Exorcisms

[Peter666]

To answer your question, yes it would prove God, so long as the evil is clearly from a supernatural source.

To be practical, there are very few documented cases of exorcism.

In the good old days, it took six or seven years of formation to become a priest. Year three was the year when one was ordained an exorcist. So technically, any priest can perform the rites, or even a non priest: a cleric.

However, many may not be experienced enough or psychologically fit to do so. There was a recent meeting of about 200 exorcist students from around the world at the Vatican recently. I can assure you, if they ever face a real possession case in their lifetime, they will be toast.

[KeysrSoze]

Alot of explanations.

1. The possessed could be mentally ill, and the power of suggestion implied by the exorcism could convince the patient that his demons were excised. For instance the patient could have what amounts to a kind of Munchausen dissorder, and acts out in a way to gain attention, leading to the exorcism and "cure". No supernatural element is needed.

2. Telekinetic and psychic phenomenon does exist, but is not supernatural, it meerly is a force of nature with defined laws, causes and effects that we haven't fully understood and studied yet. Possession could be a form of telepathic seepage; the possessed is intercepting anothers thoughts (someone phychotic or evil in the case of a "demon") and is being influenced by them. Or pure mind control where someones telepathic power is so strong they can possess weak minds at will. Etc. The exorcism could ammount to a psychic battle of a kind between priest and subject.

3. The supernatural exists, but God (or the Judeo-Christian version) does not exist. Why does the spirit world inherantly need a specific god or gods to exist? Demons could be ghosts of people dead, insubstantial beings from an alternate dimension, spiritual anthropomorphic manifestations of mankinds' collective taboos and dark thoughts... any number of horror novel answers. Exorcism could work because it is a kind of sympathetic paradigm-effective magic: It works because millions of people believe it should work.

[Peter666]

When someone starts levitating and barfing copious amounts of pea soup, it's the devil.

[KeysrSoze]

That would be choice #4 (actually in the Catholic Vulgate "the devil" would be more akin to "Diabolus enim et alii daemones": the Devil and his demons), but its only your opinion that its not 2 or 3.

[Ringo]

If I personally witness a "posession", where, say a 5 year old is suddenly able to talk in a verified, ancient language, then that would absolutely warrent further investigation from me.

However, I don't expect to see anything like this. In a case of "posession", I would expect to see mental illness, speaking in gibberish, or a willful deceit. A proper scientist would (or rather should) approach things like this with an open mind, and carefully weigh the evidence.

The question is though, how much time do scientists give occurences like this? If genuine posession were a real phenomenon, it should be independently verifiable, instead of consisting of whispers, rumour, and biased (ie, clergy) witnesses.

No-one can deny the existence of x-rays, electricity or magnetism. Theyre all observable and repeatable. How much more time should we give ideas like this? Show me something solid (not rumour or dogma), and I'll all be for further investigation.

I'll not hold my breath though.

Ringo

[Peter666]

The problem with #2 is that there is no evidence of people who can do this sort of thing on demand. If you have evidence of that though, I would love to see it.