Recently, a Christian reader asked:
As an atheist, what do you make of the supernatural experiences of Marjoe Gortner who admits to being an evangelical fraud who was in it for the money, yet said he did experience healings and things he could not explain? I think also of a man named Richard Gallagher who is a well-respected psychiatrist trained at Columbia University. Gallagher is a Roman Catholic who definitely believes in demonic possession and professes to have seen it many times and has worked with Catholic exorcists. I ask this not to argue with your atheism, but what is your opinion? Did you ever experience demonic possession or any kind of supernatural things when you were a minister?
I have written about Marjoe Gortner in the past, Bruce, What Do Think of the Marjoe Gortner Story? While Gortner has repudiated his fraudulent past, he did have allegedly supernatural experiences he could not explain. What should we make of these unexplainable experiences?
Before attributing healings to God, proof of his existence must be provided. As a skeptic, I am not going to believe anything without sufficient evidence to justify a claim. When someone claims God did something, I am going to ask, “How do you know it was God that did this?” What empirical evidence can you provide that justifies your claim? Quoting the Bible is not evidence. The Bible is a book of claims; claims that require sufficient evidence to warrant belief. Gortner experienced things he couldn’t explain, but a lack of explanation doesn’t mean “God did it.” Gortner should continue to investigate these claims, but until he has evidence for them, at best, he should say, “I don’t know.” Of course, this approach is antithetical to how many, if not most Evangelicals, navigate the world. Questions and doubts are frowned upon. Certainty of belief is foundational to Evangelical Christianity. When is the last time you have heard a preacher say, “I don’t know.” Oh, these so-called men of God may privately have doubts and questions, but when they mount their respective pulpits, their words exude confidence and certainty.
The same goes for Robert Gallagher’s claims to have seen demonic possessions and exorcisms. How do we know Satan/demons exist? Are there other explanations for alleged possession behavior? As a pastor at Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas, I encountered several people the church and my fellow co-pastor, Pat Horner, claimed were demon-possessed. I concluded otherwise, believing both men were mentally ill. Prayers were uttered and exorcisms were performed, without success. What these men needed — professional psychological help — was never encouraged or offered. Horner regaled church members with stories of demonic possession from his missionary work in India and Mexico; of how he cast demons out of people. I questioned the truthfulness of these stories, but kept my doubts to myself.
Did I experience supernatural experiences as an Evangelical pastor? Sure, but I now understand that I was indoctrinated and conditioned to see the supernatural anytime I couldn’t explain something. “God did it” or “Satan did it” were common refrains when confronted with what I perceived to be experiences or behaviors I could not explain or understand. Instead of withholding judgment until sufficient evidence was garnered, I automatically assumed God or Satan/demons were the cause. Parishioners never heard me say from the pulpit, “I don’t know.” Not wanting to cause church members to lose their faith, I felt I needed to exude confidence, even when it was unwarranted.
During the deconversion process, my partner and I took a close look at the prayers we believed God answered on our behalf. We concluded that, with a handful of exceptions, our answered prayers could be explained without supernatural intervention. Either we answered our own prayers or other people did — no God needed. But, Bruce, you admit that there were a handful of answered prayers you could not explain! “God did it, right?” Certainly, that’s statistically possible, but not sufficient to convince us that a supernatural God supernaturally answered our prayers. If the existence of God hangs on a few unexplainable circumstances, that’s not sufficient evidence to convince us that said deity exists and is personally involved in our lives.
I am a skeptic and a materialist. If you want to convince me of the supernatural, I am going to insist you provide sufficient evidence for your claims. Anecdotes and personal experiences won’t cut it.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I would challenge your comment that god is ‘statistically’ possible, and argue that it is better to say conceptually possible. My reasoning goes back to arguments I had with believers several years ago, as they tried to use the statistical (they were actually invoking Bayesian concepts, but that’s another matter) method when it wasn’t justified. For example, on the specific points in this article they’d claim that if a healing took place that there might be a 0.01% chance that God was responsible. They’d then take this low percentage chance (which they were prepared to negotiate over because the amount didn’t affect their argument) and multiply it by the numbers of such claims to make the odds appear nearer to 100%.
The problem with this approach is that you can’t apply statistical methodology to something if it is only conceptual in nature. To do otherwise is to be able to magic into existence anything that you are able to imagine, from fairies to Bigfoot. Statistics work only where they have meaningful existence. So when we read the Bible we cannot regard its existence as being in any way attributable to God, because we haven’t established the statistical likelihood that God even exists. Indeed it’s possible to argue statistically that God cannot possibly exist, as the number of failed attempts to prove its existence amount to ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, though I’d not expect any theists to accept this argument!
Healings can be credibly explained by the placebo phenomenon which can appear to heal people but only of hysterical ailments that weren’t real in the first place. As for the existence of demons, I’ve dealt with mentally ill people who defied all treatment. I submit that even a hard core atheist might consider the possibility of an evil spirit inhabiting such a person. Perhaps demonic possession and mental illness are interchangable terms simply describing the same thing, The latter is a superstitious way of explaining the former.
I’m sure all former fundies recall spending thousands of hours praying for the healing of sick folk, from a head cold to both strangers and our loved ones dying of cancer. And when the seriously ill didn’t recover, we spoke of mysterious ways and the joys of heaven. I was always privately confused about prayers like this. God knew our requests before we made them and had fore-ordained the outcomes anyway. We weren’t gonna change his mind were we? He knew best, so why order us onto our knees to beg? When de-converting, a church I knew held nights of prayer for their young pastor who had a terminal brain tumour. I wondered how I could have stayed awake to participate. All we could ask was ‘Please heal Tim and look after his wife pregnant with their first child.’ Did I have to say that for 8 hours non-stop? Tim didn’t recover. It was one more factor in my deconversion. As a commenter said on this topic, he imagined god up in heaven with a stopwatch as folk held a special day of prayer for something. Was god saying ‘Excellent my sheeple, you’ve prayed for 8 hours, do another 2 and I might consider granting your request!’
And don’t get me started about evangelists with a ‘healing ministry’. If that were true, why weren’t they going into hospitals curing all the sick in them?
Well said. That particular God had feet of clay as God’s will, and you noticed. I remember the priests doing hospital rounds at the St, Vincent’s childrens’ ward in Toledo. I wish I could live it over just to ask them why didn’t they just get us kids all fixed so we could go home. I would ask why the children playing in the St. Vincent’s orphanage playground below my wondow were orphans? I recall feeling sorry for those orphans never thinking those orphans probably felt sorry for me looking down from my hospital bed. We hadn’t heard the stories about Catholic orphangaes being in close proximity to Catholic institutions to take in the illegitimate children of the Nuns and Priests. I’m glad I never heard such rumors as a child, whatever truth may have been in them. Life was ugly enough but I only see that in retrospect. Kids huh? Glad just to be alive.