Mark 9: Faith

After the scene of the mystical transfiguration, Mark 9 continues with another exorcism scene. This same scene is duplicated in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but there are some striking differences. For one things, the authors of Matthew and Luke do not include the father's famous quip, "I believe; help my unbelief." Perhaps an even more obvious omission is the apparent disagreement between authors about why Jesus was able to do something that his disciples were unable to do. The author of Mark has Jesus say that the kind of demon he exorcised from the boy can only be cast out by prayer (even though the story doesn't say anything about Jesus praying in this scene). The scene is truncated a bit in the gospel of Matthew, but when it comes to this question of why the disciples were unable to help the boy, the author takes the opportunity to have Jesus criticize the disciples' lack of faith. It is such an obviously different answer than the original version of the story recorded in the gospel of Mark that some scribe(s) at some point inserted the bit about prayer and fasting into the Matthew version. (In most translations, this inserted verse is omitted and relegated to a footnote). The author of Luke leaves out the question altogether, choosing not to include anything about the disciples' inability to help the epileptic boy, which makes it a bit awkward when the Jesus character bemoans putting up with the "faithless and perverse generation."

Some "perverse" people in the twenty-first century still consider demonic possession to be an actual thing. Considering the vast amount of research and evidence on the subject, as well as our previous critique on the abusive and manipulative practice of exorcism, we can leave that aside. It is reasonable for us to forgive people living so many centuries ago for thinking that some neurological disorders were caused by supernatural forces. Instead, there is a theme that emerges from the versions of this story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew that seems worthy of a bit of attention, namely the father's plea, "I believe; help my unbelief," and the line about a mustard seed of faith being enough to make a mountain move (which is also duplicated in Luke 17:5-6, just not in connection to this exorcism scene).

Faith is a tricky subject. It essentially means believing something that cannot be proven by available data. Faith isn't intelligent, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. It's important to realize that a statement of faith is necessarily a claim without any empirical foundation. This trips some people up. They want to believe that their statement of faith is absolutely true, that they can prove it to other people, that they can make other people agree with them, even though there is no actual evidence for the claim. If there were ample evidence to demonstrate the validity of a claim, it wouldn't need to be taken on faith.

Faith can work for us or against us. Some people flatly reject cold, hard data in order to maintain a faith-based perspective; other people manage to incorporate the available facts into a fluid faith that grows and changes as their knowledge grows and changes. There are people in the Creationist (or Intelligent Design) camp that fall into the first category, blatantly disagreeing with scientific evidence in favor of the text of an ancient religious document. Others revise their version of faith in a creator so that it remains compatible with scientific conclusions.

It isn't so dangerous when people are just engaging in fruitless arguments about the age of the planet (although it is dangerous to teach children that they can ignore actual facts in order to keep believing what they want to believe). Thoughtless faith can put people in serious danger, though. Some people have faith that their supernatural will protect them from the venom of poisonous snakes, even if they antagonize said snakes. Some people have faith that their supernatural will heal their child, provided they don't give in and seek competent medical assistance. A recent outbreak of measles within a religious community in Texas that opposes vaccination in favor of "faith healing" is just one more senseless piece of evidence that it's dangerous to rely on a supernatural to do the work of a doctor. Faith that refuses to incorporate verifiable evidence is, frankly, abusive and evil.

Blaming faith isn't really helpful. Intelligent faith helps us create meaningful lives. Insightful faith helps us connect with people and build incredible communities. Faith isn't the problem. Human egoism is. Why in the world would a spiritual leader advise his flock not to get vaccinations or professional medical attention? My guess would be either hubris or stupidity. What do you say to the parents of a 4-month-old infant who contracts measles because a spiritual community refused to take appropriate health precautions? Was the faith of the parents faulty? Or perhaps the 4-month-old had faith that was too weak? I try not to be critical of other people's beliefs, but I get angry about children suffering needlessly because of adults with nonsensical religious convictions.

Still, it's the people who are responsible for the consequences of their actions, not whatever they had faith in. The father who brought his son to Jesus' disciples in the story was looking for a solution. He wasn't committed to pursuing some tenacious assertion about the supernatural, he was trying to get help for his son wherever it might be found. By the time Jesus questioned the father's faith, the poor man was probably exasperated from trying to find someone who could do some genuine good for his boy. And yet, he couldn't just confess blind faith. Even Jesus' disciples had failed him. He had hope, but he wasn't an idiot. His son was seriously afflicted. He believed in the possibility of his son's healing enough to get him to a healer. Whatever he lacked in faith, he certainly expressed a willingness to be persuaded.

We can approach faith like that. We can stake our claim and say, "based on available evidence right now, I believe this." When further evidence presents itself, we have the freedom to adapt our statements of faith. By "evidence," I mean falsifiable data, information that can be verified by outside sources, not just another person's opinion or a slippery thread of logic. For instance, believe in God if you like, but don't ignore scientific data about vaccinations or geology in order to cling to a primitive version of that belief in God. We can allow our God to be as vast or impressive or intelligent or insightful or loving as s/he needs to be in order to accommodate the actual knowledge we have about our natural world. We cannot restrict verifiable data based on our personal beliefs. If we try to do so, we wind up with things like measles outbreaks that could easily have been prevented.

So, since our beliefs don't have the power to modify actual scientific evidence, it only makes sense to allow actual scientific evidence to modify our beliefs. This doesn't diminish our faith in any way; it makes our faith more credible. This doesn't weaken our faith; it strengthens our connection to reality, and thus increases the value of our faith. Digging in our heels and refusing to reconcile our beliefs with cold, hard facts is just another way of refusing to grow. When we refuse to grow, we stagnate. Life is not stagnant. If we are going to have faith, doesn't it make sense to have faith that is alive and able to grow?

Casting Out Demons

In the Gospel of Mark, after Jesus calls his first disciples, he begins his ministry of miraculous healing and exorcism. The authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke copy these stories from Mark, editing them a bit as suited their particular messages. Throughout the Gospel of Mark there runs a thematic element of Jesus telling demons and people to keep his identity a secret; this is known as Mark's "messianic secret" theme. The author of the Gospel of Luke preserves the formulaic silencing of demons in his retelling of the exorcisms, probably because these texts were used in actual exorcisms, and thus the specific words and actions were ritually important. For this collection of short passages, the Gospel of Luke closely follows the version in Mark with a few minor edits. The author of the Gospel of Matthew spaces out these passages in three separate places, interspersing other miracle stories and teachings that were important to the author's portrait of Jesus. The thrust of these passages is that Jesus performed effective acts of healing and exorcism as part of his ministry.
Of course, we have lots of stories of exorcisms and miraculous healing from both before and after the writing of the gospels. Some of these stories make spectacular claims about actual people while others feature fictional healers, like the abundant ancient stories of the Greek demigod Asclepius. Faith healing has been associated with a variety of belief systems, as has exorcism, and both are still practiced to some extent in the world today. The breadth of these claims across human history offers a few choices about how one may respond in terms of belief.

One could believe that all faith healing and exorcism is to some extent true, but that would be a difficult position to maintain. Apart from many of the stories being clearly fictitious, belief in faith healing is challenged by the exposure of many frauds like Jack Coe, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Peter Popoff, and abundant scientific research has shown the ineffectiveness of spiritual healing and intercessory prayer in a medical setting. Even the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Association have published statements against faith healing, because of numerous tragic reports of people with serious illnesses who died because they relied on faith rather than medical treatment. Choosing to believe in faith healing in light of the evidence equates with ignoring reality.

It is possible that some stories are true while many are false, however. Some might choose to believe in the veracity of ancient stories that predate modern medicine, or in just the stories that paint the heroes of their particular faith in a positive light. The challenge then becomes how to discern which stories are true and which are false with no evidence. A person will obviously approach a story already committed to a belief, and the story itself will be judged by presumption rather than on its own merits. Since we do not have any verifiable, scientifically documented cases of faith healing or demon possession, there is no real support for believing in any faith healing. Although it is impossible to disprove an assertion that Jesus (and his true disciples throughout the ages) performed actual miracles while all others were mere charlatans, the available evidence suggests that actual, effective faith healing is unlikely.

There is a reason that faith healing and exorcism are lumped together in the gospel stories. The ancient world believed that many cases of illness were manifestations of demonic activity. Their understanding of biological reality was not as advanced as ours, and they wanted explanations for the things they did not understand. Demons were an easy explanation for bad things like disease. For some reason, even though our understanding of the physical world increased exponentially, belief in demons still persists. In twenty-first century books on Christian spirituality, one can still find abundant assertions that demonic activity and spiritual warfare are legitimate concerns, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What is so appealing about holding on to a primitive worldview?

First of all, the evidence refuting demonic activity and possession is easy to dismiss if one believes that demons are real. If demons actually exist, they would certainly be able to fool a few scientists and doctors, after all. The belief seems far too deeply convincing to be damaged by a little scientific report. In actuality, if demons were prevalent, it would be a miracle if any scientific studies were ever replicable. If the world is constantly influenced by the supernatural, there would be no way to obtain reliable evidence about disease, or any natural phenomenon for that matter. If demons caused disease, we would not be able to create medical cures and vaccinations, unless demons are susceptible to the laws of the natural, scientifically verifiable world. And if demons are susceptible to the laws of the scientifically verifiable world, science would be able to test for demonic activity and verify which instances of disease are the result of demons and which instances of disease are caused by something else. What we know about the natural world and about the increasing efficacy of medical treatment strongly suggests that there are no demons.

There are some cases, however, that seem to fly in the face of that evidence, however. Anecdotes about an exorcism in which some supernatural event transpired, or about how prayer healed someone, or about some personal encounter with spiritual forces entice us to leave the door open for the supernatural. The more we learn, the more we realize how creative we can be when we don't understand something. Human beings are creators. When something doesn't make sense to us, we invent a hypothesis. Sometimes we test that hypothesis -- we do a bit of research, we perform a few experiments, we determine if our hypothesis really holds water. Other times, we are so satisfied with our hypothesis that we simply run with it, even when our hypothesis leads us to do real harm to ourselves or other people (as is the case in many documented exorcisms). Our belief in the supernatural, thus, is evidence of human creativity and laziness. When we take the time to investigate the things we do not understand, and we persist until we have understanding, we learn that the natural world can be bizarre and astounding all on its own, without the need for supernatural influence.

The real attraction, though, is that belief in demonic activity gives us a scapegoat. If we are constantly being assaulted by dark spiritual forces, then we have something to blame when we act shamefully. We can still beat ourselves up for giving in to temptation, but it's much easier to be a helpless victim to demons than it is to be a personally responsible human being. When our children behave in a way that we don't understand, belief in demonic activity can allow us to preserve our impression of them as innocents who need to rely on us to survive. Out of our own insecurities and fears, we might fail to provide effective medical or psychiatric care for our loved ones. If we believe that it's possible for our actions, or the actions of other people, to be influenced by external, powerful, supernatural entities, we don't have to examine our own thoughts and actions as closely. We don't have to confront the real challenges in life because we have invented imaginary challenges. While demons are not necessarily more attractive than reality, our ways of confronting demons might be more appealing than the sometimes difficult emotional work of confronting reality and taking responsibility for our own growth. Belief in demons is a crutch that hinders people from being fully engaged in their own lives.

People become addicted to things -- substances, behaviors, routines. People get sick. People commit crimes. People break their promises. People do things that harm other people. People do things they later regret. Not demons. People. Not people under the influence of demons. Just every-day, ordinary people. If a person wants to change -- if a person wants to break an addiction, treat a medical condition, keep promises, respect other people, act in accordance with a nobler inner self -- the answer is not exorcism. The answer is personal responsibility. If we confront the things within ourselves that lead us away from our own deep sense of worth, then we can more effectively be our authentic selves in the world. We can figuratively call those things our "inner demons" if we want to, but it's all just us. The lies we tell and the false beliefs we cultivate come from within ourselves, and we have the power to dismantle those lies and false beliefs and tell the truth about ourselves and the people around us. Integrity comes from letting go of blame and embracing our own capability.

So there are no demons, although there are things in the world we do not yet understand. We don't always like what we do, particularly when our actions don't line up with what we claim to believe. Still, we are responsible for all of our actions, even the ones about which we aren't happy. We are responsible for our beliefs, too. We don't have to believe things that reinforce the idea that we are weaklings or victims. Such beliefs hinder us from being all that we can be in the world, and such beliefs keep us from seeing other people clearly. It makes sense to believe in what's real. People are incredible. The world is amazing. If we start there, our journey will be infinitely more satisfying.