Are Demons, Ghosts, and Exorcisms Real? An Investigation with Billy Hallowell.

hey we are glad you are with us today for a show that can only be described as somewhat eerie we're talking about demons and the supernatural and exorcism and ghosts what's the evidence that they are real what does the data show does it happen today can it be described as mental illness well we're going to start talking with this and i don't know anybody more qualified and bring an interesting perspective than my friend billy halwa who's written a new book just out called plain with fire and what i like about it is he brings his training in journalism to kind of look at this with a skeptical eye of a journalist of course he's a christian so he has some biases but i think one of the things i love billy is you work really hard in this book to just kind of approach this and say what is the data show we're going to jump in and get into that but thanks for taking the time to come on the show hey thanks for having me yeah well let's jump in kind of the obvious first question that i ask when anybody writes any book but especially a book on demons and the occult is why write on this well i laugh because if you were to tell me two years ago that i was gonna do this i would have said you're crazy i'm not gonna write this book um you know i do like to tackle difficult topics so the first book i wrote was on the end times and i like to approach topics from okay what do you believe let's let's go to all the christians out there who are highly qualified who are theologians who understand these issues and let me go and present sort of that overarching christian view and so this has been an issue that as a journalist actually has come up repeatedly when i was i would cover these stories of possession when the conjuring came out you know the studio the hollywood studios came out they're like listen will you cover this so we would kind of cover the based on a true story and then being a lifelong christian i was just intrigued by it obviously but i also felt like i had never really been to a church that really addressed it like i felt like it's a very under addressed issue within the church we talk about it um and i can't speak for every church but the churches i've been to we speak about evil but we don't really get into what it really means how it manifests itself so long story short it was a very strange occurrence the opportunity emerged it was presented to me and you know this as an author you usually have to kind of go through and put together a proposal and i didn't do any of that i mean this was something that came up in a conversation and it was offered to me and i was taken by surprise a little bit by it and i sat on it for two months and i prayed about it because i'm like wow do i want to write this like do i want to do this you know and then i did it i felt like i was supposed to do it so i did it well good for you i think it's a great book i didn't know what to expect because we've done interviews i've watched some of your other stuff but hadn't read your books and i was really pleasantly surprised just how you aim to be balanced in this and not stretch the evidence beyond what it shows even though you're christian and clearly believe in the reality of demons i think you did a great job of kind of balancing that by the way those who are joining us we'd love to hear where you're from we have people from boston uh coming in and we often have people from around the world this channel very quickly is brought to you by biola apologetics so if you're new make sure you hit subscribe because we have some other interviews coming up you are not going to want to miss well let's jump in and tell me this before we start looking at the evidence for the existence of demons what how as a journalist do you uniquely approach this question versus me i'm an apologist versus a theologian what do you bring in how do you try to balance in your mind between falling for these exaggerated stories yet not also ruling them out you know i am like like you know i'm a lifelong christian so i believe in these things right but for me it's always about evidence it's where is the evidence that i can go to and that's sometimes difficult on a topic like this but are there cases that have evidence that is hard to dispute that is on the record that has something about it that's unique and sometimes the evidence manifests itself in people being unwilling to talk about their experiences you now just because someone's unwilling doesn't mean it's true but it does give you sort of a lens into seeing okay that person there's a reason why they're hesitant and so i start approaching things from that perspective i also want to understand what are the different viewpoints so one of the first things i do is i try to dive in and look on an issue like this okay you know what are demons there's different ideas about that um how do they manifest themselves today not everybody believes they do even in the christian world so understanding the different pieces of it but really going back to that evidence and of course you start with scripture because if i'm going to look at this from a christian perspective that's the first place you really want to look and then i go to those individual stories the claims over the last 100 years and in different people's experiences and i try to verify as much as i can okay is this a story i want to tell or you know if there's not a lot of evidence is the person compelling is there something about that individual that would connect or resonate uh with people so that's sort of the starting point for me that makes sense when i typically people ask me why i believe in demons one things i'll point towards is the scriptures if the scriptures are true and reliable this includes the reality of demons but another piece of evidence a different way we could stop kind of start is kind of from the bottom up saying let's look at some cases of demon possession demon haunting and see if there's any good evidence for this so you approach this as a journalist let's look at what's often called cranmer's claims what on earth is happening with this story and are you convinced there's any reason in this case to believe that demons are involved so this story surrounds a guy named bob cranmer he's out in pennsylvania now bob cranmer was a county commissioner in allegheny pennsylvania so this is a guy who was a politician he was elected to a position and after he was elected to this position he comes forward with this story of things that have been going on in his house now i first encountered bob i want to say probably 2013 2014 when i was working at the blaze and somebody had tipped me off that this guy had a story and it was a guy who wasn't just some random guy it was this politician and so i sat down with bob and he told me he proceeded to tell me that he was dealing with something called infestation that his home was basically i think it's what people would call haunted in the christian world we would say there was an evil presence it was there was almost a possession of the location right that's how we sort of describe infestation now not everybody believes in infestation even those who believe in possession and we can talk about that after but inside the home he had numerous children he and his wife it was sort of his dream home he grew up in that neighborhood always wanted to live in this house they move into the house crazy things start happening um and they start going to just to try to get help right and when i say crazy things the children were affected they were misbehaving in strange ways the wife was experiencing um mental duress there were all sorts of things happening it was sort of chaos in the home and then they started having things like mysterious red fluid coming off of the walls they started it just it started manifesting itself and so i'm listening to the story and i was intrigued by it and what do i do i want to know is this true are there facts that i can verify and so sometimes when you don't have things you can look at what you'll do is you'll start calling the other people who you were told were involved in the case and i called other people and what was remarkable to me some of these people would not be named they would not go on the record but they verified everything he said and so that was very intriguing to me and it's a very complex story he eventually was able to get rid of this but it took two years of effort on the part of different churches in the community to sort of heal this home that's crazy so basically to what's convincing is some people is that he tells a story and others are able to corroborate the same story uh how would how would say a skeptic write some of this off what would be the common ways people just don't buy it well in the case of this story i think it's important to tell the other side which is that former residents the children of former residents of that home have said we never had these problems inside the home right and so i cover that in the book i think it's important you have to show both sides of it um i don't know how a skeptic would write off numerous people telling you that they've seen and i get into details and playing with fire about the things that people saw in that home the things that they experienced they would put the passion of the christ on dvd they would play it on loop in one of the rooms in the home and they would come home and the dvd would be like out of the dvd player right and the tv would be off so there were all sorts of things that were seen inside of this home including a location in the home that was closed off that they felt that this location was sort of the centerpiece of this table what was going on in the house and when they took the wall down they found toys strange drawings things that there was no way could have been placed in there and people validated those stories so a skeptic could say well bob made it up he made it up for money they could they could come up with all sorts of different options for how these things unfolded but there were people there who saw and who experienced these things and so i'm i am very skeptical of everything i'm not going to tell people this definitely happened i think it's a compelling case in which we have to at the least say something was happening that people could not explain by natural needs i think that's a really fair approach and you take that plane with fire not overstate but also not dismiss and i think it's really interesting when i've done research on say near-death experiences about four percent of the population at least in germany and arguably in the us have had some kind of near-death experience but they're very reluctant to share their stories because people think they're crazy so it seems to me that if this is a politician who's public what would he have to gain by inventing a story like this i mean how much does that add i don't think he has a lot to gain he wrote a book about it and you're always going to have people who say well you know great your story could become the next conjuring movie right but there's a lot that goes along with this to your point it is really difficult to come forward and say that you've had some sort of supernatural experience and yet 45 of the country not christians 45 of general people in this country believe in ghosts and believe in demons so almost half of the population is admitting they believe in these things and many of those people have had those experiences and they're they're not willing to show them i can tell you i encountered numerous people who were too afraid to share their story with me i knew their story and i was going to them and i was saying hey we'll change your name we don't even have to put your name and i will protect your identity and they still didn't want to share it right and it's because of that stigma it's because i wrote the book and i know there's people who are going to say oh you're crazy for writing it but i think once you dive into it you start to read it i would hope that people can see that there's a fair approach given but you can't write all these people's stories off as crazy because they're not crazy people i i think you do take a fair approach and by the way i see some questions in here about what demons are in biblical view we are going to get to that i promise i love that you're asking questions but i want to hear another case first you have a book one that just frankly kind of freaked me out and i gotta warn our viewers before you talk about this indiana case it i was reading this book before i was going to sleep at night and was like maybe i'm going to read something else it's just eerie stuff that feels like it comes from a horror film but there's some documented evidence for this so talk about the indiana case yeah this was the case actually when you would ask me that first question what made you want to do this one of the big stories um in 2013 and 2014 that i had covered when i was the blaze was this case in indiana and it was a mother her mother so a mama grandma and three kids and they were claiming that and this actually happened in 2011 but it wasn't until a couple years later that it made its way into the press they were claiming that they were experiencing possession the mother was experiencing possession and it would sort of jump to the children and so when officials heard this and doctors for this they assumed that there was some sort of abuse going on in the home in fact she lost custody of the children for a time during this and there was one day they were at a doctor's office the doctor was called 9-1-1 because the kids were acting erratic they were acting crazy they get to the hospital and this is sort of i'm sort of truncating the story but they get to the hospital and a cps child care worker and a nurse and this is important we're in the room with the mom the grandmother and at least one of the kids and i can't even believe i'm saying this and you've read it so you know yeah but they claim that this little boy in the midst of this fit walked up the side of the wall and and sort of did a flip and landed on his feet now of course the cps worker who actually placed this in an official cps report which is in the book and people can read um ran out of the room went to get the doctor of course the doctor comes in doesn't believe the story and the nurse who is in the room has valid validated this has gone on the record and this was such a compelling story okay and that's just one of the elements of what went on that the indianapolis star actually wrote a massive story on this it was in a mainstream outlet it went viral it was all over the world um back in 2014 and so my approach to this was to go i didn't really want to talk with the family they had been out there they had talked about it a couple years had passed obviously i wanted to talk to the sheriff who investigated the case so i did i wanted to talk to the priest who investigated the case and so i did and what was remarkable was to sort of hear them explain what they experienced that they experienced things they couldn't explain and throughout this entire case and so you have real documentation of again something going on that people could not explain and there are so many strange details in the case and in fact the house ended up being bought by a reality tv star they demolished the house they made a movie about it all sorts of other things went on in this case but the case itself is one of the most compelling now am i saying it's true no but i will say for me looking at that evidence including staff members at the cps office who at least one of them left her job after and left the state and moved away so this had a profound impact on the people who were involved in it did some of the stories that you researched for this kind of surprise you and take you back like there must have been things you didn't expect to uncover in writing a book like this absolutely i mean i think yeah there were a few things the the one consistency that really disturbed me in talking with a few people who had gone through what they believed was a possession right i'm not talking about like a spiritual attack something minor i'm talking about a full possession was this thought that they had in their mind that they wanted to end their life it was something that i don't know why it was just something about this detail that really stuck with me and it really freaked me out and it wasn't just oh you know maybe i should end my life it was you need to end your life you don't matter and you're in your life and it drove at least one of these people to attempt to do that and to obsess over that and that was a weird consistency and it shouldn't be that strange to me because we when you read the descriptions of satan in scripture i mean this is basically to destroy i mean this idea of trying to destroy us that would make sense but to hear people describe what it was like to slowly go through this process finding themselves in that state really struck me you know it is powerful when you look at scripture satan is not only a liar but he's a murderer is what we're told so and throws people into the fire and the guy claws himself across the sea of galilee so these descriptions do really fit in the way that uh you're talking about it so let me ask you this then we'll get back to the evidence what does hollywood get right at least in terms of a biblical view of say demons and satan in the supernatural and what does it get wrong so the interesting thing about hollywood and and i find this convicting and before i answer that it's part of the answer we asked people we went out and asked church leaders so this wasn't just pastors it was youth leaders it was people in charge of the church whether they were volunteers or on staff we asked them a bunch of questions about this do you think that demons can impact culture over 80 said yes do you believe demons can impact individuals lives over 80 said yes are your churches talking about this enough are your pastors talking about this enough 78 said no only 17 of these protestant leaders had some sort of deliverance ministry in their church so when you ask what hollywood has right i guess at a baseline they're talking about it they're actually talking about these issues not the right way all the time most of the time not the right way but they're bringing them up more than some churches are and so that should actually be terrifying to christians who care about this issue because the only framing that some people have is what hollywood is giving now there are some films that have attempted to really show that struggle over good and evil when you look at ephesians 6 and you look at sort of what we know is bubbling beneath the surface i think hollywood does a good job sometimes of actually illustrating what that looks what that could look like um and some of the films that that are based on a true story of course they're over the top there's pea soup spewing it's crazy um but but that baseline of sort of the good and evil i think hollywood does sometimes get right and you know again if we're not talking about this right i'm not saying obsessing over but trying to understand it and culture has decided to take their own spin on it that should give us some pause i think as christians because i can't think of another issue and you are you are the bible expert here so i'm going to say this and correct me if you want i can't think of another issue that's spoken about so much in scripture and has talked about so little in comparison to how much it's talked about that's really interesting i i can't think of one off the top my head but you're probably right certainly the new testament more so than the old testament when it comes to demons and angels because we see a little bit more information new in the old but you're probably right about that i was struck that you you cited in the book that i think is 2017 that the horror film industry passed like a billion dollars in profits and it was increasing before covet who knows if that'll increase it or change it but at the same time our church our culture is becoming less shaped by the larger christian narrative why do you think that is why would there be all these shows and all this discussion and fascination and interest in you writing a book on this at the same time the culture's kind of moving away from its commitments largely speaking to the christian story yeah i think that's a great question and i think there's probably a lot of different answers we could give to that but my sense is that we all have something built into us that god put there that we want to understand these things these are the most basic questions right and we're looking at evil around the world we're looking at new stories that we can't process we don't really understand whether these things are happening more frequently or we're having a lens or a light rather shined on them because of social media and technology i tend to think we're seeing more of these strange events there's a real sense that evil exists and so what are people to do with that we're intrigued by it we want to understand it why are people going to see psychics and still buying ouija boards like crazy because there's this deep i think thirst to try to connect with the things we don't understand the danger is when you're pushing god out you're opening sort of this vacuum right for people if they're not hearing the gospel where they're trying to fill that void with something and so i think one of the problems with hollywood is that you know it can often lead people to have intrigue maybe that they wouldn't have had otherwise when it's not handled well um but it is very fascinating to me that we have this sort of you know drift away culturally from god and yet we have this real almost obsession with the horror film genre right and it's not just film it's tv um and it's and when you watch a reality show everybody on the reality show is generally going to see a psychic at some point so you you wonder like what is going what is going on here right and so i think that is at the core of it that's a really good response and by the way those who just join us we're here with billy holloway he works with pureflix is a journalist he's written a fascinating new book called playing with fire which takes really an honest sober look at what's the evidence for demons ghosts and exorcisms now there's other stories we won't get into right now but one of the pieces of evidence i found fascinating i first read in the one of my favorite books in the historical jesus is called the jesus legend by paul rhodes eddie and by greg boyd and they were countering this naturalistic worldview and they said across cultures in a large percentage of cultures you find this kind of spirit or demon possession and there's characteristics like somebody just get becoming very violent entering into a state where later they have no memory of it becoming very very strong what what really is the evidence for that one and second in your mind how significant is that in terms of making a case for the reality of demons yeah i think it's it's obviously something that's been studied a lot and what what i think is most fascinating about it is the claim that people can speak languages they don't know i mean that to me because you can talk about you could say well it's just mental illness and of course mental illness exists in every culture but the reality is almost every single culture since the beginning of his human history has had these stories right of of possession essentially and they're told in different ways there are different you know elements of those stories and we even see that today with the contemporary stories not every person who's affected seems to be affected the same way now that would cause a critic to say well there's not consistencies shouldn't this always look the same well no it shouldn't always look the same i would i wouldn't assume it would why would we think that it doesn't always look the same in scripture when we see the stories there are different elements there are different levels to which people are are afflicted uh before jesus heals them um and so i think i think for me when i look at that evidence i'm saying to myself okay okay there's clearly something going on here and you have experts who are mental health experts who will look at these cases and will say i mean i've had people tell me and they're not saying this publicly but they've told me off the record that they work in this field and i'm not talking about the medical field i'm talking about the you know spiritual field dealing with these issues and that they will get a call a couple times a year from mental institutions who will say we have a case we need you to keep it off the record and we don't know how to deal with this can you come and look wow and so what is so interesting to me is that there seems to be a whole community of people in the realm of science including prominent doctors i live in new york or here in new york city who are looking at this issue and saying there's something here they may not know what they think it is but there are some like richard gallagher who are working and he's a respected psychiatrist who are working day in and day out trying to solve these issues working with the catholic church and others so we have a we have a history there to look at but to me the most compelling piece is if somebody's speaking a language which they've never learned and they're doing it in an adequate way where it's understandable i don't know how well should you explain that so that that one sticks out to me is very fascinating that is a really fascinating point now you mentioned kind of like mental illness and certain professionals and psychiatrists i want to come back to the question of whether or not this can be explained by mental illness and clearly speaking a language can't so that already challenges it but tell us the story of m scott peck and i asked because i read his book the road less traveled in college thoroughly enjoyed it he is a harvard trained professional died in 2005 but as far as i understand he did not believe claim to believe in demons or satan but his last book that he wrote is called glimpses of the devil a psychiatrist's personal account of possession what on earth convinced a psychiatrist who's used to interpreting what we might call erratic or unexplained behavior by pointing to the brain or some mental illness that there actually is a spiritual realm of demon-like beings yeah so with m scott peck and others it's interesting it's it's usually this common thread of actually being involved in an exorcism actually saying okay you know what i'm gonna take part and in his case there were two cases that he took part in and they convinced him i mean that he was actually able to see evil and so we see this with richard with dr richard gallagher too i mean there are plenty of people who have gone through this in the science realm they're kind of like oh this doesn't exist i don't believe in this i'm a doctor i believe in science and you're confronted with actually seeing people behave and manifest in ways that you can't explain whether that's strength that you can't explain whether that that's in some cases i don't need to get away from his story but i think his is pretty cut and dry he saw two people two women go through this and it changed his perspective but in gallagher's case he actually i mean he it's crazy he was on a phone call with a priest about this woman that he was trying to help and he claims that a voice came over the phone and communicated with both him and the priest and they were 2 000 miles apart they were 2000 miles away from each other when this happened and it was a voice that was threatening them to stay away from her don't help her and so you hear he's like i mean this is somebody who would not make this up right he's a well-respected psychiatrist so sure there are so many examples of this and i think with m scott peck we see that we see somebody confronting evil seeing it for what it is and having to and and thank goodness people are willing to change their perspective to say okay there's something going on here that's really helpful by the way i just got a comment that my mic is much louder than yours if you all can make a comment in the comments if this is better i turn it down that would be helpful let's talk about one more piece of evidence for kind of the supernatural realm which are our ouija boards and i mean i know i'm probably like a lot of people where i haven't done ouija board i'm in sixth grade i had a friend start when i was like i'm done let's not do this but i can tell you i have people i know and completely trust that tell me things that had been revealed to them they could not possibly have known that they verified with other people later on what do you think is the evidence that there's something to ouija boards that at least points towards kind of this supernatural realm yeah yeah you know i think one of the problems with something like the ouija board is that critics will say yeah but i've used one and i never had a problem and the vast majority of people might use a ouija board and they think they're playing a parlor game it's nothing harmless and they may have no problem with it but there are enough people who have actually had life-changing life-altering issues after using a ouija board some of them i know as well some of them are not willing to speak about it um and they have had terrifying things happen in their home in their lives now here's here's the thing about the ouija board okay it promises to open a door right for you to communicate with the dead i mean that's the entire premise you're trying to communicate with the spirit world and that's how they work in their in their advertisements and this became a toy it became something that we think is fun like you were saying you know friends will pull it out at a sleepover and everyone's laughing you're having a good time well some people don't have a very good time after they use it and so i wanted to go and sort of look at the history of it like what is the history of this thing because it's one thing to sort of look at it as this tool that's fun to play with in a board game but where did it come from and i had never really thought about that before and so when i started digging into this sort of mysterious shrouded history one of the things that stood out to me and this is sort of a commentary on the media too i mean when you go back to the 1800s and you look at what was going on back then the wall the um new york times the associated press these outlets would actually often cover different stories that involve the ouija board they would talk about the history of it they would talk about cases right like let's say somebody committed to murder and they claimed the ouija board told them to do it that would be included in the news report um if there was a possession of some sort the one the washington post covered the story that was based that was the basis of the exorcist in a news story in the 1940s so my point is the media was once opened to these things now critics would say well yes everybody you know back then they just weren't as astute they weren't as smart they weren't as you know but i think it's actually fascinating to look back at a time when people were more in tune with the spiritual to see how they communicated about it so when it comes to the ouija board there is a deep history to it it was actually something that was purportedly created by this woman helen peters she was a medium and it was created for the exact purpose of what it's used for as a game which was to communicate with the dead and you have a history of people turning to the board and it was called a talking board that was initially what it was called a talking board until helen allegedly claimed um that the board wanted to be called the ouija board so this name apparently came from the board itself communicating that that's what the name should be so the long story short of it there is a very eerie history of this and the thing that really stuck out to me was this man william fold who he he had created now he had inherited the rights to it the new york times at the time in 1920 1929 1927 it was when he died they called him the creator he wasn't the creator of it but he owned a factory where he was producing ouija boards and he fell off the top of the factory he was up replacing a flag and he died he fell off of the ouija board factory and died and so i was looking at his obituary which was in the new york times and it was describing this incident and i was just thinking what a strange it's a strange detail it's a very shrouded and bizarre history but i would i wanted to mention one more thing about the board during wartime people who were desperate right it sort of preys on the desperation of people desperate to connect with their deceased loved ones they would turn to the board in droves and so throughout history when things have gotten difficult when there's been a war or a tough moment people will often legitimately turn to it to try to find that soulless and that peace by connecting with their dead loved ones so it's got that history to it didn't fold say that the board told him to build kind of the house and the chimney in the way they did which led to his death did i get that detail right so one of the claims is that he believed and of course you know we have things that are documented right which is his death that's documented one of the claims surrounding his life is that he was told by the board to build that very factory that he fell off of yes wow which would fit what demons do if there's demons behind something like a ouija board not necessarily other spirits doesn't prove it but kind of fits the larger narrative that's there okay let's anything that i missed in terms of evidence you would offer for the reality of demons that i didn't ask you about so far or is that a pretty good case so far you know i think it's a pretty good case so far i think one of the things you know that just as you're asking this that comes to mind and a lot of critics will say this well if this is happening why isn't it so out in the open that everyone can see getting recorded on their phones and documented and one of the responses to that that has come from some i've been interviewed has been well if you are satan if you are a demon if there's evil you would want to hide in the shadows you wouldn't want to be out in front and so i find that interesting i think it's compelling i think some would say it's a cop-out on this issue but i had people saying to me don't write this book you're giving attention to something you shouldn't be giving attention to and and my thought is the opposite my thought is we're not talking about this stuff you don't have to believe this right you could think everything that we're talking about here is not true and that this is crazy but to not have the conversation especially for christians right when we talk about evidence especially for christians is a very dangerous thing we are leaving out a massive part of of the gospel and i would also add and then i will be quiet and let you ask your next question that if we if we don't fully understand and this is my takeaway here right one of them if we don't fully understand evil and what it is and the bible is very clear about this and i just ignored it i just always glazed over it read it kind of knew satan's bad obviously you know but if we don't understand that i think that we lack what we need to a degree to fully understand the good like why do we need jesus why do we need christ why do we why do we need any of that i mean it points us right back to that so rather than obsess over the dark and the evil i think we understand it we see it for what it is we see the effect it can have over ourselves and culture but we're pointed back to truth in that process so if it's true that a lot of people say our culture is dominated by naturalism which explains everything scientifically which i would argue we see in movies like stranger things which seem to have a demonic realm but it's all explained by science then one of the ways to counter this is to show that there is a demonic real realm and you cover the story in your book about the exorcism and how actually the person who first wrote the book was trying to communicate these stories in a positive way that people would actually believe there's a demonic realm first off did i get that right and second off what is the story behind the exorcism yeah i mean you got it right he act so blatantly the author he he actually thought he was writing like a mystery crime you know book he didn't think he was writing something terrifying which because if you don't if people don't realize this the exorcist the movie is based on his book and so blatty often spoke about this and said i i didn't even realize i was writing something scary i thought i had a compelling case of exploring evil people but it was more of a mystery for him and he was really compelled by this and what's so interesting about the exorcist we talked about the ammons case right out of indiana both of those cases were made public when somebody gave information to a journalist and that is so interesting to me so in the case of the exorcist in 1948 there was this little boy robbie now that's a moniker we don't know his real name to this day robbie's identity has never been revealed but robbie was the basis of that book and of the film and what happened to him was that he apparently had an aunt his aunt tilly and she was very into the ouija board and communicating with spirits and she had sort of gotten him into that tilly dies and all of a sudden they start having crazy things happen inside their home and inside the family home the bed is shaking there's all sorts of things going on now this is according to his family and they seek help they seek doctors they seek anybody they can to help them and they end up in st louis and they end up seeking help from the catholic church and it's this crazy case of multiple exorcisms over this little boy and what's different about this case is that there were actually journals kept by the priests who were involved in this and these were this was all kept under wraps but those journals document some of the most horrific and terrifying things you can imagine words appearing on his body and disappearing one of the priests had his nose broken during these violent fits that this kid would go through and so this kid was healed okay he was a teenager he ends up being healed and the church assumed the catholic church assumes this is a closed case nobody will ever know about it well somebody leaks it to the washington post and they write a story about it and william blatty the yeah that's uh so that's how this came about william blatty read the story and he heard about it from a college professor of his and he was captivated by this story of robbie's ordeal and so he wrote the exorcist based on that and what's so interesting is that years later somebody [ __ ] sent him shared with him that journal that had been under wraps for all those years so he had a chance to read it and it's available people can read excerpts from this journal and the priests over the years and again this goes back to when you ask is somebody's story legitimate if somebody is hesitant to share it it does give some credence and those priests always felt like that story should have never been revealed and to this day we don't know who he is this boy did not want his identity revealed and he'll probably go to the grave without us knowing who he was gosh that is so fascinating well we are here with billy halloway looking at the evidence for demons and we've been looking at uh stories today we look at cross-cultural evidence let me ask you one more question about this then i want to shift to some of the biblical evidence we've had some great questions in the comment section that you deal with in the book plane with fire but given all you've researched and all you've seen is a journalist if you were going to reject this what route would you take to reject it meaning would you say we just don't know and there has to be an explanation would you say it's mental illness what approach would you take if you're forced to like debate the other side yeah that's a great question i mean i i think the mental illness aspects are interesting but they only go so far because not when you look at when you look at what could be explained only so much of it could be explained by mental illness having extra strength having the ability to speak in another language not responding to certain things that mental illness would respond to those are things that we would have to explain away i think i would have to say if i was going to take the other approach it would have to be well there's not enough evidence overall in all of these cases there's not compelling evidence that's interesting that's very similar to i think on the resurrection it's just kind of a naturalistic bias doesn't meet the standard of evidence which means this like many other issues really comes back to a question of world view um so let's shift speaking of worldview let's shift to some of what the scripture says about demons and there's two kind of competing narratives so to speak about what demons are and where they come from one is that they're fallen angels what is that narrative and why what is the evidence behind it biblically speaking yeah i mean this this notion that angels like human being has essentially had the ability to choose right and so when you know with satan being a fallen angel having the ability to say i'm either going to follow god i'm not going to follow god and you and they make that choice now where that gets a little rickety and interesting i won't even say rickety because i think it's i think it's fascinating and it actually makes sense that god would give that right to any spiritual being that he's created right if he's giving it to human beings why would he not give it to angels one of the debates surrounding that is well did angels have one opportunity to make that choice at one point in time and they made that choice and they either became demons and angels and that was it or is is that free will something that they continue to have could an angel today become a demon right and you can't get we can't answer that we really don't have the evidence to answer that but i think it's interesting um and so you know biblically when you look through when you look through scripture there's nothing that overtly says it there are certain interpretations based on revelation and some other places where people would sort of pull that out but it does seem to be the most plausible considering what we are to believe about about satan himself okay what about the explanation that michael heiser who i had in the show a few weeks ago has written the book demons become really one of the world leading scholars on angel's demons the supernatural unseen realm he favors the position that demons are the spirits from the nephilim back in genesis chapter six these angels that had sex and got married with human beings that helped bring on the flood what it like explain that view to us and then maybe what you think of it yeah yeah i mean this is like when you get very and everything you just said every time i explain this people look at me like i'm crazy like what because i think a lot of christians have never heard it and michael heiser is phenomenal i think he does an amazing job of making his case on this um one of the struggles with this theory we have very little information in the biblical text on the nephilim right we don't really know a lot about them and so there are different theories on what they are they're mentioned twice they're also mentioned in numbers and so because we don't know a lot about them i think the initial reaction that people have to that is okay well i don't know but we we do have another text it's outside of the bible um one enoch and in that text when that's really where a lot of this comes from now this is a text that people might dismiss because they'll say well it's not part of the canon it's outside of the canon and appealing to it is probably is problematic but we do have jude in the bible actually you know referring to it and talking about moses and all that so you've got these references to it that are actually in scripture and so what we do know based on that and i want you to jump in and correct me if you don't agree but what we do know is that at least people were aware of it at the time judah was aware of the book and that with that awareness there were there was respect for at least the details that jude is referring to in scripture not the entire book there's there's no evidence that jude is saying that an entire book is to be believed but it's in in enoch that we see this description of what you were talking about which is angels essentially mating with women and creating these nephilim now the idea is that after the flood one of the ideas surrounding this after the flood they became disembodied right and they were looking to be re-embodied they were looking to infest people's bodies and to again take on a human form and so that is an alternative theory to the fallen angel one and what's interesting is that when we actually did polling on this the vast majority of church leaders are still very much in the fallen angel um camp right but heiser and others they make very compelling arguments for me my struggle i always go back to scripture and i try to say okay what does scripture tell me and if scripture is not telling me enough about something i pause and i say i just don't know my default would be a lit i'm a little more in the camp of i think fallen angels but i don't think it matters to be honest with you what what they are because at the end of the day what we need to worry about is the description of what they can do and what we see them do in scripture because that is what is concrete and present does that seem fair yeah that seems fair i wanted you to describe the two different positions and how you view that and if we don't know for sure uh we don't know for sure i think that's completely fair uh so let's make it a question that always comes up and andrew asked in the comments earlier was whether or not christians can be possessed by demons and a distinction that's often made is oppressed versus possessed so let's start maybe what is that distinction between the two and what do you think the scripture says about it so that distinction is really interesting and one of the things i tried to do in the book in playing with fire was to really differentiate these different terms because everybody exorcism deliverance you know possession oppression they all have different definitions depending on what theological camp they're in in the christian realm and so you really have to try to get down and say okay this is what these things mean now possession in my in my mind is full control that the demonic entity has taken full control of you you've done something to open a door that has allowed that to happen and that can manifest itself as we see in scripture in very scary situations and these are very rare cases possession is not something that's happening and everybody will tell you this anybody i interviewed who either dealt in the protestant realm or the catholic realm would say listen most of the cases we investigate are not possession there's another explanation to them you know it's very rare but it does happen oppression is very different oppression seems to be something that all of us could fall prey to that a christian a non-christian anybody and and this is where the demonic entity is not inside of you but it is around you it's imp impacting your life in some way um it could be that you're facing some struggle as a result of it you may have some thoughts that are you know very negative so it's it's it's not a full control over the person it could be a partial control over the person and so that seemed to be the debt those seem to be the definitions that the experts i was speaking with were able to sort of give me and i found that very compelling so so the short answer can a christian be possessed i i think that most would say no but not everybody some people think christians can become possessed and the bottom line reason would be because if we have the holy spirit inside of us uh there cannot be a demon that comes in and takes over the realm of where the holy spirit is i think of the story in mark that's in the other synoptic gospels about jesus saying you've got to kick out the strong man first and some would say that's a strong man of the holy spirit inside somebody yet you made the interesting point i'd never thought of before that at least some catholics would say it could come inside your body but that's different than it taking over your soul so is that one way that people would distinguish that yes yeah and i think the other way so i what you just described is more of where i am i don't personally i think i don't think that a christian who truly has the holy spirit is going to face a full possession it seems very unlikely and i would say impossible but if you believe you can lose salvation and so this is where the conversation gets interesting right you get very theological if you believe you could lose salvation well then there's nothing to stop you from saying that you've crowded out the holy spirit so much in your life with what you're doing that you could maybe open up that that realm right you could maybe start to allow that in so that would be the other side of saying okay this is maybe this is possible not only just demons we also talk about exorcisms we don't have time to go into all that but just kind of quickly on on ghosts now as i understand it a ghost is understood to be somebody who dies and rather than going to face judgment or eternal life stays back in human realm for to right some wrong or maybe to haunt a house or something like that what's the evidence for ghosts let's start there do you think there's good reason to believe that ghosts exist so no um so and i've had people challenge me on this i think going through and talking to different experts on it i'm open to being convinced otherwise i would again go back to scripture and you're again you are the experts here so i want you to check me but when i look at scripture i see some very interesting things happening i see saul um you know going to a medium and calling up samuel and you have this strange moment we're not told that that's a haunting we're not told even i don't even think we're really told that that that's definitely samuel coming back it could be an image that god is giving it could there's a million things that could be going on there in fact the medium she seemed surprised that she was even able to do it right she's like oh like here he is right so there's that you have the fascinating moment after jesus's death where i never noticed this and i can't i mean like ashamed to admit this where people are coming out of their tombs and going into town and you're like wait a minute is this like a it's almost like this zombie-like but it's not i think it's obviously showing the overcoming of death that's about to happen but that that doesn't really seem like ghostly to me either and you have some other examples that are like that but none of them seem to be a person dying and remaining behind to haunt and so we don't we don't have a lot of examples of that in scripture and it seems to me there's a debate about when you died you go straight to heaven are you asleep until you know the end of days there's different debates about that but but when you talk to experts about this and these are people who see this every day they will say that this assumption that you're communicating with a ghost or a ouija board or that you're communicating with a dead person that you're actually communicating with a demonic entity that wants you to believe you're communicating with a dead person and that was compelling to me and going through and just really thinking about this is that that could actually be the case that's really interesting so you have evidence that could be interpreted by ghosts but also could have another possible interpretation there's not what you would say unique evidence for ghosts what about the passage where i believe the apostles that's in luke say that they when jesus is coming to him they thought that they saw a ghost does that indicate that they believed in ghosts or what does that tell us yeah um so there are a lot of different theories about that as well is that i mean listen when we get afraid we'll say oh my gosh is it a ghost right there's people who talk about hunting and is it the same sort of thing are they just saying is it maybe they've never seen a ghost a day in their lives but they're assuming but but there's also different um historical narratives on the what the words they're using are that it's actually a spirit that they're referring to right which would not be out of step with what we're talking about which could be a demanding demonic entity which is obviously a spirit and so we can look at that different ways but um i don't i don't know that i would think that that's sort of proof that ghosts exist it's proof that people believe maybe at the time that they could and maybe even when we've seen the disciples at other moments not always have the most amazing judgment so if they could they could have been off off in that moment as well yeah that raised a lot of interesting questions like we clearly don't think everything the apostles believed was right it could have just been reporting their instances i mean i don't believe in ghosts but if something weird happened i might have a moment where i go holy cow did i just see a ghost like does that make me rethink something right so i think there's enough ways to take that passage that the bible's not teaching a ghost as we understand it necessarily exists and there's alternate explanations so i think that's that's well said now when you and i were chatting before i asked how some of this research kind of affected you and you shared one story in particular you said that is really just stuck with you it was the story of amy stomantis if i said that right can you share what that story was and why that has stuck with you so much yeah when i was researching the book i was doing a lot of praying just like god lead me to the right people and i i thought let me just do a google search like has there been anything in media and this was last october and so all of a sudden i'm googling exorcism i'm googling demons i'm just curious like has anybody covered it and i noticed this local affiliate in arkansas media outlet had covered this woman amy's story and she's in a wheelchair i noticed immediately and i thought that was interesting and i start reading it and i decided to reach out to amy because i was so compelled by what i was reading but her story starts completely in the most bizarre way she's a churchgoer she's somebody who believes she was a christian and so this is interesting going back to what we were talking about before she at least believed she was and she was a nurse successful working in a hospital and one day she just didn't feel right something did not feel right in her mind her body felt off and so after her shift she goes home she tries to go out for a run she was a marathon runner and she can't run in a straight line she goes home to her husband and she's like i don't know i feel like i'm losing my mind i feel like i'm having a nervous breakdown and within eight days from that moment within eight days she was in an institution okay a mental institution they're trying to figure out what's wrong with her she's losing her mind she's not behaving normally completely erratic and so she goes to the mayo clinic she goes all over the place trying to get answers and nobody can give her an answer they don't know what's wrong with her is it physical is it mental and so she's on all sorts of medications they're not helping and eight months goes by okay so flash forward eight months she's lost her job she's not working anymore and she's got children and a husband right so she's got a family and she goes up to the second floor of her house and amy had this idea in her head it was that idea i mentioned before she wanted to end her life she had never been suicidal before and she just kept feeling like how do i do it how do i kill myself i'm a nurse i could like let me think of the ways and so she goes up to the second floor and just picture this she sits in the windowsill she's facing the inside of her house so her back is to the open window and amy decides two stories up not to jump but to just drop herself out of the window okay that alone when i was reading it was terrifying to me people will jump they will she didn't she didn't try to break her fall she just glided down hits the cement floor hits the cement ground and nearly dies she breaks all of her ribs she breaks her back and amy is now paralyzed she's paralyzed from the waist down now what happens is she goes to the hospital obviously almost almost dying and a woman goes to this prayer event that amy's church holds for her and this woman doesn't know amy at all but she feels compelled to visit her in the hospital and this is a woman who's done deliverance right she's she's been involved in this and she goes to the hospital and amy's talking to her basically in another voice giving her indications and the woman says i could see evil like and this one's being interviewed in this story too that this outlet did and long story short she prays over her dozens of deliverance and once amy is cycled off of her medicine this all ends she never has another manifestation she never has another issue so she goes just basically a prayer over amy that this woman does and now amy is speaking out and again there's reluctancy her family doesn't love that she's speaking out at least they didn't in the beginning but she's got a compelling story she has never had another issue again since this happened so i'm kind of truncating it but her story really struck me for a lot of reasons she's in a wheelchair for the rest of her life that is powerful these are not just ideas in books or blogs or movies that's a real life person experience this today and living it out shows how much ideas have consequences and makes the case that the demonic realm is is real let me ask you a final question i'm curious about when i was reading heiser's book on demons he says we typically think that satanic kind of influence is exorcisms and hauntings but when you look at ephesians chapter 6 the first defense that we have is truth so aren't these some would you agree with this that these tend to be more the exceptions but satan's normal strategy is just to twist truth and deceive people do you agree with that 100 percent and at the end of playing with fire i talk about culture and i think right now we are looking at a very confused loss and you know this i mean i follow the work that you do a culture that is looking for answers in all the wrong places and when i i mean i'm i'm a trained journalist i've worked in media for years i've worked around hollywood for years and when i look at all the places of learning in this country and in this world you've got hollywood you've got media you've got schools and universities and all three of those areas i mean think about this coincidentally all three of them have been dominated by a secular materialistic world view and a world view that has not only been and i'm generalizing here but i think most people know that this is the case that that has been damaging to young people to adults the ideas that are coming from these arenas are are terrifying and they're they're harming us so if you were satan and you were really trying to confuse people on a mass level i believe you would do it through culture i believe you would do it through the day-to-day the slow churning changing of people's perceptions through all different means and so i think that is really the battle that we're facing and so whether it's politics and how and anybody who watched the presidential debate probably was like oh my goodness what is going on um politics is downstream from culture i mean we have taken our culture and we've allowed it to become what it is and so i think that is the that is the rule right we are talking about exceptions and i think we have to be careful how we handle these issues we need to be aware of them we need to talk about them but more importantly i think we need to understand the impact of not talking about them is actually how we end up in part with the culture that we've inherited that's such a good word hey quick quick question from karen fisher have you read gabrielle emworth's an exorcist tells his story book i have not i have not but now i want to all right person has since passed i uh i think what you said about truth is really really important that's our greatest weapon in spiritual warfare so to speak is sticking to and living out truth uh i thoroughly enjoyed your book i get to read a ton of books for my blog and for my podcast and for this show and your book playing with fire i thought you know what i'm going to skim through this just to make sure i understand and get some good questions for my buddy billy and i slowed down i'm like dang it i've gotta really spend some time reading this because the stories just drew me in and i appreciate a couple things about number one again you approach it as a journalist so you're christian you believe this stuff is real but it's like you hold back sometimes don't overstate the case and say look here's why people doubt this they deserve to be heard but ultimately i don't agree and here's why and i think it's just a model approach to how look at these issues so for anybody if you're interested in issues of demons exorcism and uh just kind of the supernatural realm again this book playing with fire by my friend billy hallowell is one i would definitely definitely recommend that you pick up uh this channel if you're enjoying this give us a thumbs up and also make sure you hit the subscribe button because we have some interviews coming up for example we're going to be interviewing craig blomberg one of the leading new testament scholars in the world he has a new book out called can we still believe in god with the interview come up with craig evans has a i think 700 or 800 page book he is one of the leading new testament scholars and jesus scholars in the world in two weeks a book coming out in october called jesus and the manuscripts is going to give us one of his early interviews we have william dempsky coming on in a few weeks to give some kind of reflections back on the intelligent design movement so lots of cool stuff coming on make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you enjoyed this stuff we have a class in our biola apologetics program at talbot by kevin lewis and he teaches theology and he's an expert on colts and spends a lot of time walking through demons and a lot of these questions so we would love to have you join us if you ever thought of getting a masters and apologetics come to our apologetics program there's information below or if you say not quite ready for a masters when you want to go deeper we have a certificate program where we will kind of guide you through an official training time on your schedule and there's a significant discount below if that's helpful to you so thank you for tuning in and billy again thanks for coming on man don't disappear i want to talk to you afterwards but really appreciate your time great great interview thanks so much thanks for having me appreciate it yeah you betcha we'll see everybody next time

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 32,664

Rating: 4.9180326 out of 5

Keywords: demons, ghosts, supernatural, demonic, evidence, proof, testimony, real, fake, afterlife, document

Id: u1OT1Aa5V6Y

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020