Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Angels

My Positions

  1. I do not hold that angels, guardian angels, or any other benevolent spirit beings exist.
  2. The evidence offered for them is of the same kind and quality as the evidence for ghosts, and fails for the same reasons.
  3. The modern guardian angel is a consumer product, detached even from the theology that produced it.

Notes

  1. The angel of the Bible is not the angel on the greetings card. The word means "messenger", and the biblical messengers are alarming: the first thing most of them say is "do not be afraid", and Ezekiel's are wheels covered in eyes. The winged, blond, consoling figure is Renaissance painting, and the elaborate ranking of angels into nine orders comes from a fifth-century writer pretending to be a convert of Saint Paul. The doctrine grew for a thousand years without a single new observation, which is the signature of theology rather than of discovery.
  2. The guardian angel story is survivorship bias with a halo. "Something made me take the other road" is reported by people who lived; the people who took the first road and died report nothing. A protector who intervenes in a fraction of car crashes, and never in the ones with children in the back, is indistinguishable from chance plus a grateful narrator (Survivorship Bias). The feeling that "someone was watching over me" is agency detection running on a happy outcome, as a ghost is the same mechanism running on an unhappy one.
  3. The sense of a presence is a known brain state. Shackleton's party on South Georgia felt a fourth man walking with them; mountaineers, polar explorers, sailors and the sleep-deprived report the same companion. It can be induced by stimulating the temporoparietal junction and by a walking robot that touches the subject's back a fraction of a second out of time. Nobody doubts the experience. The question is whether it is a visitor or a glitch in the self-model, and the glitch is the one we can produce to order.
  4. Belief remains high because it costs nothing and comforts. Around seven in ten Americans and roughly one in three British adults say they believe in angels. A belief that makes no prediction, demands no behaviour and soothes the bereaved will persist regardless of evidence, which is exactly why it is an improper subject of belief rather than a harmless one (Popper's Razor). The angel-card and "angel therapy" industry is the commercial expression of this, and its most successful author publicly renounced her own books in 2017.
  5. Angels make the problem of evil worse. A god who delegates protection to a host of agents has a host of agents who were also absent from Auschwitz. The believer who thanks an angel for a near miss should be asked what the angels were doing the rest of the time.

Sources

  • Geiger, J., The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible (2009)
  • Blanke, O. et al., "Neurological and robot-controlled induction of an apparition", Current Biology 24 (2014)
  • Gallup, "Most Americans Still Believe in God", 2016 data on belief in angels; Bible Society / ComRes, "Angels" survey, 2016
  • Virtue, D., public statement renouncing her angel and tarot publications, 2017

Also see