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Are Angels Real?
Raising the subject of angels often leads to the raising of eyebrows. Researching and writing a book on angels has involved me in many conversations about them both with friends and with complete strangers. Reactions to the subject matter have surprised me. Most have been interested and engaged. Many have been amused. Only one person has shown complete, but polite, lack of interest. The vast majority of people have been intrigued and seemed keen to talk about the subject for quite some while. However, the most interesting feature of these conversations has been how people have begun with a wry smile and only shown genuine personal interest when sufficient trust has been established within the conversation to ask the embarrassing question without fear of appearing somehow naĆÆve or unintelligent.
The embarrassing question is, of course, are angels real? Belief in God is generally socially acceptable. Even people who view religious faith as something of a vice tend to acknowledge that intelligent people can (for whatever reason!) believe in God. However, this grace does not extend as far as angels. Even among religious people there can be something of an embarrassment surrounding the subject of angels.
This may partly be accounted for by culture and history. Some of the Protestant Reformers have left us a legacy of mocking belief in angels. The infamous question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin was never asked by any medieval Roman Catholic theologian. It was most likely made up by Protestants to discredit medieval Roman Catholic theology.1 From there it has passed into the history books or at least the kind of history teaching where many of us first heard it. The threat of being on the receiving end of such mockery can render us disinclined to ask whether angels are real.
Difficulty in speaking about religious matters is nothing new to those who research religion. In the summer of 1986 the psychologist of religion David Hay conducted a survey of religious experience in the UK with Gordon Heald, director of Gallup Poll London. In answer to the question āHave you told anyone else about this experience?ā an average of 40 percent of respondents replied that they had never told anyone else of their religious experiences.2 In another project Hay recounts how he changed research method from survey to interview. Whereas surveys in the UK and USA suggested that 30 percent of people have had a religious experience, in research from interviews this figure rose to 60 percent. Interviews afforded the time, space, and sense of trust necessary for people to share their (often highly personal) religious experiences.3 Hay records the reasons people gave for not disclosing their religious experiences: fear of ridicule and fear of being thought foolish or insane.4 Many people are simply too embarrassed to talk about their religious experience. If talking about religious experiences is difficult, how much more so openly conversing about the reality of angels?
I suspect that there is another reason that many people are nervous of asking the question. Interest in angels has grown in the last few decades. Angels have taken the lead roles in some films and television programs. Increasing numbers of books are being written about angels. There are many āspiritual advisorsā who offer to help people to get in touch with ātheir angel.ā Angels are in the public domain. This makes for increased interest in them and goes some way to making them an acceptable topic of conversation or artwork. However, it does not make belief in them either easy or comfortable. If I may put it this strongly, there is a certain snobbery around actual belief in angels. There seems to be a cultural assumption that only certain sorts of people believe in angelsāthose branded religious nuts and flaky new-agersāand we are not those sorts of people, so we do not believe. This sort of attitude seems as prevalent in religious circles as outside of them.5 Hence the lowering of tone of voice I so often encountered as my conversation partners turned to the topic of the reality of angels.
Arguments for Angels
So, are angels real? Are those branded religious nuts and flaky new-agers deserving of the general disapproval they receive for their credulity? Or do they see more clearly what those who bow the knee to social acceptability will never enjoy? Currently, the balance might be beginning to tip towards favoring those who assume that angels exist. Probably the last time that angels were generally assumed to exist was the Middle Ages but one of the surprises awaiting those who start the study of angelology is that angels are beginning to make tentative inroads into serious philosophical enquiry once again.6
Those who are enquiring into angels are interested in establishing the existence of angels and describing their nature and functions. However, demonstrating that angels exist is no easy task. People tend to assume that the existence of something must be proven if they are to believe in it, and proof of angels that satisfies the skepticism of the average punter is hard to find.
For many the only acceptable proof is personal experience or the experience of others whose testimony they trust. If we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste something, then we have evidence of its existence. We can sense it. Our senses enable us to observe and measure it, and this enables us to describe it. Once we have described it we assume we have knowledge of it. The physical sciences work a little like this and there is a great advantage to this kind of knowledge as it is public knowledge.7 Most people are able to share it because they can use their senses in the same way to establish the same set of facts about the same object. The shared nature of the knowledge makes the knowledge more secureāthere is safety in numbers.
However, this way of arriving at knowledge is not practical for some forms of knowledge. The classic example would be that of history. Leaving aside for the moment the idea of time travel, we have no firsthand access to past events. To obtain any knowledge of historical events we rely entirely on what people from the past have told usāmost often, although not always, in written documents. Although anyone can gain access to these documents in order to establish the truth about what they say concerning past events, no one can gain firsthand access to the events themselves. Therefore we have to trust the testimony of the documents we have and what they say about the past. If we have good reason not to trust them then this avenue to the past becomes closed to us. The fewer the documents we deem trustworthy, the smaller our database for understanding the past. To gain any knowledge of past events we have to trust the testimony of at least some of the documents we possess. Trustworthy testimony is foundational to establishing knowledge in some areas.
In fact, trustworthy testimony is far more fundamental to the gaining and sharing of knowledge than we tend to recognize. It lies right at the heart of our educational system. Basically we cannot afford to do otherwise. We cannot send all school and university students studying geography to Brazil in order to check for themselves that what the textbooks say about the favelas (shanty towns) is true. We are unable to take all students studying the Old Testament or the ancient Near East on archaeological tours of Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and Egypt. We cannot provide all physics students with a particle accelerator as we do not have the money. Although they are introduced to the theory of using and assessing data, students have to take on trust the evidence that is provided by teachers and textbooks for the greater part of their education. This seems reasonable given the advantages of receiving an education. We trust our teachers to tell the truth and to provide access to the evidence necessary to gain understanding of any particular topic. So the truth is that most of our knowledge comes from trustworthy testimony rather than firsthand experience.
On the whole the average person generally accepts that there are certain things that can be known about the physical universe which experts in the physical sciences teach us. Moreover, said person has knowledge of other aspects of the material universe on the basis of their experience, which experience is shared with others and so considered to provide reliable knowledge. However, there remain other sorts of things about which people claim to have knowledge. In his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke describes them thus: āThere remains that other sort [of thing], concerning which men entertain opinions with varieties of assent, though the things be such, that falling not under the reach of our senses, they are not capable of testimony. Such are (1) The existence, nature, and operations of finite immaterial beings without us; as spirits, angels, devils, etc.ā8 Locke claims that nobody can sense angels with any of the five senses. If this is true then nobody is capable of giving or receiving reliable testimony about angels and it is here, with this argument for the unattainability of reliable knowledge of angels that the arguments for the reality of angels begin.
Arguments from Experience
One argument challenges the assumption that there is no trustworthy testimony of angels. There are many books of angel stories on the market at the moment that offer testimoni...