Demons

Demons have been on my mind a lot lately. I've gone back to reading Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World again. I'd been reading Saint Augustine's City of God and some time ago I got to a portion in which Augustine wrote about demons. Of course, Augustine wrote under the premise that demons were really malevolent entities while Sagan invokes the term as a symbol for intellectual processes gone compulsively astray. Yet the effect is not so different; the nature of the cause may be different but both men caution the reader against the same effects. Sagan's book has this wonderful quote from Francis Bacon's 1620 work Novum Organon:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar [in Bacon's time, "the vulgar" referred to the common, majority of the people]. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding.

It's prettier hearing Augustine talk about such things as demons, though, as false mediators between God and humans.

There's so much in City of God that I recognise in the rhetoric of Christians I've heard all my life, in some ways more than the bible itself. It really speaks to how Augustine shaped the religion as we know it.

In talking about the faults of religion, Carl Sagan mentions the Holy Trinity as a tellingly confused concept. Augustine spends quite a lot of time explaining the Trinity, at one point talking about how the Trinity is plainly reflected in human nature. I was impressed by one particularly complicated line of thought:

For we both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us--colours, e.g., by seeing, sounds by hearing, smells by smelling, tastes by tasting, hard and soft objects by touching--of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?

Augustine addresses suicide later in the book but putting aside whether he's right or wrong about people always wanting to be happy or alive, there's also a problem with the certainty of love, as it's certainly possible for a person's affections to be manipulated chemically. He was aware of this and elsewhere he takes time to talk about the distinction between will and passion.

The insight into human nature is considerable and Carl Sagan acknowledges the power of religious stories and myths to relate such things. Sagan also has a quote from Bertrand Russell: "Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth."

Speaking of Bertrand Russell quotes, recently the famous former Muslim converted to atheism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has recently written an article announcing her conversion to Christianity called "Why I am now a Christian", in reference to Russell's "Why I am not a Christian". She talks about the influence Russell had on her initially becoming an atheist but the gist of her justification for her more recent conversion is that the human mind cannot effectively cope without the bedrock of some formally organised moral belief system. She also quotes G.K. Chesterton "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." This seems similar to what Augustine says about the dangers of demons leading the mind astray.

So it's not like she had an epiphany, some sudden awareness of God's existence and the veracity of scripture. It's similar to what Jordan Peterson once said when asked if he believed in God: that he behaves as though he does. Can this sort of conscious double think really be useful? Carl Sagan had a quote from Thomas Paine on the matter:

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Of course, Hirsi Ali and Peterson are being somewhat honest about the dissonance. Does that make it better? Sagan acknowledges Christianity was the origin of many of the tools of rational thought that characterise science:

On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton's Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers.

Maybe this new conscious application of Christian belief will work, I won't claim to have the wisdom to say. It seems like it would be cold comfort to most people, though, for whom comfort is a primary function of religion.