Reacting to William Lane Craig's views on hell

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dCmBMQEIOD8

God pours out His wrath against sinners, as we see in the Flood and on the day of judgment as described by Jesus and Revelation (and Paul mentions God's wrath in Romans 1). But why? What's so bad about sin? Because it alienates us from God? How does sin do that? When a child makes a mistake, does their loving parent disown them, or correct their behavior? 

If God is in control, then it's up to God whether we are alienated from Him or not. Even the New Testament depicts Jesus as eating and drinking with sinners, because just as the doctor comes for the sick, not the healthy, so does God come for the unrighteous, not the righteous (Mark 2:17). Far from pushing God away, our sin should draw God all the closer to us! That's when we need God the most, and a loving God would recognize that.

Maybe God pours out His wrath against sin because of how bad sin is, because of the pain and death that sin causes. But that demands the question: What greater source of pain than hell? If causing pain is so bad, then hell, the greatest pains with the greatest duration, is the worst evil (see David Lewis, "Divine Evil").

Jesus and Revelation paint a picture that forgiveness is impossible for the damned. Why? Either the damned are incapable of asking for forgiveness, in which case their free will has been robbed (and so the Christian cannot appeal to free will to defend the justice of hell or God's hiddenness), or they can ask for forgiveness but God refuses it, in which case God is not perfectly forgiving.

Ad hoc model of hell

Here's a way a finite hell might be able to make sense, even on hedonistic terms.

-Problem: it feels unjust to just let a moral monster into heaven. There is no difference between the fates of culprits and their victims. There is no way to separate the evildoers from their deeds, leading to distrust, hatred, unforgiveness, inability for assimilation.

-God is maximally socially intelligent and would understand perfectly that this cannot work. If you're going to reintegrate moral monsters into heaven, there has to be a process for this, a grand ceremony, a special ritual involving the drama of forgiveness and repentance.

-(God could just erase memories, but then what was the point of earth?)

-In hell, evil people experience the exact suffering that they caused others on earth.

-This allows for reconciliation in a number of ways:

-1) There is a difference maker between the fates of good people and evil people; we are not letting evil people get away with it

-Second, it fulfills the aspect of justice that we might call acknowledgement, or understanding; the evil person needs to acknowledge and understand the sheer evil of their actions; by experiencing the exact pain of their victims, they experience the evilness of their actions. You don't have to try to tell them or convince them that what they did was wrong, you directly show them the wrongness of their actions by forcing them to experience the pain that they caused.

-Third, the victim, knowing that the culprit understands the pain that they caused, now shares something in common with the culprit: a shared trauma, a shared pain, and a shared understanding of the evil that was caused.

-Fourth, the victim can forgive the culprit knowing that when the culprit apologizes, the apology is known to be sincere, because the victim knows that the culprit knows exactly the pain that they caused.

-This allows for reconciliation and forgiveness between moral monsters and their victims.

-This in turn allows for all persons to participate in eudaimonia, and not just people who happened to be initially good enough.

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster, because this way the victim also receives resolution. By annihilating the moral monster, you lose out on true resolution for the victim(s).

-This is better than annihilating the moral monster also because it does right by the moral monster; you don't make their lives retroactively absurd.

-This does right by maximizing eudaimonia by having an additional member of the eudaimonic system.

-This also requires a profound amount of virtue on the part of the victims, virtues pertaining to love and forgiveness and a relinquishing of hatred, pain, and protest.

-This means the torture of hell is smart. Instead of a dumb torture where the pain is meaningless, the pain comes explicitly from the harm the damned committed while on earth. The damned experience all and only the pain they caused others.

-Hell is temporary, as it lasts until you have gone through all the pain you caused others.

-This is hedonistically viable because it allows the damned to reintegrate harmoniously into a eudaimonic system, maximizing happiness.

The only problem with this model of hell is that it's totally ad hoc. There's no biblical evidence for it; there is biblical evidence against it, and it's not the orthodox model.

In fact, the plausibility of this model, insofar as it really is a plausible justification of hell, counts against Christianity exactly because Christianity fails to teach it. If Christianity fails to teach the most plausible model of hell, then that counts against Christianity.

This model is a plausible ethical model, meaning that its justification is plausible, though the idea that this hell is real is not plausible.

The point of this is to show that it's not necessarily the case that retributive punishment goes against a perfect being, or against hedonism.

The damned would not experience unbearable suffering in the sense that the damned would rather cease to exist than go through this suffering. It might not even be determined whether the damned are willing or not to undergo this experience. On some level, the damned might understand that while the pain is bad, the pain is for a good reason, and will eventually lead to eudaimonia. In fact, God could implant this background understanding into the damned mind to prevent the damned from experiencing unbearable suffering by giving them hope that eventually it will all work out.

Project: Problems of Evil

The arguments go from weakest to strongest, or easiest to argue to hardest.

1) The Problem of Hell: A perfect being is logically incompatible with worst possible evils. The best possible being can't create a worst possible evil.

2) The Problem of Unjustified Evils, Failed Theodicies, and Skeptical Theism.

 

Fifteen Theodicies (add Justin Mooney's and Sam Leben's)

3) The Problem of Unbearable Suffering: A perfect being is logically incompatible with the rejection of consciousness.

 

4) The Ontological Problem of Evil: A perfect being is logically incompatible with any imperfection whatever. Define imperfections as imaginable improvements. There should be no imaginable improvements over the best possible world; everyone should be living their best life imaginable. But what would such a perfect life look like? Plausibly, it will involve creating, building, expanding, and... improving! Making the world better by adding more people to it and by creating beautiful things to be enjoyed by people.

 

So imperfections (as imaginable improvements) are not the problem. An imperfection is something deeper. Something like: an imaginable improvement that is impossible to work toward. Our world is full of imaginable improvements that are impossible to work toward. So, really, you could say imperfections are pessimism-causing evils. The imaginable improvements of the ideal world do not cause pessimism, because we always know that we can work toward them and will eventually succeed. So if God exists, there should be no pessimism. 

 

We might say: Just as a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting itself, a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting the world it finds itself in. (In fact, doesn't rejection of the world you are in entail a rejection of your consciousness?) 

 

And yet, pessimism is a rejection of our world. (With full pessimism being a full rejection, and mitigated pessimism being a mitigated rejection.) So a perfect being rules out pessimism.

 

A perfect being rules out imperfections (thus, any degree of pessimism) because perfection can only beget perfection. And perhaps a perfect being rules out imperfections (any degree of pessimism) because even the slightest degree of pessimism implies a degree of rejection of the world, and thus a rejection of consciousness, and a perfect being is incompatible with a rejection of consciousness.

5) Bonus: The Nightmare God of Love

An analysis of love reveals a contradiction in the Nightmare God of Love: God regards members of the nightmare world as wellsprings of value and also regards members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value. If this God fails to accurately regard members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value, then there are other aspects of love that he violates. Love to some degree is a success term. Love requires understanding. Plus, for a God to not recognize the members of the nightmare world as suffering, this God would have to be hopelessly confused.

If theists say there are relevant differences between the nightmare world and our world, they must answer 1) What those relevant differences are, and 2) At which point would our world feature those relevant differences were we to imagine our world to steadily get worse over time until it resembled the nightmare world. If the theist cannot do this, and in turns out that the basic analysis of love is correct, along with the analysis behind unbearable suffering, and if it turns out that its these analyses that allow us to see that the nightmare God is necessarily not loving, then we will be able to see that the God of the actual world is necessarily unloving as well.

David Bentley Hart on Hell and Autism

That All Shall Be Saved (2019), taken from the preface to the paperback edition:

My friends' son is now old enough to grant me permission to tell this story, but it happened more than a dozen years ago, when he was only seven or eight. The year before, he had been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome. He was an extremely intelligent child, shy, typically gentle and quiet, but occasionally emotionally volatile—as tends to be the case with many children classified as "on the spectrum." They are often intensely sensitive to, and largely defensive against, extreme experiences: crowds, loud noises, overwhelming sensory stimulation of any kind, but also pronounced imaginative, affective, or moral dissonances. So perhaps it should have surprised no one when he fell into a state of panic for three days, and then into an extended state of depression, after a Dominican homilist who was visiting his parish happened to mention the eternity of hell in a sermon. It did in fact surprise his parents, though, as they had not realized until then that he had never before consciously absorbed the traditional Christian picture. Now that he had, his reaction was despair. All at once, he found himself imprisoned in a universe of absolute horror, and nothing could calm him until his father succeeded in convincing him that the priest had been repeating lies whose only purpose was to terrorize people into submission. . . . As a result, they have not gone to mass since that time . . . Now, to me it seems obvious—if chiefly at an intuitive level—that this story is more than sufficient evidence of the spiritual squalor of the traditional concept of an eternal hell. After all, another description for a "spectrum" child's "exaggerated" emotional sensitivity might simply be "acute moral intelligence." As difficult as it sometimes makes the ordinary business of life, it is precisely this lack of any very resilient emotional insulation against the world's jagged edges that makes that child incapable of the sort of complacent insensitivity that permits most of us to reconcile ourselves serenely to beliefs that should, soberly considered, cause us revulsion.