God and the Daredevil: Marvel’s Foray into Theology

Warning: Potential Spoilers Follow

I’m not often impressed enough with how theology or religious people are handled on television to say anything about it, but I’ve been impressed with Marvel’s Daredevil and their treatment of the protagonist, Matthew Murdock, and his faith. For those of you that don’t know, within the Marvel Universe Daredevil is Catholic.

In the Comics we know that Matt Murdock’s father was Jack Murdock, a boxer and his mother was a nun. She became a nun after he was born, but he still grew up never knowing her. He only met her once as a kid. It was shortly after he went blind saving an old man from being hit by a truck that she came in to visit him. She asked him to consider his blindness not a curse but a gift.

Scene from Daredevil #229, Marvel Comics Group: New York City (1986), page 4, written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. Reprinted in Daredevil: Born Again trade paperback, Marvel Entertainment Group: New York City (2005), 7th printing, page 56.

And this I think is where we begin to get into some of the territory that the Netflix series covers. Matt Murdock grows up to be a defense lawyer by day, vigilante by night, hunting down those who deserve judgment. He never kills though. The first season of this series is about him hunting down the man that is trying to abuse the people of his home, of Hell’s Kitchen New York, and make them leave while he remakes the city in the image he wishes it to be. This is not what I want to talk about though, what I want to talk about is some of the Theological questions they actually raise in the show.

1. What is the purpose of law?

Matt Murdock is a lawyer, but he recognizes that not everyone who is guilty of a crime is brought to justice by the legal system. He takes it on himself to use his vigilante status to bring them to justice(usually through gathering evidence and then using the law.) but he limits himself to never cross the line and become executioner. (At least in the Netflix series, the comics are a little different of a story.)

“Judgment is best left to God…” his priest says in the Netflix series and Murdock seems to agree with that in regards to life and death.

In addition, in a particularly interesting scene they are in a courtroom defending a guilty man. Matt Murdock presents the law as is, namely, the accusation has to show that there is no reasonable doubt that this man killed in self defense. No one witnessed him not doing so. He does not deny that his client killed a man, and did so rather brutally, he only states that in the court they are there to decide ‘legal judgments’ not moral ones.

In other words: The law does not decide whether an action is good or bad, or a person is good or bad, but only whether they are culpable of the action in question. That is an interesting distinction for a lawyer/vigilante to make. If breaking the law does not make you a bad person, how is he justified in referring to the Kingpin as “the devil.”

It’s possible he was just being showy, saying what he needed to. Or he actually thinks it and behaves inconsistently(that wouldn’t be a surprise. He is only human.)

2. The social character of sin and righteousness.

Matthew and his Priest are discussing a particular proverb: “Like a muddied spring or a polluted well are the righteous who give way to the wicked. (Proverbs 25:26 NIV)” Matthew takes an interpretation that that is a mandate to stand up to the wicked, lest they poison the entire village and harm everyone in the process.

His priest takes a different interpretation (though it isn’t mutually exclusive): That if a man who is righteous, falls into sin, he poisons everyone and everything around him. Sin isn’t just his private affair, but it harms those around him.

We see this, for example, with his lying. In keeping secret his identity from his friends Foggy and Karen, he feels he is protecting them, doing them no harm. But soon, Foggy finds out and gets mad and stops speaking to Matt because he’s not sure who he is anymore. This causes Karen to begin to get upset because Matt and Foggy are fighting and there can’t be “Nelson and Murdock: Attorneys at Law” is Nelson and Murdock are fighting. Eventually she winds up not being able to tell either of them the truth about what happened one night when she shot a guy to death. This one lying habit, quickly spread to all of them.

This is one of the tensions of the series. How do we stand up to evil men, without becoming evil men ourselves? Especially, when the law can’t touch him.

3. God’s gifts/will and how to use them.

In the Comics, Daredevil’s mother asked him to view his blindness as a gift from God. After all, he wound up being able to see the world better than he could before, and hear the pain of people around him. He was given this power for a reason, he argues. In the current television rendition, he tells a story of a time he was lying in his apartment and he heard a man down the street violating his young daughter. He did it in such a way the wife didn’t know and it didn’t leave any marks, and so when Matt called CPS it simply got brushed under the rug.

But it kept happening and only he knew about it because of his gift. Was he supposed to sit on it? He followed the man and beat him up and told him that “he’d know if he ever touched his daughter again” and then disappeared. The man, as far as Matt could tell, never did touch his daughter again.

But Matt’s struggle is that exactly. If God is to be the sole judge, why did he give him this gift that allows him to hunt down and destroy evil, if he had no intention of it being moral to do so? Surely we see that God uses certain forms of Earthly Punishment as Divine Punishment, we see it in the Babylonian Captivity, just to give one example. So maybe Daredevil is like the Babylonians, God’s instrument of punishment on Earth.

But how much is in his hands? Can he take life? Is he judge, jury, and executioner, or just the instrument for that? But how? Matt Murdock is a complex character in this way. He always wants to do what is right, by both man and God, but isn’t always sure what that is. What is the line between standing up for the weak and righteous against evil, and becoming that very horror yourself?

This is but a few of the issues I think the plot raises. There are additional interesting points, for example: “Whether or not there is a singular entity called ‘the Devil’?”, “Are there such things as absolutes? Even Lucifer the absolute evil in this universe, was once an angel.” but though they are in the series, they have not yet become big themes in them, so I have chosen to not focus on them.

Quinquae Viae: The Five Ways of Aquinas (Part 3)

When thinking about the Second Way of Aquinas, which states that no cause can cause itself and therefore there must be a first cause, we run into a difficult problem of which the Second Way cannot get itself out. This problem is this: Aquinas has only proved this First Cause, he has not proven God.

In light of Modern Cosmology you might make the argument that the first cause was the Big Bang that brought all matter into existence.¹ And given the restraints of the Second Way there is no way out of it. You cannot deny that if you define the Big Bang by the simplified way it usually is, then it fits the qualifications of “First Cause”. So then why think the First Cause is God? That is what Aquinas seeks to do in his Third Way. Show that “Even if there is a Big Bang, it did not have to occur, it is possible that the universe could have not existed. Since it is possible for the Big Bang to have not happened, there must be an explanation for the possibility that is namely: the Big Bang did happen.”

The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence – which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.

What we have above is a precursor the Leibniz’ Cosmological Argument from Contingency and a follow up on Avicenna’s argument from the same. As his other arguments in this series it depends heavily on the argument against actual infinities, but has a distinct flair from his versions on motion and causation. This is a distinctly modal argument.

While Avicenna drew largely on Aristotelean principles he seems to have come to a different conclusion than Aristotle did. Aristotle and Aquinas both argue that there is a first cause because of an infinite regress of causes is impossible. Avicenna however, argues that since the totality of all possible things cannot be caused by itself (since it is itself possible) it must be caused by something outside itself. And since the thing is outside of the totality of all possible things, it must be necessary. And that means that there is a necessary thing, and that thing is God.

Aquinas doesn’t take this same sort of modal approach to the argument. He argues very similarly to the fashion of Aristotle, namely that the unvierse has to have an explanation of itself. A cause of causes. It is easy to conflate this argument with the Argument from the Beginning of Motion, but we should not do that because they are distinct even though they have a logical similarity to their argument. We should not think of these causes, for example, as temporally sequential, happening one right after the other. Instead we should view them as simultaneous causes: logically simultaneous like what exists in an argument.

Let us take for example his argument:
1. Contingent beings are caused.
2. Not every being can be contingent, for this would create an infinite regress.
3. There must exist a being which is necessary to cause contingent beings.
4. This necessary being is God.

There is not a temporal succession to these things. It is not that ‘First’, step one comes, and then step two and then three and then four. Our minds may track through that path, but they all exist simultaneously. They are on your screen at the same time whether you are reading them or not. And they happen concurrently, and YET there is some degree of dependence of 4) on 3) and 3) on 2) and 2) on 1). If any of these had been different the argument would not work.

In the same way, we like to say that the irrational number Pi, “Goes on to infinity…” which is a misstatement. It is not as if Pi is continuing to count itself out every time it is calculated. It exists in it’s entirety, like a ray but rather all of it’s infinite digits exist simultaneously though each is dependent on the former. This is not to say that it is an actual infinite. Pi has a definite end point, namely the 3 on the other side of the decimal. It is infinite in the future direction only and all later numbers are dependent on that 3. 3 however, could not exist if it were the final number of Pi, that was dependent on an infinite set of variables in the other direction.

Similarly, if I had an argument consisting of infinite premises, all of which was dependent on the others but I came to a conclusion at the end.

…
Infinite 1: There exists an x
Infinite 2: There exists an x+1
Therefore: _____

That conclusion would be dependent on an infinite number of non-temporal causes that occurred before it, and therefore could never be reached.

In the same way, Aquinas argues that necessity and possibility work. For every contingent thing must have a cause. To put it another way, every contingent thing is dependent on something else for it’s existence. Since an actually infinite number of causes is impossible, this first thing must be a necessary being.

Since God is the only thing that could exist necessarily (think about Anselm trying to show the absurdity of a God that doesn’t exist) and must exist of its own power, then this first cause is God. It is not just a convenient stopping point for Aquinas it is the end.

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1. This doesn’t actually help the problem since it doesn’t make sense for that to have occurred un-caused at any point. If there was an infinitely dense ball of matter that existed there since eternity past, there would have had to have been a change in order for it to rapidly start expanding. That would be the first cause. ↩

Lenten Thoughts: How a blog can be a Spiritual Exercise.

To give a confession to my blog readers(the few of you there are, the less if I continue this habit of posting randomly and without order) I often forget I have a blog that needs updating. These past few months have been difficult for me spiritually and emotionally, and the worst part is I’m still not even sure what the cause of it was.

Every blog I have ever had has fallen away in the litany of concerns of my daily life. It is easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of day to day activities and forget about other things which are not as pressing.

Or at least don’t seem as pressing.

This Lent I’ve been thinking about discipline. I intentionally sort of set aside philosophy this Lent, and focused rather on spiritual classics and digging into the Scriptures as well. It has always been a fault of mine that I am not terribly consistent in my workflow and am not very good at self-motivating towards my own goals. This is why I love the structure of Academia, someone at least puts a deadline on you and consequences for missing it.This is not me defending myself on account of not being in an Academic setting.

What I am apologizing for is being undisciplined. I am not saying that I am lazy, but that I lack consistent and regular devotion to a single thing. I am not good at being a ‘disciple’. A disciple wakes and learns from the master and then emulates the master. I have not practiced that in any sense. Thus, hopefully I can use my blog as a tracker of discipline. If I am studying Scripture, Philosophy, History, or really anything, I should be able to come up with at least a few words to say about it every week. Thus, if I am updating my blog, it is because I am being disciplined in my studies. If I am not, then I am not being disciplined in my studies.

There is however an obstacle that I would like to point out to some of the topics I have mentioned in past blog posts that I was working on.

Lack of Sources that are readily available: For my Third Part of Aquinas’ Five Ways, I was planning to integrate Avicenna’s argument from contingency to discuss it in contrast with Aquinas’. However, up until recently, I was having trouble locating its source material. I have found references to it in other philosophy blogs, and discussions of it in other commentary texts, but never an actual transcript of the argument. It wasn’t until I found a reference to Avicenna’s argument on Edward Feser’s blog ¹ that provided a link to the source material in an anthology that I was able to locate it. I still have not recieved it, but have opted out of doing that particular bit since Feser does such a good job on his blog of explaining and discussing Avicenna’s argument. I will make reference to his post about it in my post on Aquinas.

Additionally: other sources are hard to find. I was planning on writing a dialogue between Pelagius and Augustine, but source material on Pelagius is hard to find. It is a lot of work piecing him together from sources that are entirely hostile to him. Augustine, Orosius, Prosper, Marius Mercator, and Jerome are all hostile to his view and it is difficult to get the nuance of his position from it. (Not impossible, just…difficult.) It is easy to reconstruct it from Semi-Pelagian and other later views, but it is hard to get at the man himself, so I may just opt out of doing this particular topic. ² It was not to be a discussion of Pelagianism vs. Augustinianism, but between the men themselves. Which will probably make me scrap this.

Also, several of my interests are hard to track down their works in English. While my ability to read Latin is existent, it is far from fluent, I depend on others to do so for me. I have no skill with either Greek or Arabic, and unfortunately these are the languages most of my interests primarily exist in. If I ever need help finding a source I will be sure to mention it in my post.

Thank you all for your patience.

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1.  http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/05/avicennas-argument-from-contingency.html ↩
2. Since the views are distinct from the man I am hesitant to equate him with Pelagianism like Calvin has been with Calvinism. (Which is interestingly debatable: https://www.calvin.edu/meeter/Was%20Calvin%20a%20Calvinist-12-26-09.pdf ) ↩