We haven't heard about demons for awhile

camestrosfelapton

Nov 30

Demons! Socrates had one, the Bible has fewer than you'd imagine. Who are they, what are they and yes, they are just made up. Still, it is important that we keep an eye on whatever they might be up to.

So over to our demon expert, one-time Dragon Award winning author for best Horror Novel that Isn't a Horror Novel, Brian Niemeier who can actually prove that they exist:

"We not only know for a moral certainty that demons exist based on Scripture, their existence is a logical conclusion from the hierarchy of being. Here we have nonliving matter (rocks and stuff), living but non-sentient material beings (plants), living, sentient, but non-sapient material beings (animals), living, sentient, and sapient matter-spirit composite beings (men), and the Spirit of Life, Logos, and Being Himself (God).

Sharp readers noticed a major gap in that progression. Nature abhors a vacuum. And just as a missing atomic number on the periodic table is a sure indicator of an as-yet undiscovered element, a blank space in the spectrum of being isn't empty. We just can't see what's there.

And what's there is living, sapient, purely spiritual being.

AKA angels.

And as every second-grader before the Millennial generation used to know, demons are evil angels."

https://brianniemeier.com/2023/11/simpathy-for-the-devil/

He goes on to explain that because humans have to experience the world through their sense they learn about generalities by abstracting from particulars but angels and demons don't work that way. They come with built-in categories. I feel like that implies that the Dewey Decimal system is an angel but maybe I'm doing theology wrong.

Still, as a kind of categorical being myself I'm not sure of Brian's scheme. Here is a short version:

nonliving matter
living but non-sentient material beings
living, sentient, but non-sapient material beings
living, sentient, and sapient matter-spirit composite beings
living, sentient, and sapient pure-spirit beings <- the gap that implies demons and angels exist
the logos aka capital-G God

Brian suggests a set of qualities and that gaps in the combinations of those qualities imply the existence of beings that match those combinations, not unlike deducing the existence of chemical elements from gaps in the periodic table. Let's treat that seriously for a moment and consider the qualities first:

Li: living v non-living
Se: sentient v non-sentient
Sa: sapient v non-sapient
Ma: material v non-material
Sp: spiritual v non-spiritual

The tricky thing here is that in Brian's scheme people are a composite of spirit and matter which makes spirit and matter two different qualities. He doesn't say overtly that "material" and "spiritual" are both ways of existing but I think it is implies i.e. something that was niether material nor spiritual is something that doesn't exist? Maybe not because he thinks triangles exist in the abstract (this is how he knows I'm a demon).

So we can redo his chain of being as space of vectors

Li-0,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Rocks, toe nail clippings, water etc
Li-1,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Plants, mushrooms, bacteria etc
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Kitty cats, lizards, birds etc
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-1,Sp-1 Humans
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-0,Sp-1 Angels, demons

Now, you don't need to be a professor of combinatorics to spot that we haven't exhausted all the combinations there. I am also not clear what capital-G God is supposed to be in that scheme, I assume like 4 but with an extra god quality. Also, I'm assuming Brian things animals and plants don't have souls. Let's add in the gaps and see what other entities we can deduce into existence:

Li-0,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-0 The void? HTML won't let me have lists starting at zero.
Li-0,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Rocks, toe nail clippings, water etc
Li-0,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-1 ghosts of rocks? hair clipping spirits?
Li-0,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-1 an actual rock possesed by the ghost of a rock
Li-1,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-0 THE LIVING VOID
Li-1,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Plants, mushrooms, bacteria etc
Li-1,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-1 Mushroom spirits
Li-1,Se-0,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-1 Possessed yeast
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Kitty cats, lizards, birds etc
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-1 Living ghost dogs
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-1 A real dog with the spirit of a cat
Li-0,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-0 Thermostats
Li-0,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-0,Sp-1 Dead ghost dogs
Li-0,Se-1,Sa-0,Ma-1,Sp-1 vampire cats
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-1,Sp-1 Humans
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-1,Sp-0 Philosophical zombies
Li-0,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-1,Sp-0 R2D2
Li-0,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-0,Sp-0 Chat GPT
Li-1,Se-1,Sa-1,Ma-0,Sp-1 Angels, demons

I'm stopping there because the list can go on. We can have an entry for every binary number from 00000 to 11111, so 32 different entities are implied by these categories.