This is the compensation theodicy, or the “God-will-fix-it-in-post” theodicy. The idea is this: If an innocent child dies from leukemia, but gets endless happiness in heaven, then why consider the suffering on earth as anything other than a tiny, irrelevant blip in the child’s life? The goodness of the child’s life in heaven so absolutely dwarfs the badness they experienced on earth that it would be strange to consider the child’s suffering to be gratuitous, or even real in any relevant sense. To quote the hymn: And the things of earth / will grow strangely dim.
#11a - This theodicy is an essential ingredient of the most plausible theodicy. One reason why is it would be absurd for God to create creatures only to snuff them out in the end. Either we are meant to be or not. If we are meant to be, then we should never stop being. If we are not meant to be, then we should never come into being. How could it be best for us to exist for an arbitrary duration of time? Even if the best life were finite, surely it would involve far more time and goodness than we can get on earth, and so heaven would still be needed.
#11b - This theodicy is essential for another reason: a child who dies from leukemia has apparently lived a life whose badness outweighs its goodness. Such a life is very apparently gratuitously evil. The only chance for there to be more good than evil for such a child is if there is an afterlife to compensate.
#11c - Theodicy or not, heaven must be part of the story for Christians given the teachings of Jesus. Jesus affirms the final resurrection (Matthew 22:30, John 11:25), Jesus himself resurrects to showcase the resurrection (1st Cor. 15:20), and Jesus makes multiple promises to eternal life for those who believe (Matthew 25:46, Luke 18:30, John 14:2).
#11d - To answer the question above, the evils we experience in this life cannot be a tiny, irrelevant blip because the experience itself is not tiny or irrelevant. We see, directly, how powerful our suffering is here and now. No number of days spent in heaven could change the fact that our suffering here had the magnitude it did.
This is why the compensation theodicy feels offensive and uncaring. In heaven we can imagine someone going up to God and asking, “So… what was that all about?”
Either the suffering on earth was meaningful or not. If it was, then compensation is irrelevant because it’s not connected to the suffering in a relevant way. I’ve heard others make the point that you cannot seriously harm someone even if you were to give them a large sum of money afterwards. Common sense morality says this is wrong.
But if the suffering on earth was not meaningful, then it should have been prevented, and God should have created us in heaven from the start.
If the suffering we cause others doesn’t matter, or is in some sense unreal given the infinitude of the future, then it’s mysterious as to why we need to repent, or why Jesus needed to die for our sins, or why God would judge us so harshly.
Anti-theodicy #7: It's evil to harm someone and then throw money at them as if that covers it. Likewise, it's evil for God to allow EJ's dementia and then "throw" heaven at her as if that covers things. If EJ's suffering produces outweighing goods for her, it certainly won't be in this life, so heaven is needed to prevent EJ's suffering from being gratuitous with respect to her. But even with heaven, what purpose did EJ's suffering serve? If none, then it's gratuitous. God could have achieved the good of EJ being in heaven without EJ's suffering on earth. There must be a relevant connection between EJ's suffering and her being in heaven. What is that connection?
Louise Antony makes this point about heaven in her Norton essay, “No Good Reason—Exploring the Problem of Evil”, in Gideon Rosen et al. (ed.) The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (2018), pg 36-45.
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