Did the Inquisition Murder All the Psychics?

Joe Rogan's latest viral guest claims the Catholic Church genetically eliminated psychic ability from humanity through the Inquisitions. But is that true?

ABOUT THIS EPISODE:
Joe Rogan recently hosted Dr. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to discuss his "psi gene" theory. During the interview, Radin claimed that the Catholic Inquisitions systematically targeted and killed people with a genetic predisposition for psychic ability, effectively removing that trait from Christianized populations over centuries.

It's the kind of theory that sounds compelling on first listen. Joshua Lewis did the historical review to test it. Is this true? Josh also explores the theological question underneath all of this. Why did the early church oppose occult practice in the first place? Was it a power grab as Dr. Radin suggests?

Join us to better understand the full discussion. Don't get caught flat-footed when secular podcasts make "confident historical claims" about Christianity.

0:00 – Introduction
0:14 – Dean Radin's Psychic Research
1:28 – The Psi Genetic Project
5:50 – Joshua's Historical Analysis
7:20 – The Four Inquisitions
9:57 – Spanish Inquisition & Witchcraft
13:03 – Scientific Problems Examined
14:12 – Church, Magic, & Scripture
17:02 – Closing Thoughts

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the wonderful world of Remnant Radio. My name is Joshua Lewis, and in this program today, we're talking about the Inquisitions. Stay tuned, it's going to be an exciting episode. So, world-famous podcaster Joe Rogan recently sat down with a man named Dean Radden. Dean has a master's degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in psychology from the University of Illinois. And he is currently serving as the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science. It's an organization that was founded by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell after Mitchell had this mystical experience on his way back from the moon. Dean has spent the last four decades scientifically studying phenomena that most researchers won't even touch, things like telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing. He's written several books on the subject, and most of his recent work argues that what we call magic is actually a measurable phenomena that mainstream scientists have prematurely dismissed. Now, before this clip picks up that we're about to watch, Dean has been explaining to Joe that he believes that there's a genetic component to the psychic ability that some people are born or predisposed towards what he calls Psy phenomenon. And he's concluded in this study that he calls the Psy Genetic Project that it tends to find these genetic markers. He's building towards a pretty extraordinary claim that the reason this genetic appears to be suppressed in certain populations is due to a scientific and historical event. And that's where this clip picks up. Let's watch.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

One day we're talking to Gary Nolan. Gary says, Have you ever looked at the genetics of highly talented people? There's a lot of folklore out there that there are people who are psychic who come from psychic families. And then there are people who don't have anything psychic and don't have anybody talking about psychic stuff. That suggests genetics. So this is a couple years ago. We decided to do an experiment that we call psi genes. We're looking for the psychic gene, more likely a polygenetic trait, but nevertheless, something about genetics. So we do an experiment where we recruit 3,000 people using the internet who say that they're psychic from psychic families. And then we do all kinds of vetting to make sure that they are who they say they are and they have some talent, and we get their DNA. We only had enough money to find out of the 3,000 people 13. Because we also did face-to-face interviews to make sure they weren't nuts. So we get their DNA. Then we find match controls, and we do standard methods of comparing the two sets of genomes. And so we found something that we didn't expect, which was that the psychics were all so-called wild type. They didn't have any unusual things happening in their DNA. The controls had a significant effect in an intron sequence. So when you have DNA, it's billions of base pairs. Only about 50,000 of them produce proteins. It's the called the exome. It's a portion that creates our body. It's that stuff. All of the rest of it used to be called junk DNA, because they didn't know what it did. It's the intron sequence, it's the thing between the genes. That now we know is the epigenetic portion. It's the portion of the DNA that turns genes on and off. These controls had a mutation in their intron sequence. So they were turning something off. We still don't know exactly what it is, but something about their makeup was turning off psychic sensitivity. And so one of the people in our project was a specialist in the genetics of societies. Different societies have different genetic makeup. And he found that, to our surprise there too, that countries that were exposed to Christianity, the longer they were exposed, the more this intron sequence was there, the mutation. We started thinking, well, how does that make any sense? And suddenly we understood. The Inquisition had systematically looked for people over hundreds of years who had these abilities, and then they killed them. And so you think about this as a uh a non-evolutionary method, but nevertheless a pruning of a portion of humanity. So they were getting rid of people who had this, and what were left over were people who had this no psychic stuff at all. So yeah. So it's like a uh uh eugenics in an opposite direction where they weren't trying to pull people for talent, but get rid of the talent. And you can see it in the in the genome.

unknown 4:44

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

And this is directly connected to the Inquisition? Because so the the Inquisition this is what what were they like who were they targeting specifically?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. They were targeting witches. So the witches were once, I mean an awful lot of innocent people were caught up in that as well. But people who were known as healers, who are people who had precognition, and of course, the the church at the time was just concerned that somebody is going to come along that's going to attract our followers away from us. So magic was okay within the church. Within the bounds of the church, if a priest is anointed in a certain way, they can do magic. The whole ceremony of the Eucharist is a magical practice. It's okay. Outside of the church, it was not okay. And so it was a very heavy-handed way of ensuring that the power would remain in the church.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

So by enforcing their Christian ideology, they eliminated anybody that had any alternative powers or visions or anything weird, any other kind of practices.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Yeah. Okay, so essentially what Dean is arguing here is that there is a genetic predisposition for psychic sensitivity. His research has found that the gene is absent in certain populations, and the reason of its absence is due to Catholic inquisitions that systematically hunted down and killed people who possessed this gene, effectively pruning psychic ability from the human gene pool over hundreds of years. He's calling it a kind of reverse eugenics. Now, I find this to be rather fascinating as a theory, and I wanted to be honest with you, when I first heard it, it kind of landed. It sounded compelling, it's got some genetics in it, it's got some history, it got a villain, and a villain that's the Roman Catholic Church, one of which I find myself also villainizing. But as a reasonable skeptic, I think we should always take extraordinary claims and compare them against the historical record to see if these extraordinary levels of evidence can corroborate that claim. So I went and I did some homework. And what I found is that this theory has some serious problems with it, both on the historic and scientific side. So let me walk you through what I found. Let's start with the beginning. What even are the inquisitions? When people say the phrase the inquisitions, they're usually picturing two one of two pictures. It's either the Spanish Inquisition or it's Monty Python. We have found the witch, my we bought you know she is a witch.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

She looks like bring her forward.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

But historically, there are actually several uh distinct inquisitions operating in different countries at different times and operating under different mandates. So let me give you a quick map historically of all of these inquisitions, starting with the medieval inquisition. This is the earliest one established around 1184 by Pope Lucius III, and the primary target was not witches and psychics. It was launched against two specific theological movements in southern France and northern Italy. Cathars, who were essentially medieval Gnostics, and the Waldinians, who were arguably prototypes of the early Protestant Reformation. Both groups were considered heretical by the Church, and this is actually where the Inquisition begins. Then you have the Spanish Inquisition. This is the famous one, established in 1478 under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. And here's something that most people actually don't know. This was uniquely under royal authority, not under papal authority. The Spanish Crown controlled it, and its primary focus was on Jews and Muslim converts to Christianity. These are called conversos, who were suspected of secretly continuing their old religious practices. This is what the Spanish Inquisition was actually built to address. Then you have the Portuguese Inquisition established in 1536, operating under similar foundations of the Spanish Inquisition, focusing largely on those same conversoso populations in Portugal and its colonies. Then you have the Roman Inquisition established in 1542. This one stayed in Italy. This is the institution that actually tried Galileo. It's mostly focused on Protestant theological influence spreading into Catholic Italy. So four different institutions, four different countries at different time periods, different targets, different levels of authority, and the word inquisition is doing a lot of heavy lifting in popular conversation and in Dean's argument. So here's the real question. Were these inquisitions actually designed to hunt down and eliminate people with alternative powers, healers, psychics, those outside of the church's control? Is it true, as Dean says, that the church used the Inquisitions to systematically remove its competition? And the honest historical answer to this question, according to the historical record, is no, not really. And in some cases, the opposite is actually true. Let's take the medieval Inquisition first. Magic was not even on the radar at the beginning. The medieval inquisition paid little attention to sorcery over the century, until something specific happened to Pope John XXII. It seems that he was in target of an assassination attempt, using poison and allegedly even sorcery. It was only after that, in 1320, that witchcraft was formally classified as a heresy and was made triable by the Inquisition. So the medieval inquisition, its interest in magic didn't emerge from an institutional desire to control power. It emerged from a pope surviving an assassination attempt. This is a pretty different origin story than the one Dean is telling. Now we have the Spanish Inquisition, and this is where Dean's argument really falls into some trouble. The Spanish Inquisition is arguably the least aggressive witch hunting inquisition in all of early modern Europe. Between 1526 and 1611, nearly a century of the Inquisition focusing on heresy only rounded up 22 people who were condemned for sorcery. 22 in a century. Witch hunts and panics were erupting all across the rest of Europe. And in fact, there's this remarkable account of this region in northern Spain. Around 1609, the Spanish Inquisition shut it all down. One of their inquisitors by the name of Alonzo de Salazar, Slytherin, not Salazar, Slytherin, his name is Sal Salazar Fryas, investigated over 18,000 people accused of witchcraft and concluded, and I'm quoting here the historical record, I have not found even indications from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred. The Inquisition responded by issuing what they called the Edict of Silence, essentially for being forbidding all discussions of witchcraft, because they recognized that the panic itself created the accusations. So here the argument is that the church gathered up a whole bunch of people who were outside of their control, who were practicing magic, and they put them to death. The opposite seems to be true of the Spanish Inquisition, that there were people being accused of committing witchcraft. And after the investigation said, guys, all this mythology and all this talk about witch hunts is causing people to accuse people falsely, 1800 of them falsely accused. So the Spanish Inquisition says, hey guys, uh, let's stop talking about this. You're putting a lot of innocent lives at risk. Then you have the Roman Inquisition. This did the same thing in Italy. It actually uh functioned as a restraint on the popular witch hysteria, not an engine to promote witch hysteria. Now, none of this is to whitewash the inquisitions. I mean, I'm Protestant after all. What the Catholics did is kind of their own business. But the Inquisitions were bad. Real people suffered, real injustices were done, torture was used, people died. And I want to say this pretty clearly: any death carried out in the name of Christ for the sake of, you know, murdering a false religious ideology is a tragedy and a betrayal of everything the gospel stands for. But what the historical record does not support is Dean's narrative that the Inquisitions ran a coordinated, coordinated multi-century program uh systematically eliminating psychically gifted people from the population. And here's the other thing that Dean's theory requires you to believe. These massive witch hunts in Europe, which scholars estimate killed between 40 and 60,000 people over 300 years, was primarily driven by the Catholic Church through the Inquisitions. That's just not historically accurate. The large-scale witch trials actually happened in Germany, Scotland, and in parts of France, and they were run primarily by secular courts and by it this Protestant authorities. Now we have Ag on our face. Not the Catholic institutions, not the Catholic Inquisitions. The institution Dean is actually blaming is largely keeping the violence against so-called witches in check, not driving that persecution. Now we also need to deal with the scientific side of this because Dean presents this as his big research finding, right? His Psy uh gene study recruited 3,000 people who identified as psychic and then narrowed it down to 13 subjects for DNA analysis. That's only 13 people, and those 13 subjects, he draws the conclusion that over centuries of historical persecution has shaped the human genome across Christianized nations. Now, I'm no geneticist, but that sample size seems way too small. I don't think any serious peer-reviewed genetic journal would treat those conclusions as established findings. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and 13 subjects is not extraordinary evidence. And then there's a logical issue on top of that. Even if the genetic findings were solid, and even if the inquisitions were aggressively targeting psychically, uh, you know, genetically predisposed people, which again the record shows they weren't, you need to demonstrate that enough people were killed in a concentrated enough way across a broad enough population to actually shift the genome. The numbers just don't support that. 40 to 60,000 deaths spread across 300 years and multiple countries is not the kind of selective pressure that rewrites the genome. So why did the medieval church forbid magic usage? Um the the claim is that there is this, you know, other power that is threatening the church. So they invent this kind of doctrinal position, this belief that all of this comes from the demonic. But but we should take a step back and say, well, when the church didn't have institutional power, do they believe this? Go all the way back to the book of Acts when Paul goes to the Church of Ephesus. What happens? Well, all those who are practicing magic and worshiping false gods come and bring out their magical books and their talismans and they burn them because they've encountered the real and they no longer want to worship the false. And it was understood that the false was actually being empowered by a demonic spirit. Paul in Acts 16 finds this slave girl who has a python spirit or a spirit of divination, depending on the translation you're using. And the language of Python roots back to the oracles of Delphi. She was likely some kind of disciple from those oracles, and she was channeling this python spirit that was deeply embedded within the mythology of the Temple of Apollos. So here Paul cast this demon out of a girl, and she can no longer prophesy as she had done formerly because the spirit was giving her the power to do so. So it's not as if, hey, the church, they come on the scene, they have institutional power, so they start creating mythology for control. This is a belief system that is old and ancient and historic, but even goes back beyond the Christian scriptures into the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament. You go back into the Old Testament, you've got Pharaohs and magicians, you've got the witch of Indor, you've got uh king of Moab who offers his son on the wall, all of these accounts, there seems to be real supernatural power, not given by Yahweh, but assumed from the text itself that it's being given by the false gods that these people worship. So I think that the assumption that there's a mythology that the church constructed to keep control of people is just objectively false. Even when they did not have control, institutional control over nations, they still believe that these kind of psychic phenomena, these supernatural events, these healing powers that didn't come from Yahweh, were coming from another source and a paranormal source of that, that from the demonic. You know, I suspect Dean is actually a brilliant researcher asking questions about consciousness that material science can't address. And honestly, some of those questions deserve our engagement as Christians because we need to be thinking deeply about those things as well. But I think his research, assuming certain genetic components, uh actually is undermined by the historical record, and I don't think it supports it. And when he frames Christian opposition to magic as a power grab, he's actually skipping over 1700 years of pastoral experience from and the earliest church record in the book of Acts, Triptulin, Irenaeus, Augustine, over and over, their kind of view of the demonic before there was any kind of institutional power or control. They understood these things as outside of the bounds of the one who created consciousness in the first place. Look, I think interviews like this on Joe Rogan really matter. I think millions and millions of people are watching this podcast, and Dean jumps on and says, Hey, look, our genetic potential to connect to the supernatural world has been limited because of the Christian Inquisitions. And I think most people just take that because they don't have the tools to, man, sift through them. So I hope that in this video that I could kind of show that's just not the case. In fact, the Inquisitions probably defended uh those who are falsely accused of witchcraft more than they persecuted those who were practicing witchcraft as it relates to those Catholic institutions. So I just don't think Dean's argument stands up. Uh, and if you're really curious about spiritual experiences outside of Christ and how those tend to go sideways, I don't want to answer that question with you know political power. I want to answer that question with the gospel. Go back to the book of Acts, look to the scriptures, and the scriptures will inform you uh how those things end in darkness and destruction. Guys, thank you so much for watching this episode. I hope it's been helpful. Share around to someone who's been listening to the conversation over there at Joe Rogan. And we'll see you next time here at the Remnant Radio.