Discover the fascinating possibilities of demonic influence on technology with Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin. Learn about demonic infestation, psychokinesis, and the importance of evidence-based reasoning when exploring the connection between smartphones, algorithms, and mental health.
Transcript:
Ani in New Mexico, listening on the Catholic Answers Live app. Welcome. Go ahead with your question for Jimmy. Hello. Hello. So, me and my friend were talking and we noticed that we were doing a research paper on the increased depression rates, especially in the rides and smartphones, and it got us thinking on if it’s possible for demons to possess objects, and if so, could they manipulate the algorithms in our phones to potentially cause this? Okay. So, demons can attach themselves to locations or physical objects. This is a form of demonic activity known as infestation. So, if a person is possessed, we call it possession, but if an object is possessed, we’ll say it’s infested. Demons, like good angels, have the ability to manipulate matter through their mental efforts, and mind over matter is known as psychokinesis. Psychokinesis comes in different forms. If it affects a macroscopic object, like let’s say a book flies off the shelf, it’s called macropsychokinesis. If it affects something that’s too small to see with the naked eye, it’s called micropsychokinesis, and we have evidence that good angels have micropsychokinetic abilities. For example, when David has performed his census and against God’s will and God sends a plague, an angel is the one distributed in the plague, which we would understand in terms of the manipulation of microorganisms, which are too small to see, and therefore even good angels have micropsychokinetic abilities. Well, electrons that run around in electronic devices are also too small to see, and so it would appear that demons being bad angels would also have micropsychokinesis and could potentially affect the operation of electronic devices, including phones, and that could take, that could include rewriting the algorithms in them so that they behave differently. It could just involve manipulating the flow of electrons, but it would seem to be possible for them to do so.
My question would be, do we have good evidence that this is happening, or could it be something else? Like humans have just designed the algorithms and the devices in such a way that it has the unintended consequence of making people depressed in some cases, and you know, there’s an old saying of don’t presuppose malice when incompetence will do. Humans do a lot of things that have unintended consequences, and unless you have specific evidence that a demon is involved with a particular smartphone, like you know, it starts talking to you with an alternative personality, and it can’t stand the holy, and so forth, and it can do preternatural things, then I would say we should attribute negative mental health consequences in conjunction with smartphones to just the way humans have designed them, rather than to demonic involvement in them. I mean, I can’t rule out that demons are involved, but we need to see evidence for demons before we propose demons as a solution. If you’d like more information about why that’s the case, I would suggest that you and your friend listen to episode 188 of Jimmy Aiken’s Mysterious World, which you can get to by going to mysterious.com slash 188. I’m sorry, mysterious.fm slash 188.
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