The Supernatural Worldview - Cris Putnam

Parapsychology grew out of the spiritualist movement in the nineteenth century. During Charles Darwin’s day, dissatisfaction with Christian theism and naturalistic science converged and captured the hearts and minds of many intellectuals. 

In truth, Alfred Russel Wallace was as well known, if not more so, than Darwin. Wallace looked at the impact of philosophical materialism on ethics and rightly rejected it in order to retain traditional Victorian morality. Since he saw no substitute for Darwinism, he sought a spiritual science—even if it entailed a leap of faith into the occult and spiritualism. A leading parapsychology textbook explains:

Within a few years the message of spiritualism had spread throughout America and to Europe. Its growth was soon to accelerate dramatically as people found wanting alternative worldviews based solely on an agnostic science or on a Christianity under siege from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Spiritualism offered an appealing compromise, for here was a religious movement that claimed to put religion on an empirical footing, most particularly by seeking direct “scientific proof” of its central tenets through communication with the spirit world.[i]

Thus, many formerly naturalist scientists founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which included notables like William James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Faced with the hopelessness of the Darwinian paradigm, these men had noble intentions. Like Thomas Nagel cited earlier, they were desperately looking for a new science to give naturalistic justification for consciousness and the afterlife in order to preserve the hope and values previously provided by the Christianity that they believed Darwin had undone. 

                                                                                                                                                    

They weren’t too far astray, because if naturalism is true, there really is no hope. Given the Darwinian paradigm, life is nothing but brutal, tooth-and-claw survival. When you die, you just cease to exist, and, accordingly, everything is ultimately meaningless. It is hardly surprising that naturalists cannot live consistently with the philosophical conclusions of their worldview. As a result, they inevitably leap into an irrational hope that will preserve elements of the Christian worldview without its God. This is why a literary genius and man of science like Doyle lived out his last days being duped out of his royalties by every two-bit medium and spiritualist sham artist in Britain. While some of the work done by the SPR remains compelling, modern parapsychology has distanced itself from its forerunner. 

                                                                                                                                                    

In the early twentieth century, Duke University psychologist Joseph B. Rhine and his wife, Dr. Louisa Rhine, were the most important academic advocates of the controversial new science called parapsychology. While Louisa compiled thousands of spontaneous, real-world cases for statistical analysis, J. B. earnestly sought to make parapsychology a legitimate science by severing its connection to spiritualism and its questionable associations. He moved it into the laboratory and sought to establish the existence of what he called ESP (extrasensory perception) through repeatable scientific experiments. However, like his predecessors, the tension between his religious longings and the scientific worldview was what drove him. Rhine explained:

Dissatisfied with the orthodox religious belief which had at one time impelled me toward the ministry and dissatisfied, except as a last resort with a materialistic philosophy, I was obviously ready to investigate any challenging fact that might hold possibilities of new insight into human personality and its relations to the universe.[ii]

Rhine’s early ministry ambitions reveal that a frustrated Christian theism compelled his search. Like most rational people, he intuited that materialism was inadequate and sought a way to prove it. His underlying aspiration to answer the basic worldview questions is laid bare:

My interest in psychic research had grown out of my desire, common, I think, to thousands of people, to find a satisfactory philosophy of life, one that could be regarded as scientifically sound and yet could answer some of the urgent questions regarding the nature of man and his place in the natural world.[iii]

Although most mainstream scientists today reject his data, few have really examined it. Even more, an increasing number of respectable academics believe that Rhine proved the existence of ESP and that recent work has replicated and confirmed his conclusions. (Those details are unpacked in chapters 6 and 7 on psi in the upcoming book The Supernatural Worldview.) As materialism goes extinct, one should expect the controversial science (or its successor) to experience a renaissance. 

                                                                                                                                                    

Interestingly, parapsychologist George P. Hansen has observed that throughout history, “the paranormal and supernatural become prominent during times of transition. Charismatic leaders may arise who demonstrate paranormal powers, attracting followers, and challenging the legitimacy of the establishment.”^[iv] He came to this conclusion from an exhaustive historical survey of paranormal and supernatural beliefs in his work, The Trickster and the Paranormal. Hansen believes that paranormal events, such as sightings of strange creatures, UFOs, and ghosts occur when the society is in disorder and during times of transition. He also ascribes this to agency rather than coincidence by writing, “The paranormal encompasses everything from levitating monks to ESP, from spirits to cattle mutilations—an incredible and unsavory hodgepodge. The mix seems incoherent. But the trickster makes sense of it.”[v] While we will address the trickster later, it is demonstrable that paranormal beliefs are not only becoming more common, but are rising to unprecedented levels.

Paranormal Is the New Normal

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a report on December 9, 2009, titled “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths.”[vi] The report shows that many Americans now “blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation,”[vii] and that significant numbers of all major religious groups (including evangelicals) report having supernatural experiences like seeing ghosts and contacting the dead through spirit mediums. A Lutheran scholar recently sounded an alarm in a 2013 book on demon possession, stating: “The western world is in transition with paganism on the rise. Spiritualism is progressively becoming a dominant religious preference within a postmodern age.”[viii] Americans are having mystical visions and experiences like at no other time in our history. According to the data, the number of Americans who report having a mystical experience surpassed the numbers who have not.[ix] Interestingly, that number has been on the rise continually since prayer was removed from the public schools in 1962. Back then, 78 percent said they had not had a mystical experience. Many Christian authors have described the 1960s as an occult explosion. 

                                                                                                                                                    

Christian apologist Ron Rhodes concluded:

In some sectors of our society, the paranormal has become the new normal. Indeed, tens of millions of people have rejected Christianity and replaced it with belief in ghosts, spirit guides, psychic phenomena, out-of-body experiences, and the like. Psychics are currently communicating messages from these spirit entities that blatantly contradict the teachings of the Bible.^[x]

One of my favorite defenders of faith saw it coming many years ago.

In my opinion, Francis Schaeffer was the greatest theologian of the twentieth century. Through regular contacts with European students at his L’Abri Fellowship, Schaeffer understood the culture better than most academics. In 1979, Schaeffer and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Within, they commented on the emergent paranormal worldview as a desperate search for hope:

People are hungry for something which will give them hope in life. They are tired of the empty platitudes that politicians and many theologians have made: endless exhortations to be good, to be good, to be good! They are also afraid. Things really do seem hopeless, even on the level of everyday life with its threats of a lower standard of living, of a growing authoritarianism, of famine and ecological disaster, of devastating war. And they are looking for any answer. So the UFOs are messengers of a friendly race from another planet. “Do not fear—the Force is with you!”—to borrow from a current science fiction film. And so people believe it irrationally. If they used their minds, they would see no evidence for friendly people from outside. But the feeling of experience as they read about this or see it on a screen is enough. It does not matter if there is any reality to it.                                                                            

What about the growth of occultism, witchcraft, astrology? Is it simply economics that has put the signs of the zodiac in shops from one end of our society to the other? In part it is economics, but, once again, the real reason is deeper. People are looking for answers—answers they can experience...                                                        

Wherever we look, this is what confronts us: irrational experience. We must be careful not to be bewildered by the surface differences between these movements. We are not saying they are all the same. Of course there are differences. The secular existentialists, for example, disagree with one another. Then, too, secular existentialists differ with religious existentialists; the former tend to be pessimistic, the latter optimistic. Some of the movements are serious and command our respect. Some are just bizarre. There are differences. Yet, all of them represent the new mysticism! [xi]

Not only did Schaeffer perceive the common thread connecting ostensibly diverse movements, he is beseeching us to ask the deeper questions while offering a strong caution to trust our experiences. Far too often, well-meaning Christians trade their supernatural experiences for a more respectable scientific explanation, but not necessarily in line with REALITY. Later we will explain Schaeffer’s two-story truth concept by which people place their hopes in demons and the occult. Secular psychologists have tracked this worldview shift as well. 

                                                                                                                                                    

Dr. Kenneth Ring is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Connecticut and past president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). He is the author of Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience and the Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large, two books with terrific application to the subject at hand. His fascination with the Omega Point is borrowed directly from the writings of the Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who conceived of the idea that evolution was progressing to a goal—the maximum level of complexity and consciousness—called the Omega Point. Along with the Ukrainian geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, he also developed the concept of noosphere, an innovative term denoting the numinous sphere of collective human thought. During his prime, Chardin was condemned as a heretic because his mystical Darwinian syncretism severely conflicted with the teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church, particularly regarding human origins and the doctrine of original sin. His primary book, The Phenomenon of Man, presented an evolutionary account of the unfolding of the cosmos that abandoned biblical theology for an occult pantheistic monism. However, as we thoroughly documented in Exo-Vaticana, today his thought is mainstreamed in the order Pope Francis comes from--the Jesuits--and was endorsed repeatedly in the theological writings of Pope Benedict XVI.[xii] 

                                                                                                                                                    

Borrowing deeply from Chardinian concepts like noogenesis, Ring employed the tools of psychological research to document the worldview shift resulting from transformative encounters like NDEs and alien abduction. He concluded these phenomena are instigating a paradigm shift entailing the “shamanizing of modern humanity.”[xiii] Of course, a shaman is typically a tribal leader who contacts the spirit world and practices magic. Like Chardin, Ring frames it as an extension of evolution. However, Ring has tabulated a lot of data that suggests we are within “a major shift in the levels of consciousness that will eventually lead to humanity being able to live in two worlds at once—the physical and the imaginal.”[xiv] He concludes that humankind is merging with “Mind at Large.”[xv] This corresponds quite neatly with the converging monistic aspirations of the interspiritual age discussed earlier in this series. Recent poll data supports the trend toward shamanization.

The paranormal has deeply penetrated American culture. It now is the mainstream. A 2005 Gallup poll revealed that three in four Americans believe in the paranormal. Put another way, that is 75 percent of Americans^[xvi]—or around 235,425,000 people. Also, 37 percent believe houses can be haunted and 21 percent believe they can personally communicate with the dead. Thus, out of the current population estimate of roughly three hundred million Americans, one hundred eleven million people believe in hauntings, and sixty-three million Americans believe they can communicate with the dead! To put that figure in visual terms, imagine a large superdome football stadium that holds fifty thousand people. Think about this: It would take 1,260 of those stadiums to hold the number of Americans who believe it is possible to communicate with the dead! That entails a lot of necromantic tailgating. What is more disturbing to a Christian apologist is that many of these folks claim to be Bible believers. 

                                                                                                                                                    

Astonishingly, 20 percent of Protestants and 28 percent of Catholics believe in reincarnation, an idea foreign to biblical theology, but, as we will examine, very popular in NDE research, parapsychology and the new pantheism. Close to the same percentages of Protestants and Catholics practice yoga as spiritual discipline, believe in astrology, and hold a belief in spiritual energy arising from objects such as mountains, trees, or crystals. This extends into areas traditionally associated with witchcraft. Seventeen percent of Catholics and 16 percent of Protestants believe people can use the “evil eye” to “cast curses or spells that cause bad things to happen.”[xvii] Reports of ghosts have doubled! The percentage of Americans who report seeing a ghost has doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent over thirteen years prior to the 2009 survey. The percentage who said that they were in touch with a dead person has increased from 18 percent to 29 percent. Given this data, should Christian apologists be spending most of their time addressing atheistic naturalism? I think not. There is a much more pressing need in addressing the occult/paranormal worldview. This is a wakeup call. However, the warning gong was rung long ago by a Christian martyr and watchman on the wall who saw it coming from his study of biblical prophecy (Nee's book on the subject and many others will be provided free with the purchase of The Supernatural Worldview - more info coming soon).

Watchman Nee’s Warning

On November 4, 1903 in Swatow, China, a baby boy, Nee Shu-Tsu, was born. His name means “he who proclaims his ancestors’ merits.” ^[xix] After the boy’s life mission became apparent to his mother, an early Chinese Christian, she gave him a new name, To-Sheng, meaning “the sound of a gong.”[xx] The new name implies that he would be a watchman who would bang the gong to warn the people of God. Hence, his name was anglicized to “Watchman Nee,” and he lived up to his name by issuing early warnings concerning the ongoing paranormal paradigm shift. 

                                                                                                                                                    

Watchman Nee (1903–1972) was a Christian teacher and church leader in China during the first half of the twentieth century. He established churches throughout China and taught countless disciples. During his thirty years of service, Nee published over a hundred books expounding the Bible,[xxi] including The Normal Christian Life, his best-known book that sold over one million copies worldwide and became a Christian classic. Following the Communist Revolution, he was persecuted and imprisoned for his faith. He spent the last twenty years of his life in prison and died a Christian martyr at the hands of militant atheism. Nee was named one of the “100 Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century” by Christianity Today magazine, and was officially honored for his contributions to Protestant Christianity by the United States House of Representatives.[xxii] 

                                                                                                                                                    

Nee not only predicted the current paranormal paradigm shift, but he offered a shocking explanation for it: mankind’s latent soul power apprehended in the last days for Satan’s diabolic ends. Nee held to the belief that man is tripartite. In Christian theology, the tripartite view holds that man is a composite of three distinct components: body, soul, and spirit. New Testament passages—like “may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23b) and “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit”(Hebrews 4:12a)—support this view. Michael A. Harbin is a modern trichotomist who explains spiritual death at the Fall by appealing to the distinction between soul and spirit [xxiii]. In contrast, the bipartite view holds that “soul” and “spirit” are different terms for the same component. This is because some contemporary scholars argue that spirit and soul seem to be used interchangeably in other passages. Even so, Hebrews 4:12 strongly supports the tripartite distinction. Nee explained the division in this way:

What is the spirit? That which makes us conscious of God and relates us to God is the spirit. What is the soul? It is that which relates us to ourselves and gives us self-consciousness. What is the body? It causes us to be related to the world.[xxiv]

Furthermore, he believed the soul was the interface between spirit and body and that before the Fall it was the seat of Adam’s ability to converse and walk with God. Nee stated:

The living soul, which is the result of the coming together of the spirit and the body, possesses unthinkable supernatural power. At the fall, though, the power which distinguishes Adam from us is lost. Yet this does not mean there is no longer such power; it only denotes that though this ability is still in man, it is nonetheless “frozen” or immobilized.[xxv]

While some of his exegesis is questionable according to modern scholarship, still his overarching thesis deserves careful consideration. It cannot be disputed that he predicted much of what we see happening today. Within The Supernatural Worldview, we will examine some of Nee’s ideas in greater depth to “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). But for now, let us hear him as a prophetic watchman:

In Revelation 18 things are mentioned which shall come to pass in the last days. I indicated at the very beginning how man’s soul will become a commodity in Babylon—that which can be sold and bought. But why is man’s soul treated as a commodity? Because Satan and his puppet the Antichrist wish to use the human soul as an instrument for their activities at the end of this age. When Adam fell in the garden of Eden his power was immobilized. He had not lost this power altogether, only it was now buried within him. He had become flesh, and his flesh now enclosed tightly this marvelous power within it. Generation has succeeded generation with the result that this primordial ability of Adam has become a “latent” force in his descendants. It has turned to become a kind of “hidden” power. It is not lost to man, it is simply bound up by the flesh.

                                                                   

Today in each and every person who lives on earth lies this Adamic power, though it is confined in him and is not able to freely express itself. Yet such power is in every man’s soul just as it was in Adam’s soul at the beginning. Since today’s soul is under siege by the flesh, this power is likewise confined by the flesh. The work of the devil nowadays is to stir up man’s soul and to release this latent power within it as a deception for spiritual power. The reason for my mentioning these things is to warn ourselves of the special relationship between man’s soul and Satan in the last days.[xxvii]

Watchman Nee believed that humans have extrasensory abilities as a remnant of their pre-Fall status entailing freer access to God and the supernatural realm. Whether his exegetical inferences are perfectly sound is beside the larger point, being that this soul power is an inherent talent, some having more than others. There is a great deal of scientific evidence demonstrating this power examined in chapters 6 and 7 of the upcoming book The Supernatural Worldview. More troublesome, Nee believed that mankind’s greatest supernatural enemy would seek to encourage and harness this psychic power for his own evil ends: “But it is Satan’s desire to develop this latent ability so as to make man feel he is as rich as God in accordance with what Satan had promised. Thus will man worship himself, though indirectly it is a worship of Satan.”^[xxviii] From facts examined in the upocoming book as well as entries in this online series, readers will discover the Watchman's predictions may have been an understatement. Behind secret, well-funded, and politically powerful doors, the strategy is already in play.

 

TO BE CONTINUED... Read the article and footnotes at -  http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/Supernatural5.htm