The DIY urge, Satan's sin and Pelagianism

I've got a big DIY urge. My motivations usually include being too cheap to buy something (typically because I'm saving up for something else--right now, a 3D printer). A fair amount of the time there is vanity--wanting to brag online, say. Sometimes perhaps there is a minor motivation (which really should be much stronger) to repair things rather than wastefully throwing them out. And sometimes the activity itself is very pleasant (I really enjoy using power tools like a sewing machine, a drill press or a stand mixer; I like the smell of solder rosin or freshly cut softwood wafting in the air). But I think often the strongest motivation is the intrinsic pull of doing things myself.

According to Aquinas, that motivation is why Satan sinned. He wanted the good things that God was going to give to him, but he didn't want them from God--he wanted getting them himself. In other words, the first sin is Pelagianism.

This makes me a bit worried about my DIY urge. Is it an echo of the Satanic pride that led to the downfall of the universe?

Not necessarily. Aquinas' discussion of the first sin is driven by two theses: (a) Satan was very smart and (b) Satan's motivations were good. So Aquinas needs needs to identify a good motivation that led him to sin, not simply by a stupid mistake. It is thus central to Aquinas' story that the DIY urge that Satan had was a good motivation: there is a genuine good in achieving good things by oneself. But in order to achieve that good, Satan refused God's gift of grace, settling for (lesser, presumably) goods that he could get by himself.

The fundamental motivation behind the DIY urge is good, thus. But there is a serious danger that it misses what St. John Paul II called our "nuptial nature": that it is our nature to give ourselves to others and to receive others' gift of themselves. Satan refused God's gift. The parallel danger in the DIY case is that it not turn into a refusal of the gift of others' creativity and labor, a refusal to acknowledge that (to use older language) we are social animals.

Of course, the products of commerce are not gifts personally directed to us. (After all, we have to pay for them!) But there is a sense in which they still have some gift-like nature. People have chosen not to be subsistence farmers, but to make stuff for others. There is an imperfect duty somewhere around here to participate in the back-and-forth of commerce, which bears some relevant resemblance to the back-and-forth of gift giving and reciprocation. And so, like all things, the DIY urge needs moderation, not just for reasons like not wasting time or avoiding vanity, but lest it become a denial of our social nature.

Naturalism and injustice

1. (Premise) All instances of severe suffering of small children are unjust.
2. (Premise) Only things agents are responsible for are unjust.
3. So, all instances of severe suffering of small children are things that agents are responsible for.
4. If (3), then naturalism is false.

A quick argument for (1): all unfair things are unjust, and all such instances are unfair. The naturalist will, I think, in the end want to deny (1) if she is to remain a naturalist. However I do think a lot of people have a strong intuition that such suffering is not just really bad, but that it is unjust.
Premise (2) is very plausible.

I think (4) is plausible, as well. For while some cases of severe suffering of children are things agents are responsible for even if naturalism is true—say, suffering directly imposed by agents—there will be many cases which are not like that. Say, a couple lovingly procreates in order to share their good life with a child, and the child has a congenital disease that causes severe suffering. There is no naturalistically-acceptable agential explanation.

What sort of non-naturalistic agential explanation could be given of these injustices? Here are the three most obvious options:

• An evil deity.
• A devil.
• The Fall.

Moreover, there is a special non-naturalistic story that could be given as to (1) is false: one could hold to reincarnation and say that all instances of severel suffering of small children are fair punishments for a life of wickedness.

Which is the right story? Well, it's not an evil deity and it's not reincarnation.

Another version of the first-sinner argument against Calvinism

1. (Premise) Any circumstances that are sufficient to determine a person with a character free of moral failings to do wrong are exculpatory for such a person.
2. (Premise) There was a first wrongdoing and it was not done in exculpatory circumstances.
3. So, either the first wrongdoer was not determined by circumstances and character, or the first wrongdoer had antecedent moral failings. (1 and 2)
4. (Premise) the first sinner did not have antecedent moral failings.
5. So, the first wrongdoer was not determined by circumstances and character. (1 and 4)

Premise (2) seems to be a part of the standard Christian picture. Nobody thinks Satan first sinned in circumstances that are exculpatory. Premise (4) follows from the fact that moral failings are evils, and evils came from sin (in the full sense of a wrongdoing the agent is responsible for—"formal" sin in Catholic terminology).

That leaves (1). But consider this line of thought. Suppose I was tortured and under torture I turned in my friends. Am I responsible or has the torture taken away my responsibility? Here is a test. I imagine whether a person free of moral failings would have been determined to do the same under torture of this intensity. If so, then the torture is of sufficient intensity to be exculpatory for me, and presumably likewise for her. (It doesn't quite follow that I am exculpated. For I could still be responsible for my sin in exculpatory circumstances, if my action is overdetermined by the exculpatory circumstances and something I am responsible for.)

An argument from evil against naturalism

Consider this valid argument:

1. (Premise) Moral outrage at an event is misplaced when no one is responsible for the event.
2. (Premise) Moral outrage at the suffering of animals before the advent of humankind is not misplaced.
3. (Premise) If naturalism is true, then no one is responsible for the suffering of animals before the advent of humankind.
4. So, naturalism is false.

I don't know if (2) is true, though. But this argument does put pressure on the naturalist running an argument from the suffering of animals against the existence of God. For that argument is persuasive in large part by creating moral outrage in the reader. But if naturalism is true, that outrage is misplaced.

What if theism is true? Is the outrage misplaced? That depends. If, say, the devil is behind that suffering, it's not misplaced.

Punishment is good for those who are justly punished

Suppose Satan is the only creature in existence and Satan sins gravely through pride, does not repent, and goes to hell forever. Hell is a punishment from God. Now in punishing Satan in this world, God does something good to creation, since God does not do anything to creation that isn't good.

But every good is a good for someone. In that world, however, there is only God and Satan. So for whom is that punishment good? For God alone or for Satan alone or for both God and Satan?

It does not seem that the "for God alone" answer is satisfactory. For God, considered on his own, has an unchangeable perfect flourishing. Additionally, there is an extended well-being that God has when those that he loves receive goods, but that presupposes that God isn't the only recipient of the good. Besides, surely, when God acts in creation, he produces good effects--he is, after all, omnibenevolent.

Hence, the punishment of Satan in that world is good for Satan (and maybe for God, derivatively via extended well-being).

But if it is good for Satan in that world, why not in ours as well?

And why is it necessarily good for Satan? Presumably because in general punishment is good for those who justly receive it.

As in heaven so on earth

Here are some thoughts on St Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer, many taken from or loosely inspired by things people said at our Department Bible study yesterday (though what I say should not be taken as representing anything like a consensus). First, my translation:

⁹Our father, who art in heaven:
    Thy name be sanctified,
    ¹⁰thy kingdom come,
    thy will come to pass,
        as in heaven so on earth.
    ¹¹Give us daily our supersubstantial [epiousion] bread.
    ¹²And forgive us our debts
        as we forgive our debtors.
    ¹³Do not bring us to a trial,
        but instead deliver us from the evil one [tou ponerou]. (Matthew 6:9-13)

The overall theme is that of the earthly and the heavenly, with the earthly being brought in conformity with the heavenly, by our own activity and that of our father. "As in heaven so on earth", I take it, applies to each: "thy name be sanctified", "thy kingdom come" and "thy will come to pass." Each of these three is simultaneously a request and a personal commitment to the indicated task, and in each case the act of praying is already partly constitutive of the prayed-for result: by praying these we sanctify our Father's name, make his kingdom present and do his will.

Implicit behind all three requests is an image of the majesty of God enthroned above the heavenly hosts who sanctify his name and bring his will to pass--and yet this King of the Universe is also our father.

The prayer is enveloped between the "father" (the first word in the Greek--while in Aramaic and Hebrew, "our father" would be one word) and "the evil one" at the end. This involves reading tou ponerou as "the evil one" (masculine) rather than as generically "evil" (neuter). This is supported the neatness of the resulting envelope structure, the central focus in the prayer on the beyond-earthly significance of our actions, as well as the implicit imagery of the angels of the heavenly host.

The central request is for our epiousios bread. We really don't know how to translate the word. A leading view is that it is the bread for the day to come. But it could also be the bread needed for our existence or ousia, the bread for the life to come, or, following St Jerome's Latin calque, the supersubstantial bread. In any case, the Church has traditionally taken a Eucharistic reading of the text, and such a reading makes the tendency of the earthly towards the heavens come to a head here: we sanctify his name and do his will just as the angels do, and here we boldly ask for the bread of angels, the new manna, the earthly bread made into the body of him who became flesh for us, the bread that is literally the Logos of God on which man lives (cf. Jesus' struggles with the evil one two chapters back in Matthew). At the same time, this reading should not rule out--and indeed the heavenly-earthly parallelism structure is very friendly to it--that this is also a request for what we need for our earthly lives from our heavenly royal father.

In verse 12, we have a switch from the positive to the negative aspects of transforming the earthly into the heavenly. The debt of our sin to God imposes on us an obligation we cannot pay and yet paying which is essential to the coming of his kingdom on earth. We boldly ask that it be forgiven, because (seemingly a non sequitur, but yet God in love for our children makes it follow) of our forgiving the debts of our debtors. It is neither good to be debtor nor creditor, and here by ceasing to be creditors we cease to be debtors. The forgiveness here is in the first instance a loosing or a release. The essential effect is normative, that the debtor is quit of the debt. Of course, when we forgive another, the essential effect is not all that we are called to: we are called to an affective component--we should feel as if the person who sinned against us is no longer in debt to us--and sometimes to a concrete reaching out to heal the relationship. Likewise, God's forgiveness heals us, and gives us the grace to avoid incurring further indebtedness, as indicated by the next verse.

The trials of verse 13 may well include ordinary temptations, but it is also plausible that the text is specifically talking of the trials of persecution and torture. We pray that our father not bring us there, and at the same time we should not deliberately take ourselves there either (there is the scary story in Eusebius about the early Christian who from bravado turned himself in to the Romans--and then broke down and apostasized). Finally, we are reminded that we do not struggle against mere flesh and blood, but that persecutions and temptations are the work of infernal intelligence, like the devil that Jesus fought two chapters back.

Injustice

The following argument is valid:

1. (Premise) If there is no person who is causally responsible for an event E, then E is not an injustice, but at most a misfortune.
2. (Premise) There have been injustices (think of a child's dying after horrible suffering in an earthquake) for which no person was causally responsible by means of natural causal processes (in the sense of "natural" that naturalists talk about).
3. Therefore, some injustices were caused not by means of the natural causal processes of nature. (1 and 2)
4. (Premise) If naturalism holds, then all causal processes are the causal processes of nature.
5. Naturalism is false. (3 and 4)

There are two options in (3): either the injustices were caused by a supernatural person (e.g., a devil) or they were caused by a natural person but through processes that go beyond nature (e.g., Adam and Eve in causing the Fall).

The naturalist will likely deny (2). Thus, then naturalist is going to have to be an irrealist about a significant amount of human experience of the world—for people do experience various evils not that are not naturally caused by human beings as injustices.

Evil and the cosmological argument

Here is a valid non-deductive argument:

1. There are some evils whose best explanation involves an evil supernatural agent. (Premise)
2. Therefore, there is an evil supernatural agent, call him S. (By (1), ampliatively)
3. If there is a necessarily existing first cause of everything else, it is not an evil agent. (Premise)
4. There is a necessarily existing first cause of everything else. (Premise)
5. S is not the necessarily existing first cause of everything else. (By (2) and (3))
6. There is a necessarily existing first cause of everything who is a cause of S. (By (4) and (5))
7. The cause of a supernatural being is supernatural. (Premise)
8. There is a necessarily existing supernatural first cause of everything. (By (6) and (7))

The really controversial premises are (1), which by itself is sufficient to refute naturalism, (3), which I've argued for in this post, and (4), which requires a cosmological argument, which I've defended at length in print.

I bet there are other interesting theistic arguments starting with (2). One might, for instance, be able to argue that an evil agent cannot be simple and unchangeable, and an agent who is not simple and unchangeable must have a cause, and go on from there.