Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller are stage magicians. They also attack frauds who claim to be supernaturally endowed with psychic powers and communication with the spirit realm. They aren’t the first to do this. Reginald Scot (c. 1538-1599), author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), exposed the witch-hunting craze of his time.
He also applied his observational skills by explaining that many people believed feats of magic were displays of the supernatural, but that they were accomplished through deception and misdirection. “If Pharaoh’s magicians had suddenly made frogs,” Scot argued, “why could they not drive them away again? If they could not hurt the frogs, why should we think that they could make them?… Such things as we are being bewitched to imagine, have no truth at all either in action or essence, beside the bare imagination.”[1] Turning a small amount of water into blood is simple. Turning bloody water into clean water is something else, especially millions of gallons of the stuff. Pharaoh’s magicians ran out of tricks. By the third miracle, “the magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God’” (Ex. 8:19). They knew a miracle when they saw it.
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy NowScot is important because he claimed demonic manipulation of nature was an illusion. Witches were not in league with the Devil but rather were deluded persons who needed biblical guidance rather than death and torture. He spends time making the case that only God controls physical elements.
In addition to Scot, Thomas Ady produced a series of books on the same topic. Little is known of Ady. His first and best-known work, Candle in the Dark: Or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches & Witchcraft, published in 1656, was unsuccessfully used by George Burroughs in his defense during the Salem witch trials in 1692. Ady also published A Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661) and The Doctrine of Devils (1676).
If the Bible had been followed, there never would have been witch trials or an inquisition. In the second part of Candle in the Dark, Ady asks the following questions related to the so-called evidence used against “witches” during the height of the European witch craze:
Where is it written in all the Old and New Testaments that a witch is a murderer, or hath power to kill by witchcraft, or to afflict with any disease or infirmity? Where is it written that witches have imps sucking of their bodies? Where is it written that witches have biggs [nipples] for imps to suck on … that the devil setteth privy marks upon witches … that witches can hurt corn or cattle … or can fly in the air…. Where do we read of a he-devil or she-devil, called incubus or succubus, that useth generation or copulation?[2]
Modern debunking of supernatural claims was standardized by Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss) (1874-1926). Many in Houdini’s day believed that he used mystical means to accomplish what he claimed was simple sleight of hand and misdirection. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, was convinced Houdini was a medium and capable of supernatural feats through occult powers. He believed that Houdini could only perform some of his tricks by dematerializing. Houdini objected.
I do claim to free myself from the restraint of fetters and confinement, but positively state that I accomplish my purpose purely by physical, not psychical means. The force necessary to “shoot a bolt within a lock,” is drawn from Houdini the living human being and not a medium. My methods are perfectly natural, resting on natural laws of physics. I do not dematerialize or materialize anything; I simply control and manipulate natural things in a manner perfectly well known to myself, and thoroughly accountable for and adequately understandable (if not duplicable) by any person to whom I may elect to divulge my secrets.[3]
As a skeptic of the paranormal, Houdini should be an example to all of us. Don’t be afraid to question claims of preternatural or supernatural phenomena. If you are ever tempted to believe, you must investigate, question, and doubt: “The first to plead his case seems just, until another comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17). John tells us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Paul writes, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). Don’t be fooled either by the materialist (man-centered “philosophy”) or the magician (“empty deception”), both are the “tradition of men.”
In addition to Scot, Ady, Houdini, James Randi, and Penn and Teller, Christian “magicians” André Kole and Dan Korem have been relentless in exposing frauds. Kole has written Miracles or Magic?, Mind Games: Exposing Today’s Psychics, Frauds, and False Spiritual Phenomena, and Astrology and Psychic Phenomena. Dan Korem’s Powers: Testing the Psychic and Supernatural and The Fakers, written with Paul Meier, follow a similar methodology. Christians should be familiar with the content and arguments of these books.
This brings me to a recent discovery by a Latin scholar in Germany of two lost sermons by the fourth-century church father Augustine of Hippo on the Witch of Endor from 1 Samuel 28.
Scot argued in his The Discoverie of Witchcraft that the Witch of Endor was not a necromancer,[4] someone who claims to communicate with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions, but a ventriloquist and illusionist. Houdini would often disguise himself and attend seances to expose these frauds. “I’m not denouncing spiritualism. I’m showing up frauds. If there is an honest medium, trot her out.”[5] Houdini believed in God and the afterlife, so he did not deny that supernatural events could take place. “Gladly would I embrace Spiritualism,” he wrote in the preface to his A Magician Among the Spirits, “if it could prove its claims, but I am not willing to be deluded by the fraudulent impositions of so-called psychics, or accept as sacred reality any of the evidence that has been placed before me thus far.”[6] As a master at misdirection and deception, Houdini was the perfect person to expose the fraud. “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer,” Houdini told a reporter in 1924.[7] Stage magicians are in the flim-flam business.
Apologetics 101: Defending the Christian Faith
Apologetics 101 is an in-depth study of defending the Christian faith. The Greek word apologia simply means "defense," and apologetics is the art and act of giving a defense. Christian Apologetics then is the art and act of defending the Christian faith, not a proof of God in general. The Christian apologist must be ready to answer truth claims about the Bible, not claims about Hinduism, Islam, or any other false religion. The Bible makes the bold claim that Jesus is the ONLY way, and the Christian apologist must set his sights on the Bible alone, not on a defense of arbitrary theism.
Buy NowWhat about the Witch of En-dor? Some claim that God made Samuel appear to frighten the medium and bring judgment on Saul. She didn’t have any power to communicate with the dead. And neither does the devil. A better explanation is that the medium was pulling a fast one on Saul. She knew it was Saul. No matter how much he tried to disguise himself (1 Sam. 28:8), he couldn’t hide his great height. The Bible describes King Saul as being head and shoulders taller than any other Israelite (1 Sam. 9:2). Only Saul could guarantee that she would not be punished (1 Sam. 28:9). He was vulnerable and open to suggestion because he had lost all communication with God (28:6-7, 15), so he sought a “medium,” someone who he believed could communicate with the dead. He wanted the spirit of Samuel to help him, but Samuel was dead! Saul’s servants said to him, “Behold, there is a woman who is a medium at En-dor.” The word “medium” is translated by the Greek Septuagint (LXX) as ἐγγαστρίμυθον (engastrimuthon), “a ventriloquist, mostly of women who delivered oracles by this means.”[8] A medium would throw her voice as if the dead spirit was speaking through her. Dan Korem, who is familiar with stage magic, takes the position that the entire encounter was staged, that the medium of En-dor was doing nothing more than a modern-day medium who claims to have contacted the dead and speaks for the departed spirit.[9]
She claimed to see “a divine being coming up from the earth” (28:13). In rare cases, the dead manifest themselves to the living: Moses and Elijah (Matt. 17:3). But do humans have the power, through demonic means, to reach departed souls? When asked to describe this apparition, all she could say was that he was an old man wrapped in a robe. Wow! What prescience. What prophet in Israel didn’t wear a robe? The medium knew this. At this point, “Saul bowed with his face to the ground and paid homage” (28:14). The only person who “saw” anything was the woman. Samuel never spoke. The woman spoke supposedly through the spirit of Samuel. This is typical of how mediums operate. Houdini aggressively exposed fraudulent mediums who claimed to channel his mother, noting that his mother was a Hungarian who did not speak English and would have used her son’s birth name, Erich, rather than his stage name.
The medium knew Saul was on the run and what had happened to him. It was common knowledge. So-called mentalists use this type of information to give the impression that they can read minds and predict the future. One of the most popular performers in this field is Oz Pearlman, who seems to read people’s minds. He doesn’t. Watch this 6-minute video.
[1] Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 180. Scot’s work was originally published in 1584, and only 250 copies were reprinted in 1886. It was reprinted once again in Great Britain in 1930. The 1972 Dover edition is the latest reprint, retaining the original edition’s spelling.
[2] Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark: or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft: Being Advice to Judges, Sheriffes, Justices of the Peace, and Grand-Jury-men, what to do, before they passe Sentence on such as are Arraigned for their Lives as Witches (London: printed for R[obert] I[bbitson] to be sold by Tho. Newberry at the three Lions in Cornhill by the Exchange, 1656). This work is searchable.
[3] Quoted in Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1956), 156. The quotation can also be found in J. C. Cannell, The Secrets of Houdini (1931), 14.
[4] “‘Divination through a dead body’), a compound of Greek νεκρός (nekrós, or ‘dead body’) and μαντεία (manteía, or ‘divination’).”
[5] Milbourne Christopher, Houdini: The Untold Story (New York: Pocket Books, [1969] 1975), 215.
[6] Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924), xi.
[7] Los Angeles Times (October 28, 1924). Quoted in Silverman, Houdini!!!, 247.
[8] The Greek word γαστήρ (gaster), “belly,” makes up part of the word.
[9] See Danny Korem and Paul Meier, The Fakers: Exploding the Myths of the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1981), 91-101.