The Case for Angels
Peter S. Williams
Paternoster, 2002, 211pp.
Francis Schaeffer apparently began a university philosophy lecture with the startling admission that he believed in angels. “There really is no point you listening to my philosophical arguments if you don’t grasp the profound importance of this fact”, he said (or words to that effect!).
It was a bold move then, and it is a bold move now, notwithstanding the New Age acceptability of some kind of spiritual worldview. Peter Williams, a British philosopher and Christian, has, like Schaeffer before him, put his cards on the table in The Case for Angels. He offers a philosophical argument for angels—an argument that it is rational and coherent to believe in immaterial spiritual beings who were created by God.
At one level, it is an easy argument to make, since the majority of the world’s population believes it to be true that angels exist. However, not many of Williams’s peers and colleagues fall into this group. Williams cites some well-known philosophers who do: Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Locke, and the majority of pre-nineteenth century philosophers; then, today, Alvin Plantinga, JP Moreland, Richard Swinburne, Bill Craig. An impressive bunch, but still a minority among today’s philosophers. In The Case for Angels, Williams climbs out on a limb to argue that not only is it rationally possible for angels to exist, but that it is a more reasonable and likely scenario than their non-existence.
His argument has a couple of building blocks. The first is the philosophical dissatisfaction of physicalism—the view that all mental phenomena, such as consciousness, memory, sense of self, the soul—are ultimately outcomes of the physical or material world. Our minds are products of our brains; likewise, our souls. Williams argues that this is more an atheistic philosophical commitment than a case constructed from deduction, observation or experiment. There is just too much positive evidence against it (he presents seven different kinds of evidence).
The second building block is the great strength and quantity of arguments for the existence of an all-powerful god. Williams explains that, if such a god exists, proving the existence of angels is a snack. He provides good contemporary summaries of the arguments for God’s existence, using material from Plantinga and elsewhere (philosophy students, see Plantinga’s ‘Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments’,). Plantinga has also put forward a strong argument that the problem of evil does not make God’s existence any less likely (for a summary, see Kelly James Clark, Return to Reason, pp.55-77).
These two building blocks mean that belief in angels is at least weakly conceivable. Williams then presents his case for the plausibility of this belief, by explaining how he thinks angels (spirits) could exist in space, in time, and in consciousness or ‘personness’. Here, there are more holes to be picked with his presentation, and he leans as much on Scripture as philosophy (which is fine for those with a high view of Scripture, of course). It does, however, offer a logically coherent picture of what angels might be.
The final aspect of Williams’s presentation is his most powerful. Having set up the possibility and plausibility of angels, he then uses the argument to best explanation to conclude that angels actually exist. In summary, he suggests that there is sufficient data—from human belief, from reported human encounters with non-human beings, and from the data of Scripture and other literature—to make the actual existence of angels the best explanation. Furthermore, such a hypothesis has explanatory power for other questions, such as how evil and God could exist (i.e. demons and angels have agency). It’s not watertight (his Occam’s Razor argument that the existence of angels and demons is a unifying explanation for paranormal phenomena seems pretty crude!), but it is an argument worth presenting to those who wish to think philosophically about the supernatural.
The book concludes with four very interesting appendices: on Jesus as an exorcist; on applying Baye’s Theorem to the evidence for angels; on angels as an argument for God’s existence; and a Who’s Who of Christian Philosophers and Apologists. In a few years’ time, I can imagine Williams writing a tighter update of this book, but he has done us good service for now in raising the discussion of the supernatural realm in the philosophy classroom.
In Briefing #295, and in the discussion on the Briefing Discussion Forum for April, Peter Bolt suggested that popular television shows such as John Edwards’s Crossing Over reveal people’s longing to believe in a world beyond this one, and that it might be worth considering an apologetic strategy that doesn’t start with scepticism, but starts with the fact that Christians believe this to be true. Yes, there is another, spiritual realm, and here’s what we Christians think is going on there. Peter Williams’s book provides philosophical strength for this apologetic task, in order to answer the questions of the most tough-minded enquirers.
