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.

Hating the devil

An interesting disagreement among orthodox Christians, even among orthodox Catholics, is whether the devil should be hated. I have run into a number of people who think in the affirmative. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that that is the more common position. On the other hand, I think we should not hate the devil—in fact, we should love him.

Here are some plausibilistic arguments for my position:

1. Surely, we should not hate the souls in hell. But if the reason for hating the devil is that he cannot repent of his wickedness, then the same applies to the souls in hell. And if the reason for hating the devil is his evil works and his empty promises, then that's a bad reason—it's a reason for hating the evil works and the empty promises, but not for hating the devil.
2. Anything that is good deserves to be loved to the extent that it is good. Anything that exists is good to the extent that it exists. Thus, the devil deserves to be loved to the extent that he exists. And to the extent that he does not exist, surely then it is not he, who exists, who is to be hated, but the fact that he does not exist fully should be hated. (Yes, one can hate its being the case that p.)
3. Love and hatred are closely tied to actions. Now the actions we should engage in with respect to the devil are ones that are good for him, and hence they are more like loving than like hateful actions. For instance, we should reject the devil's temptations. That is good, because by rejecting the temptations we make him be responsible for fewer evils than he would be responsible for if we yielded, and it is bad for one to be responsible for evils. We should shun the devil's company. But to be in the devil's company, we would have to be wicked. And it harms a person to be provided with wicked companions. Furthermore, we should strive to frustrate the devil's wicked plans. While the frustration of one's plans may be bad for one in one way, in a more salient way, it is good for one when the plans are wicked. It is a bad thing for one to succeed at evil.

On the other hand, one might worry that love has a unitive dimension, and then one might argue that we should, surely, not seek to be united to the devil—that is just too dangerous. However, we can be united simply by doing good to someone, and there are ways of doing good to the devil that do not carry undue danger—for instance, we can, as noted above, do good to the devil by frustrating his evil designs. Another good we could do to the devil, should God assign this to us (we are mysteriously told that we'll judge angels), could be to condemn him to punishment, if it is intrinsically good to be punished for one's wickedness.

At the same time, the love should not have much intensity. The devil is dangerous, and we should not think too much about him. Maybe I have already done too much.

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.

Moral evil and naturalism

The only argument against theism that is worth considering at all seriously as an argument against theism[note 1] is the inductive problem of evil.

The inductive argument from evil holds that it is unlikely that God would have created a world containing the degree, kind and amount of evil that we observe.

Now, one might offer the inductive argument from evil as an argument for some supernaturalistic hypothesis, such as that there is an evil god (either alone or along with a good or neutral one), or that there is an indifferent god, or the like. In that case, what I will say below does not apply. But, among contemporary philosophers, the primary hypothesis competing with theism is not one of these unorthodox supernaturalistic ones, but naturalism. And then the philosopher offering the inductive argument from evil needs to show not just that the degree, kind and amount of evil that exists in the world is unlikely on the theistic hypothesis, but that it is more unlikely on the theistic hypothesis than on the naturalistic hypothesis.

But to show this is tricky. Much of this point comes from C. Stephen Layman (I am grateful to Todd Buras for letting me know of Layman's argument). Let us grant for the sake of argument that the conditional probability of the degree, kind and amount of evil that we observe is, say, 10⁻²⁰ given theism. Denote theism by T and let E is the event of there being the degree, kind and amount of evil that we in fact observe. Then it's granted for the sake of the argument that P(E|T)=10⁻²⁰. Do we know that the probability of the degree, kind and amount of evil that we observe is more than 10⁻²⁰ given naturalism, i.e., that P(E|N)>10⁻²⁰, where N is naturalism?

Many of the evils that we observe are of such a kind that they are only evil because of conscious life—pains are like that. Therefore, E entails the existence of conscious life, but says a lot more than that conscious life exists. Hence: P(E|N)<P(C|N), where C is the claim that there is conscious life. If P(C|N) is no greater than 10⁻²⁰ then we do not have P(E|N)>10⁻²⁰. Thus the naturalist to use the argument from evil against theism must be able to estimate P(C|N) as greater than 10⁻²⁰. I do not think we are in a position to make that estimate. And without it, we are not in a position to know that the inductive argument from evil supports naturalism over theism.

Moreover, many of the evils that we observe are moral evils. That there are moral evils entails that there are morally responsible persons, and that there are moral truths. IF R is the claim that there are morally responsible persons and M the claim that there are moral truths, then in order to use the inductive argument from evil as an argument against theism and for naturalism, one would have to show that P(R and M|N) is bigger than 10⁻²⁰. But I don't think we are in a position to know that. First, it may be very unlikely that persons would arise given N. Second, it seems quite plausible that for moral responsibility one requires persons who engage in a form of causation very different from the natural causation around them—if all we have is the kind of causation that ordinarily goes on in nature, we don't have moral responsibility. If so, then the likelihood of R given N is nil, or perhaps very small. Furthermore, these persons would have to have moral beliefs to be morally responsible. But to secure intentionality for moral beliefs is a tough task for the naturalist. It's hard enough to secure intentionality for empirical beliefs on naturalistic theories, but perhaps some kind of causal theory of content can be made to work. But it does not seem likely that in a naturalistic setting (except an Aristotelian one—and that's not what people usually mean by "naturalism") we could get intentionality for moral beliefs.

And while I do not know of an entirely convincing argument that the existence of moral truths is incompatible with naturalism, the existence of moral truths is not as prima facie likely given naturalism as given non-naturalistic hypotheses like theism. (In fact, theism entails the existence of moral truths.)

Moreover, among the evils that E reports, there are some truly horrendous moral evils. While bare-bones theism may have difficulties with explaining these, naturalism likely has a difficulty with explaining them, too. But theism, unlike naturalism, is at least compatible with positing a supernatural tempter, a devil, to help explain these horrendous moral evils. So, once again, it is not clear that naturalism does better.

Of course one can tell stories about the evolution of persons, responsibility and even the capacity for horrendous moral evil. But are these stories any better than stories that the theist can tell—stories about divine design, the value of human and demonic freedom, etc.?

If I am right, then the argument from evil does not support naturalism. The naturalist can still offer the argument as an ad hominem, but if she is serious about thinking that the argument is a good reason to reject theism, she needs to be open to the possibility that it is a good reason to abandon naturalism.