

Isn't this true of basically every single author every single time they write something? Even scientists have something to gain by publishing their research. Does that make scientific research automatically suspect?

I think this is a pretty poor reason for out-of-hand rejection.

This is probably the most intellectually honest answer for the materialists.

Yes, it does. As a research professor, i know this to be true. I do not trust anyone's research, because it is all biased. All of it. Including my own. It is simply not possible for humans to be truly scientific in their approach. Everyone has a conscious or subconscious agenda. And making $$$ off your research is a big carrot.

It's not out of hand. I have a reason for it and i've had 15 years of research experience and time to think about it. You may not agree with my reason, but that does not make it out of hand. Or perhaps you don't understand what "out of hand" actually means?

Maybe you have a different concept of "trust" in this context. Can you elaborate a bit on how exactly you parse your understanding of "I do not trust anyone's research"? Do you assume that the information in a published journal is false?

(Also, what field are you in? In math, you would be hard-pressed to pick up a random article and say "I don't trust this." Similarly, in the physical and biological sciences, there's no underlying credibility issue that causes distrust of published results.)

I take "rejecting [an article] out of hand" or "rejecting [the credibility of the author] out of hand" to mean that you've reached your conclusion before engaging the article/author. That is, your decision to reject the credibility of the author is not based on what the author said or anything specific about the author, but some set of beliefs/assumptions that you bring into the situation beforehand.

More specifically, your position was "I have a good reason for rejecting this article. The author has something to gain." Since (in your mind) this is true of every single article and every single author, you have reached your conclusion without any information that's actually pertinent to the author or what the author wrote. this is an out of hand rejection in my understanding of the term.

What do you think "rejection out of hand" means?

I appreciate the thoughtful reply.

I think you touch on broader problems of epistemology--what things can really be known? The standard you've outlined above suggests that personal testimony can almost never verify an event to be true. Which is fine, though it compels us to disregard a substantial amount of human history that relies on such testimony. Are you certain that Hannibal crossed the alps or that Julius Caesar was murdered? I suppose you even could take it a step further and move toward a full David Hume-like view of radical skepticism, where we can't really *know* anything. But such a skepticism is effectively worthless in understanding and contextualizing human experiences.

Obviously many people would disagree with your characterization of psychiatry as quackish pseudo-medicine.

If you read the linked WaPo article, he essentially stipulates that most purported cases of demonic possession throughout the world are either cases of deep psychosis or fraud. He bases his belief in the reality of the phenomenon on a tiny minority of cases he's personally witnessed.

While you list a handful of plausible reasons why the author would invent these stories, there are substantial counterbalancing incentives to *not* waste time on the supernatural, not the least of which is professional reputation--his education and credentials clearly place the writer in the very top tier of his field. I think the most straightforward reason for his work is that, as a faithful Catholic, he felt called to assist when the Church asked for special expertise. Note, too, that lying about this sort of thing would be in direct odds with his espoused faith, and if the above were untrue, the Church would move to swiftly distance itself from his writing.

A final piece that ought to be considered is those who recover from possession through the intervention of the Church. Consider the following series of events (cases like this which have substantial documentation): 1) Individual displays deep psychological disturbances religious in nature 2) Conventional, sustained psychiatric medicine is ineffective 3) Through the church and psychiatric experts the individual is determined to suffer from possession vs. a legitimate mental disorder. 4) The Church performs the Rite of Exorcism 5) The individual recovers and no longer suffers these symptoms.

Again, we can go all Hume and can't know for certain that the causal chain of possession/diagnosis/exorcism/recovery is true. But at a certain point we end up making decisions on what we think is true based on our observation and our human experience.

Of course it does. All scientific research is highly suspect (and in fact, most is later proved wrong). We had this discussion earlier where I gave you some links, and I didn't continue the discussion because you're a third rate sophist who's extremely boring, but I'll revisit that thread when I get a minute. You seem not to understand how useless scientific research is until independently replicated many times.

It's like you don't even understand the basics of what science are. All the procedures of science - falsification, replication, etc etc exist because all claims, no how authoritative or plausible, are automatically highly suspect. That philosophy/applied common sense is the foundation of science.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. That's because they're nearly always wrong.

That's not to say we should be closed minded to new ideas, but OP asked for a critical/materialist take on this, not a balance assessment.

The weight I put to personal testimony isn't the same for all types of testimony. If this expert proclaimed someone had a certain type of psychiatric problem, I'd probably believe them. I wouldn't have a complete trust of course but it would be good and persuasive evidence. But this expert is proclaiming nonsensical supernatural stuff fundamentally incompatible with my worldview and so I DON"T consider it good and persuasive evidence.



Sure. While its possible that because his current job depends on it and the success of his future book depends on it that he is being deceptive, I would accept it is more likely that he has deceived himself and genuinely believes his on their face ridiculous claims.

Let's look at some of the evidence in the article:

Saying you are prideful seems like pretty standard "fortune teller" carnival fare here. I've had more insightful fortune cookies. We don't know specifics on the mother died thing, but again this seems just ripe for slight misremembering misrepresenting what occured to being totally benign. OTHER people told him she spoke languages...did they know these languages? Was she just mumbling something? Are we talking about a fragment of latin picked up from a service? Very vague, 3rd party, unclear there is anything going on. Contempt for religion...well...doesn't seem surprising that someone with a psychiatric problem would be spiteful about religion when a priest comes to exorcise them. OTHER people told him there was levitation. Great.

None of this seems remotely convincing to me.

Are you convinced by it?

It's not really a standard so much as a standard that applies to this particular case. I think there are degrees of plausibility we can give to different kinds of personal testimony.

One of the problems with fantastic claims and a public stage is that there is selection bias that acts to select those who make fantastic (false) claims plausibly. Out of 100 million people, you will get quite a few who swear they have seen aliens, demonic possessions, etc and believe it to the depths of their soul. Some will even be reliable, intelligent, honest people.

Human brains are deeply fallible. Most of the time they work just fine, even highly reliably (particularly in professionals like psychiatrists, journalists, etc), but some small percentage of the time they go wrong in every way they can go wrong.

What does mean for epistemology? If you pick a random person and they make a claim, it's very likely to be true. If you allow selection bias to act on millions of people, where the few with fantastic, plausible yet false claims will get a voice, it's a certainty that those people will come forward.

You essentially have to apply a vastly different standard of proof to selection biased claims. David talks about this stuff with Bayes Theorem quite often, and even though it's simple, it's not intuitive. What people end up doing is using their personal truth heuristics ("most people I know tell the truth and don't lie, especially about the big stuff!") to weigh selection biased claims, wildly misplacing the odds that those claims are true.

When multiple people corroborate the same thing, it becomes more reliable. There's a list of factors that makes something more or less likely to be true. Selection bias, corroboration, possibility for correction, etc, all weigh up.
I don't think we need to be that obtuse. I'm not even much of a skeptic, let alone a radical one. Different types of claims under different circumstances have different probabilities, sometimes wildly different.

Sure. As would most people in the 1950s/60s when (we know recognize) all of what they did was quackery/zero efficacy. Give it 20 years

Yes. The guy is very good at persuasion. If I was trying to convince someone that my story was true, I'd use similar tactics.

Well, he's clearly fascinated and may well believe in demonic possession. The mind fills in the gaps, and memory/repeated storytelling does the rest. It's how humans work. As for credentials, every quack field around has some highly credentialed people behind it.

Oh for sure. Doesn't mean what I wrote above doesn't apply.

It's fairly rare for someone to make things up out of whole cloth. Embellish, story telling, filling in the blanks with that extra bit of a fantastic hook, is what people do. That forms a narrative over time that becomes their reality.
And raping small boys is at direct odds with the espoused faith of deeply religious priests. Yet lots of small boys got raped. You're reading way too much into this. Again, I refer you back to selection bias.
The Church goes out of its way to maintain its mythology - one of which is demonic possession.

I'm fairly sure he's not making the stories up. People get spooked too you know, and see things that didn't happen, and feel things that aren't real. When I was 19 I thought I'd seen a demonic possession - a friend started talking in tongues, their eyes went weird, and they knew things they shouldn't have known, as if they were seeing into my soul. They were on drugs.
Considering the pervasive of both religion and mental illness, millions of cases of this would be expects over the decades.

It usually is. Improvement rates vs placebo are in the single digit percentages for psychiatric interventions. Number needed to treat is usually over 10.

Again, this will happen even if possession doesn't exist.

This is superficially interesting, but the cause of it is also the reason that quack "natural" therapies have thousands of genuine testimonials of fast cures of conditions that doctors said were incurable.

Even if there is no demonic possession, highly plausible-seeming claims and testimony of it are certain to exist.

So what exactly are you basing your decisions on? How are you avoiding getting fooled?

The saying "believe only half of what you see and nothing of what you hear" is pretty sound advice - and that from someone who's not even much of a skeptic.

Anyway, I'm not saying to just call it BS. I think nihilism and automatic skepticism is unhealthy. If it interests you, then follow it up. Read more. If it doesn't, filing it in the "this is pretty likely to be nonsense, but I'll follow it up if ever I get a chance to talk to the guy in question" folder is the rational response to this.

edited to add: And even that is just the materialist/rational response, which is what you asked for, so it's what I'm giving. I don't think it's healthy to be too materialist. Strong irrational passions or beliefs are part of the tapestry of life and drive interests and emotion and energy and even intellect. And you don't always get to decide what you find stimulating. If demonic possession fascinates you and your heart/instincts say this is likely to be true, then go with it.

One may deny testimony, but one has to use a lot of effort of authority to destroy it. Neither requires understanding to do. One can leap from presupposition in either case.

Anyway, I would take personally witnessing apparent unexplained supernatural phenomena as witnessing a natural phenomena which is unknown or yet to be explainable.

Hearing testimony of such an event does require grains of salt, for one, a "demon possession" is sensational and worthy of faking for entertainment and profit rather than for some sake of knowledge.

Not really. This is more about how ignorant people talk about science when they actually don't know that much about it. I challenge you to show me evidence that "most" scientific research is "proved wrong."

No, this isn't really scientific at all.

This is just mostly just bad philosophy.

The position that I was challenging had nothing to do with materialism. Did you notice that? Probably not.

Speaking of presupposed, the entire idea of a demon who is able to possess a person is a presupposed narrative. Even when a record of phenomenon is apparent, there is no reason to attach the presupposed demon narrative to describe a system from and process by which the phenomenon manifests.

I have question as well about the article opening with a Witch and switching to a Priest. Witches have no dogma that mandates following the demon narrative. Though one would also count Witches among demonologists individually. It's an odd juxtaposition. I guess it gives an over-simplified impression of the people involved, while the important person in the scenario from a trauma perspective are the patient and their loved ones.

I'm not sure what your question actually is.

Conceptually, demon possession can be* understood like an infection. It doesn't matter whether you know what the origin of the infection is, how it's passed on, and so forth, you can still get sick from it. So even if the witch doesn't have a narrative that includes any specific sort of demonology, that element is simply not necessary in any way for demon possession to occur.

* Note: *CAN* be. For the purposes of this post, I'm just explaining one of many existing narratives regarding demons.

I'm not even sure what you're asking the article to do based on this statement.

Unsurely? Like you have question?

I am sure of the distinctions and commonalities among priests and witches, particularly in relationship with demon possession.

It's within the range of what articles do for an author to promote their other work, however styled.

Is over-simplification not worth having question about?

You said you had a question. But when I looked for a question, I didn't see one. None of your sentences ended in a question mark, and none of them were formulated like how one might formulate a question.

Now, it's entirely possible that you had questions. But it's quite clear that you never actually asked any of them in that post.

And your last sentence seemed peculiarly worded, as if it had absolutely no relevance to what preceded it.

I wrote I have question. Stopping there on reading the post would be a mistake in understanding what exact questions may follow.

What is compelling about unsurely reading mis-comprehension combined with meaningless criticism about sentences?

If you don't have question about the article's content, I bear no obligation for you to.

I suppose your narrative can be considered accurate. But I have a question about it. It seems relevant to the structure of your paragraph, if it is should be coherent, that the intended communication would be understandable.

One can combine words in many ways to form grammatically correct sentences. And in many ways, failure is possible.

The contrast among witches and priests also connects to the OP as nothing precludes a Witch from having an atheist assumption or materialistic assumption.

And also pantheist- which has no basic presupposition for the universe as God to have demons that possess.

Among people, anyone may accept the demon narrative as an analogy of a person being infected by a bug or malfunction is like being possessed by a demon.

It's alienating, outside the person's control, and frightening to those sensitive to display.


I knew a person diagnosed with mental illness who was deluded they were possessed by a living priest and they produced phenomenon in an attempt to prove it.