So the reality of angels and demons, it's interesting to devote a talk entirely to talking about angels and demons.

We think of them more as, let's say, part of the decoration in a church when we walk in, or just something that's on the sidelines or on the periphery.

But what would it mean to consider them as a subject of a whole talk,

or really to delve a little bit, to dip our toe into angelology, as we might call it?

The question of whether God exists is a very pressing one, and, you know, a common enough topic

for our Timistic Institute talks, in fact, the last

topic you had here as a talk, but and the reality of the human soul also very important and

interesting. So someone might say, but why angels? Aren't angels something we should rather be sort of

ashamed of? Didn't we do away with those?

Aren't those a relic of an earlier time?

Weren't angels just a psychological projection of a more primitive people?

And haven't we as human beings evolved culturally, become more enlightened? And shouldn't we leave behind angels and demons as

sort of the imaginary friends of our cultural infancy? A relic of a primitive and pre-scientific

culture. It's interesting that the word immaterial, when someone uses it as an adjective, oh, well, that's immaterial, means irrelevant.

But when we're talking about angels and we say they're immaterial, we're talking about their nature, talking about what they are.

Anyway, part of what I'm getting at with this introduction is to show that Christians have often been, in the modern period,

sort of ashamed of angels, afraid to bring up the topic because it seems a little bit too fanciful.

But in fact, something would be lacking in our account of reality if we ignored angels altogether.

We can actually say a great deal scientific about them in the full sense of science in terms of

philosophy and theology.

There's also the fact that one needs to reckon with the fact that cultural and, how do I put this, the fact that many different cultures throughout

history had a sense, a very vivid sense of immaterial spirits operating at some level,

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