Saturday, August 03, 2013

Angels among us

One stock objection to Bible history is the alleged mismatch between the modern world and the world of the Bible. Miraculous things happen in Scripture that don't happen in real life. Our everyday experience doesn't correspond to the world depicted in the Bible. For instance, there are many angelic encounters recorded in Scripture. But when is the last time an angel appeared to you? So Bible "history" is unreal. 

However, that objection raises a question: how do you know that you never met an angel? The objection tacitly assumes that angelic encounters are manifestly angelic. But in Scripture, that's generally not the case. The objection confuses the perspective of the omniscient narrator with the perspective of the characters within the narrative. The reader knows that some character encountered an angel because the narrator cues the reader to the true identity of the angelic visitor. But the character isn't automatically privy to the narrator's viewpoint. 

And the true identity of an angel isn't evident unless the angel makes that evident. Although angels can take on a supernatural aspect (e.g. luminosity), when angels interact with humans, they typically assume a human appearance. They are outwardly indistinguishable from humans. They can exhibit supernatural powers (like the angels who blinded the Sodomites), but if all you had to go by were appearances, you couldn't tell an angel from a fellow human being. 

Put another way, angels often function as undercover operatives. They disguise themselves as human. So for all you know, you have encountered angels. 

Now an unbeliever might object that this is special pleading. There's no evidence that you met an angel. 

But that misses the point. I'm not discussing the evidence for angels. I'm discussing the claim that what we experience in "real life" is inconsistent with how the Bible depicts the world. I'm discussing the assumption that if angels still do the things attributed to them in Scripture, we should see the evidence all around us. Because we don't, that's evidence for the nonexistence of angels. 

And I'm pointing out that this objection is illogical. There's no presumption that if you met an angel, you'd know it. 

BTW, that doesn't mean there's no positive evidence for angels in the modern world. Angelic apparitions are reported in the modern world, as well as church history. 

Of course, we have to judge the credibility of these reports on a case-by-case basis. And in many cases, we lack sufficient information to assess them one way or the other. 

But, then, they weren't for our benefit in the first place. We are third parties to that transaction, assuming it happened. 

1 comment:

  1. People who argue that since we don't run into angels today means the description of angelic visits in the Bible must be false remind me of the man who would argue that smallpox is a myth because no one is dying of smallpox today.

    And of course, we can look at it from another angle too. I think it can be successfully argued that there aren't really that many angel visitations recorded in Scripture. I haven't counted how many were actually recorded. Let's assume 100 recorded visits (a number I believe to be far too large, but which works well for math). The Bible covers roughly 3000 - 4000 years of recorded history. That's only a visit every 30 - 40 years, on average. Even then, the visitations would only be to very few people at a time--sometimes as few as a single person.

    But let's be generous and assume that 1,000 people would come into contact with these angels and it would happen every 30 years. This would mean that we can expect there to have been about 3,000 people to have come into contact with angels over the course of the last century.

    3,000 out of nearly 7 billion, or 3000/7000000000, which is 0.00004% of the population. This means at values far exceeding the recorded rate of the Scripture, we should expect that 99.99996% of people would not have come into contact with angels.

    Or to put it yet another way, I daresay we could find well over 3,000 people alive today who would claim to have seen an angel at some point, meaning we could easily find enough to fit the rate of Scripture even if we discounted the majority of modern claims as being lies or delusions.