The Logical Problem of Hell

Part 1: Introduction and Core Argument

Does God exist? I argue that the God that sends people to hell, as featured in orthodox Christianity and Islam, not only does not exist, but certainly does not exist. More precisely, I argue that an infernalist God is logically incompatible with being a perfect being. So if a perfect being exists, hell doesn’t.

There are two reasons why this matters. First, many religious traditions have taught both that God sends people to hell and that God is perfect – perfectly loving, just, worthy of worship, and so on. If we prove that hell is incompatible with a perfect God, then we prove that these religious traditions have been sorely mistaken all this time. For a religious tradition to get hell, a doctrine of infinite importance, so wrong for so long is to deal a serious blow to its credibility. You would think that a God of perfect love would ensure proper communication of such an important doctrine. But it gets worse. If my argument succeeds, then members of these traditions have the following options: 

 

1) Opt for the view that life in hell is not fundamentally bad because hell does not last forever ('fundamentally bad' is explained under Part 2). In other words, opt for some form of universalism.

 

2) Opt for the view that life in hell is not fundamentally bad because although it lasts forever, members of hell do not wish for death.

 

3) Conclude that the God they worship is not perfect.

 

4) Conclude that the God they worship does not exist.

 

If options 1–3 are unacceptable for theological reasons, then members will be forced to give up their religion entirely.

The second reason why this matters is because some people—both religious and non-religious—suffer from ‘hell anxiety.’ Some religious folks may suffer from hell anxiety not for themselves, but for non-religious loved ones. For Christians, Jesus twice depicts scenarios where characters are in hell, desire to get out, and are refused by God.[1] On one interpretation, Jesus says that some sincere believers will go to hell.[2] Furthermore, Jesus mentions a mysterious unforgivable sin of ‘blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.’[3] Combining these items, we can see how some Christians may worry that they have committed the unforgivable sin unbeknownst to them, and will find themselves rejected by God with no recourse despite the fact that their faith in God is sincere. Such Christians are at a high risk of severe hell anxiety.

Hell anxiety is not a common issue,[4] but for those afflicted by it, proofs against hell can in theory be a precious resource for treating hell anxiety. Proofs against hell can further be used to prevent hell anxiety from taking root in the first place, and to combat attempts to spread hell anxiety through "fire and brimstone" preaching.

 

Below are the three steps of my core argument. After defending the first two premises I will draw out the full argument, which ends with the conclusion that God doesn’t exist (though the argument can be inverted to say that because God exists, hell doesn’t).

1) A fundamentally bad life is the worst possible evil for an individual. (Premise 1)

2) Every evil corresponds to a good of equivalent magnitude of being saved from that evil. (Premise 2) 

3) Therefore, being saved from a fundamentally bad life is the best possible good for an individual living a fundamentally bad life. (Conclusion 1; From 1,2)

 

Part 2: Defending Premise 1

To live a fundamentally bad life is to be stuck in an unwanted existence forever, eternally wishing for death but unable to die. Note that while the word ‘evil’ is associated with immorality, here ‘evil’ means ‘bad thing.’ So a fundamentally bad life is the worst possible bad thing to happen to an individual.

A Christian might respond in the following way: We have free will, and with free will comes moral responsibility. With moral responsibility comes just deserts, including retributive punishment. People who do evil must pay for what they’ve done. When we imprison murderers and child abusers for their crimes, we don’t feel bad for them. We see their suffering in prison as good. Justice demands that they suffer. So while hell is bad for the individual, this badness constitutes justice, a great good.

My rebuttal has two parts. First, this fails to understand the concept of ‘good.’ What does it mean to call justice good? Good for whom? Good in what way? Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen, in their book When Heaven Invades Hell, argue for a universal reconciliation view of hell. In that book the question is posed: Do people serve justice, or does justice serve people? Immediately we should see that justice serves people. Isn’t this the point Jesus makes when he says that "The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath"?[5]

The person who thinks people serve justice has a poor understanding of value. Here’s a better understanding. If there were no persons, no consciousness at all, then there would be no goods or evils. There could be no suffering, or harm, or injustice if no one is there to suffer or be harmed or be wronged. So goods and evils depend on consciousness.[6] Intrinsic goods (intrinsically positive qualia, or ‘happiness’) just are those things that make consciousness worth having, and intrinsic evils (intrinsically negative qualia, or ‘pain’) just are those things that make consciousness not worth having. That which makes consciousness most not worth having is therefore the greatest evil for a conscious being. Hence, Premise 1.

Second, and this follows from the preceding point: free will is not worth the risk of eternal suffering. Joshua Rasmussen paints the following picture for us[7]: Imagine your children playing on a playground. There’s an infinitely deep pit on the playground, and anyone who falls down that pit will fall down forever and will suffer forever. Would you give your children the freedom to play on the playground if it meant running the risk of them falling in? Of course not. In the same way God, who loves like a parent, and who knows how value works, would never give us freedom at the risk of eternal suffering. Like Rasmussen, I "can’t see how the value of freedom could possibly be worth that kind of a risk."[8]

 

Part 3: Defending Premise 2 and Expanding the Core Argument

Intrinsic goods—various kinds of happiness—are good in virtue of their phenomenal quality. By being directly aware of this quality, we are directly aware of what makes happiness worth pursuing for its own sake. Extrinsic goods by contrast are good in virtue of their giving rise to intrinsic goods. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of intrinsic and extrinsic evils. Most things we call good (good movies, good food, good friends, good jobs, etc.) are extrinsically good, with the experiences they generate being the intrinsic goods that ground their goodness.

But this leaves us with a puzzle. How can death be bad for us? If death is the cessation of consciousness, then there is no consciousness to ground the badness of death for the one who dies. But clearly, dying is bad for the one who dies, and indeed we consider death to be typically the worst harm that can befall a person. This calls for a third kind of evil, depriving evils, which derive their badness not from their giving rise to intrinsic (or extrinsic) evils, but from their preventing the intrinsic goods that would have taken place. Not only are we directly aware of the goodness of happiness and the badness of pain, but we are directly aware of the difference between the two, and of happiness being better than pain and better than an absence of happiness. When a young person dies, we say they have been robbed of life, that they had their whole life ahead of them. We are acknowledging the directly accessible superiority of having intrinsic goods over not having them. The direct awareness of this superiority provides the consciousness needed to ground the badness of depriving evils. Despite death not being intrinsically bad, we know death is bad for the one who dies because we know that it’s better to enjoy intrinsic goods than not to, all else being equal.

We need a ‘deprivation theory’ (some version of it) to make sense of the badness of death.[9] But depriving evils imply the existence of saving goods. And just as being deprived of a greater good is worse than being deprived of a lesser good, being saved from a greater evil is better than being saved from a lesser evil. As bad as an evil is, it is that good to be saved from it. Hence, Premise 2.

But this leads to another puzzle. Consider the depriving evil equivalent of Premise 2:

Premise 2(d): Being deprived from a fundamentally good life is the worst possible evil for an individual living a fundamentally good life.

 

On one hand, this sounds commonsensical. It does sound right that the worst thing that can happen to you if you’re in heaven is to lose heaven. But there is more than one way to lose heaven. You could be annihilated, or sent to hell (or sent to purgatory, or earth, or a slightly worse heaven). Surely getting sent to hell is infinitely worse than being annihilated. So how could being annihilated be a worst possible evil when being sent to hell is infinitely worse?

 

My answer is that living a fundamentally bad life is the worst possible extrinsic evil. Being fully deprived of heaven is the worst possible depriving evil. These evils are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, living a fundamentally bad life includes being deprived of a fundamentally good life for the person who otherwise would have lived a fundamentally good life.

Applying this to Premise 2, then, we see that there is more than one way to be saved from a fundamentally bad life. You could be saved by being annihilated or saved by being sent to a fundamentally good life. Again, clearly, being sent to a fundamentally good life is infinitely better than being annihilated. And yet, if Premise 2 is right, being annihilated or sent to heaven would both be best possible goods. How can this be? We can apply the same distinction here: living a fundamentally good life is the best possible extrinsic good while being fully saved from a fundamentally bad life is the best possible saving good. As long as you are fully saved from a worst possible fate, you enjoy a best possible saving good no matter how you are fully saved.

To ensure there is no equivocation over the terms 'good' and 'evil', here is the core argument updated:

1) A fundamentally bad life is the worst possible extrinsic evil for an individual. (Premise 1*)

2) For every evil there is a saving good of equivalent magnitude of being fully saved from that evil. (Premise 2*)

3) Therefore, being fully saved from a fundamentally bad life is the best possible saving good for an individual living a fundamentally bad life. (Conclusion 1*; From 1,2)

 

These clarifications allow the argument to be filled out, showing its final conclusion:

 

4) People in hell live fundamentally bad lives (and thus, suffer worst possible extrinsic evils). (Premise 3)

5) The best possible good for an individual will either take the form of a best possible extrinsic good or a best possible saving good (with best possible extrinsic goods entailing best possible saving goods for those saved from worst possible evils). (Premise 4)

6) Therefore, there are worst possible evils that fail to give rise to best possible goods. (Conclusion 2; From 4,5)

7) If there are worst possible evils that fail to give rise to best possible goods, then there are unjustified evils. (Premise 5)

8) Therefore, there are unjustified evils. (Conclusion 3; From 6,7,modus ponens)

9) If God exists, there are no unjustified evils. (Premise 6)

10) Therefore, God does not exist. (Conclusion 4; From 8,9,modus tollens)

 

In Part 4 I defend Premise 3 and in Part 5 I defend the remaining argument. While the first four steps are crucial, steps 5–10 present opportunities for variations of the argument. This is just one variation. The key idea behind steps 5–10 is that because the best possible goods with respect to worst possible evils are necessarily eliminating in nature, worst possible evils cannot possibly generate justifying goods. The best you can do with respect to worst possible evils is prevent them.

 

Part 4: Defending Premise 3:

Do members of hell live fundamentally bad lives? Recall the two criteria for a life to count as fundamentally bad: the rejection of consciousness (preferring death to life) and eternal duration. According to the orthodox account of hell, hell explicitly lasts forever. That criterion is easily checked off. But according to the orthodox account, do members of hell wish for death? While this is not explicit, there is strong evidence that this is implied. In the case of Christianity, consider the following responses:

 

1) The first is the common sense response. Given descriptions of hell (of which I'm sure you are familiar), it's just obvious that yes, anyone suffering the torture of being burned alive, or what have you, would shortly be wishing for death. This response applies to Islam's orthodox account of hell as well.

 

2) The second is the salvation response. If hell is not a bad place to be, then why is it so urgent that we be saved from it?

 

You could argue that hell is a purgatory where life is fundamentally neutral. That is, life is always just good enough that you could take it or leave it; or life bounces evenly back and forth between being more worth living and less worth living. Then life in hell would still be infinitely worse compared to life in heaven. This retains the urgency and importance of salvation, nullifying the salvation response.

 

But the orthodox account does not remotely paint a picture of hell being like purgatory, with hell and purgatory being explicitly separate fates in Catholicism.

 

3) The third is the candidate response. There are at least five good candidates of figures in the New Testament who plausibly prefer death over their fate: the rich man (Luke 16), the devil, the beast, and the false prophet (Revelation 20:7-10), and Judas.

Jesus says of Judas, the disciple who betrays him, "It would have been better for that one not to have been born."[10] Now, if universalism is true, then ultimately all souls go to heaven. So ultimately, it’s always better to have been born on universalism. So on a plain reading, Jesus is saying that at least one person, Judas, will not end up in heaven (indicating that universalism is false). This means either Judas will end up in hell as tradition teaches, or Judas will be annihilated and, per Jesus, it’s better to have never been than to live a life like Judas’ only to be annihilated. If Judas ends up in hell, and it's true that it's better to have never been than to be in hell, then hell is a worst possible fate. Even if this only applies to Judas (or only to any of the other candidates), that's enough to enable the argument.

 

If Judas ends up annihilated, then the orthodox account of the fate of Judas is sorely mistaken, and again one wonders how a religious tradition could be so wrong about something so important. If Judas ends up saved in a universalist scenario, then Jesus is mistaken, or exaggerating to the point of being misleading when he says that it would have been better for Judas to have never been.

4) The fourth is the Revelation 9:6 response.[11] This verse reads (NRSVUE): "And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them." This is described as a period of punishment that lasts five months when God is sending his wrath on earth against the unbelievers. If we suppose that the suffering of this period is no worse than the suffering of hell’s final form, then this description will apply to hell as well.

 

5) The fifth is the Revelation 20 response. Consider the relevant passages:

 

And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. (10)

And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire, and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire. (13–15)

If we suppose that the translation of "forever and ever" is accurate, and that the torment in question causes one to wish for death, and that the lake of fire in verse ten is the same lake of fire as in verse fifteen, and that there is no difference between the torment of the first group (devil, the beast, the false prophet) and the second (the damned non-believers), then this would confirm the orthodox view of hell and the view that hell is a worst possible evil for all its members.

 

On one interpretation, the second death means the destruction of the soul, supporting annihilationism. But on another interpretation, the death of death refers to the eternity of hell (if death "dies" then no one can die after that).

Christians might argue that members of hell, despite their torment, prefer hell to heaven in their stubbornness. But this clashes with Luke 13:25 where those casted out of heaven are depicted as wanting to be in heaven.[12] The rich man in Luke 16 is depicted as wanting relief from his suffering, and as wanting to save his family members from hell.

Despite these verses, it’s debated whether the Bible teaches a doctrine of eternal conscious torment.[13] In addition to infernalism you have universal reconciliationism (hell is a temporary period of rehabilitation) and annihilationism (the eternal punishment is permanent death). There are conflicting interpretations of the relevant Bible passages, and a number of verses seem to outright contradict each other. All three views can be argued from scripture. Authors arguing against the traditional doctrine of hell have responses to the verses I’ve quoted here.

 

At the very least, my argument, if not an argument against Christianity (or Islam) in its best light, remains as an argument against Christianity (and Islam) in its contemporary orthodox form. In that case, as already pointed out, if contemporary orthodoxy is mistaken, then this proves to be quite the embarrassment for Christianity (and Islam), especially if one takes the Church to be guided by the Holy Spirit toward true doctrine. The Christian (and Muslim) is left with a dilemma: Keep the orthodox doctrine of hell and face the logical problem of hell, or give up the orthodox doctrine and face the problem of having a tradition that is unreliable in arriving at the truth of its most important doctrines.

 

But it's even worse than that. Giving up the orthodox doctrine of hell may prove impossible given its scriptural and cultural support, and debates over hell may do little more than reveal that scripture is ambiguous at best and contradictory at worst about one of if not the most important doctrine, casting doubt on the inerrancy and inspiration of the Bible.

Indeed, if the arguments from defenders of universalism and annihilationism as to the true interpretation of scripture have merit, and there are multiple defensible interpretations of hell, then the Christian has no choice but to admit that the Bible is ambiguous at best and contradictory at worst about one of if not the most important doctrine. In that case, no matter which interpretation the Christian chooses, the damage will have already been done to the credibility of the Bible and the Church.

 

But to make matters even worse, annihilationism is itself an undeniably morally abhorrent doctrine, placing further philosophical pressure on Christians to accept universalism and to explain away passages that imply annihilation.

 

A Christian might say that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church into the truth of universalism (or annihilationism) today. But I would argue, one, that the Holy Spirit ought to have prevented the Church from ever adopting a doctrine as horrible (and logically impossible) as hell in the first place, and two, both universalism and annihilationism remain unsupported by most denominations. Given the obvious scriptural support for infernalism[14], and the endorsement of infernalism by major denominations, Christianity may be stuck with the orthodox account of hell.

Part 5: Defending the remaining argument

What the rest of the argument is getting at is the fact that worst possible evils cannot possibly be justified. Intrinsic badness is self-evidently worth eliminating (and thus, preventing). So to justify an intrinsic evil (or an evil that gives rise to an intrinsic evil, or an evil that deprives one of an intrinsic good), the evil must lead to an intrinsic good that outweighs the intrinsic evil (or lead to a saving good that saves one from a worse intrinsic evil) and the good must depend on the evil to be realized (that is, if you can get the same good without the evil, then the evil is not justified). Because worst possible extrinsic evils lead to maximum intrinsic evils, worst possible extrinsic evils are maximally self-evidently worth eliminating (and thus, preventing). Anything that is maximally worth eliminating cannot possibly be justified.

Another way to see this: because intrinsic evils are conscious, and thus positive[15], the best possible goods that depend on worst possible evils are negative, or saving, in nature. So it’s impossible for a worst possible evil to generate a positive good that both depends on it and exceeds (or even matches) its magnitude.[16] If someone is suffering a worst possible evil, it’s necessarily the case that the sufferer has missed out on the best possible good that depends on this evil. Put another way, because the best thing that can happen to someone with respect to a worst possible evil is being saved from that evil, then necessarily if that person is suffering a worst possible evil, they haven't been saved, and thus haven't enjoyed the best possible good with respect to that evil. 

 

Whatever dependent goods the worst possible evil might generate (e.g., God’s justice, or alleged justice), they cannot possibly reach the magnitude of the best possible saving good. The person living a fundamentally bad life would have to live a fundamentally good life (or not at all) to cancel out the worst possible evil, but it’s impossible to live a fundamentally good life (or not at all) and a fundamentally bad life at the same time. Even if this were possible, the fundamentally good life would have to depend on the evil of living a fundamentally bad life to count as justifying, and even then the good would not exceed the evil, only match it in magnitude, making the good more arbitrary than justifying.

God, as a perfectly good, perfectly rational, perfectly powerful being, would be perfectly aware of all of this and would have the power to prevent worst possible evils. And therefore, if there is a perfect being, there are no worst possible evils. In simplified form, my argument is therefore the following:

 

1) Worst possible evils cannot possibly be justified.
2) Hell is a worst possible evil.
3) Therefore hell cannot possibly be justified.

While this rules out the possibility of a perfect being creating hell, my argument does not rule out all conceivable hells. For all that’s been established here, there could be an evil God who sends everyone to hell. Or, there could be no gods at all, and yet our consciousness survives our deaths and drifts on for eternity. I trust that there are proofs out there against these hells too.

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1 - See: The Narrow Door: Luke 13:22-28 and The Rich Man and Lazarus: Luke 16:19-31.

 

2 - Matthew 7:21-23, Luke 13:22-28.

3 - Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-30, Luke 12:10.

4 - In a study of 353 undergraduate students at a religious university, 82% held moderate to confident belief in hell. Students were asked to rate how well various statements applied to them (e.g., “Sometimes I worry that my beliefs are not enough to keep me from Hell”) from 1–5, with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being “very much.” Scores were low, ranging from 1.34 to 1.88 across questions reported. The study still notes that hell anxiety is “a significant mental health concern for many individuals given the extreme nature of the traits attributed to Hell,” especially given how common belief in hell is. For details, see: “Hell anxiety as non-pathological fear” (2018) from Cranney et al. An obvious explanation for why hell anxiety is not common is because religious people believe they are saved and non-religious people believe there is no hell. Besides anxiety, belief in hell is linked to negative well-being. See: “The Emotional Toll of Hell: Cross-National and Experimental Evidence for the Negative Well-Being Effects of Hell Beliefs” (2014) from Shariff, Azim and Lara Aknin.

 

5 - Mark 2:27, NRSVUE.

 

6 - This account of good and evil (‘philosophical hedonism’) is ancient, tracing back to Epicurus who says that “good and evil implies awareness” ("Letter to Menoeceus"), and to Plato via Socrates ("Protagoras", 352d – 355e). Recently, philosophical hedonism has been defended by Sharon Rawlette (The Feeling of Value, 2016).

7 - Majesty of Reason. “Universalism and Eternal Hell | Dr. Josh Rasmussen & Dr. Eric Reitan.” YouTube. October 22, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxQyKw04Ncg?t=3495, 58:15-1:00:25 and 1:25:55-1:26:25.

 

8 - Ibid. 59:31. David Lewis is another philosopher that questions the value of free will in light of the risk of eternal suffering (and argues that hell is certainly incompatible with a good God). See “Divine Evil” in Philosophers Without Gods (2007), edited by Louise Antony, 231–242.

9 - For a partial defense of the deprivation theory and discussion of some of the tricky puzzles surrounding it, see Death (2012) by Shelly Kagan, 206–233.

 

10 - This is true of traditional, orthodox accounts of hell within Protestant, Catholic, and Islamic traditions. However, a number of recent works from Christian authors have argued that the Bible does not teach this traditional, orthodox account. See:
“Universalism and the Bible,” by Keith DeRose, https://campuspress.yale.edu/keithderose/1129-2/.
God’s Final Victory (2011) by John Kronen and Eric Reitan.
Rethinking Hell (2014), edited by Christopher Date, Gregory Stump, and Joshua Anderson.
That All Shall Be Saved (2019) by David Bentley Hart.
When Heaven Invades Hell (2020) by Joshua and Rachel Rasmussen.
One can’t help but wonder whether the motive to deny traditional views of hell is attributable in large part to the philosophical problems of hell. Certainly, arguments against hell are motivated by a reexamination of the biblical data and the history of the doctrine itself. But what motivated this reexamination in the first place if not the obvious difficulty in justifying hell?

11 - There is also Revelation 7:14–17, which features the damned asking for rocks to fall on them:

 

14 The sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. 15 Then the kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, 16 calling to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, 17 for the great day of their[h] wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"

Curiously, the passage says that all mountains are removed and yet are still there.

 

12 - Matthew 26:24, NRSVUE.

 

13 - This conflicts with Revelation 9:20 and 16:9–11 where the damned are depicted as unrepentant despite their torment.

 

14 - It's important to point out not only what the Bible says, but what it doesn't say. It doesn't depict Judas, the devil, the beast, or the false prophet as being redeemed. It doesn't depict anyone, ever, being rescued from hell. We don't see universalism played out in the Bible, something you would expect were universalism true. Why would scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, fail to appropriately emphasize a universalistic message were universalism true? Shouldn't such an important doctrine be featured front and center?

 

15 - Intrinsic evils are ontologically positive, but phenomenally negative. Intrinsic goods are ontologically and phenomenally positive.

 

16 - Even if a worst possible evil gave rise to a best possible good by way of someone’s going to hell somehow giving rise to someone else going to heaven, you still would have a worst possible evil failing to generate a best possible good with respect to the person in hell.

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Bibliography

 

Cranney, Stephen, Joseph Leman, Thomas Fergus, and Wade Rowatt. “Hell anxiety as non-pathological fear.” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 21, no. 9-10 (March 2018): 867–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2018.1443436.

Date, Christopher, Gregory Stump, and Joshua Anderson. Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014.

DeRose, Keith. “Universalism and the Bible.” n.d. https://campuspress.yale.edu/keithderose/1129-2/. Accessed March 31, 2025.

Epicurus. "Letter to Menoeceus." Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. https://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html. Accessed March 31, 2025.

Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Kagan, Shelly. Death. Yale University Press, 2017.

Kronen, John, and Eric Reitan. God’s Final Victory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

Lewis, David. “Divine Evil.” In Philosophers Without Gods, edited by Louise Antony, 231–242. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Majesty of Reason. “Universalism and Eternal Hell | Dr. Josh Rasmussen & Dr. Eric Reitan.” YouTube. October 22, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxQyKw04Ncg?t=3495, 58:15-1:00:25 and 1:25:55-1:26:25.

Plato. “Protagoras.” In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, 746–790. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

Rasmussen, Joshua, and Rachel Rasmussen. When Heaven Invades Hell. Great Legacy Books, 2020.

Rawlette, Sharon. The Feeling of Value. Self-published, 2016. First published as Normative Qualia and a Robust Moral Realism by Sharon Hewitt, 2008.

Shariff, Azim and Lara Aknin. “The Emotional Toll of Hell: Cross-National and Experimental Evidence for the Negative Well-Being Effects of Hell Beliefs.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 1 (January 2014): e85251. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085251.

Self-deception as an argument for the possibility of akrasia

I believe akrasia, weakness of will, is impossible. More precisely, I believe that no one knowingly does what is wrong. All evil actions are accidentally evil. This view fits nicely with my view that there is no free will, which also implies that all evil actions are accidentally evil. No one chooses the chisels that shape the marble block that is their character – chisels such as parents, genetics, social pressures, survival pressures, and so on. Those who have an evil character have one by happenstance. Those who make evil choices do so on the basis of the character they have by happenstance. All actions are accidents.

Here is an interesting rebuttal: Consider the case of self-deception. When someone deceives themselves, they know what's true but bury that knowledge because they lack the strength to accept the truth, or something like that.

I myself am guilty of self-deception. When I was getting my first college degree, I lied to myself that this is what I wanted. It wasn't. I felt pressured and felt like I had no other options. Had money been no object, I would have made radically different choices back then. Much, much better choices in terms of my well-being. I think this is true of virtually almost every person; survival pressures force us to choose against our nature. If your nature happens to conveniently line up with a lucrative field, then good for you.

Eventually it came to a head and I had to do the hard, painful thing and look within myself and admit that I had been lying to myself the whole time. I continued and finished the degree, but this time with a new sense of honesty: I am doing this not for its intrinsic reward, but for the benefits that will come later. While I knew it was tragic to major in something you hate purely for money, I hoped that the rewards would be worth it. They weren't, but that's another story.

So we might put it like this:

When you self-deceive, you know what's true but you bury the truth because, to put it simply, you can't handle the truth. There are obvious psychological stories we can tell to explain why a particular person cannot handle a particular truth, given enough information about that person. So we can imagine someone deceiving themselves into doing evil, and thus knowingly doing evil.

My response is that self-deception does not imply knowledge of what is true. Knowledge requires belief, and self-deception prevents belief in what is true. I failed to believe what was true about myself because of self-deception.

When someone can't handle the truth, they refuse to believe it, and make up whatever excuses needed to allow themselves to believe what they want. It's a mistake to attribute to this person a tiny spark of knowledge that they are burying; that spark isn't there. What might be there is a fear that they are wrong about something. But someone can worry that they are wrong without believing that they are. It's just a worry. Though, often, we aren't even honest about our worries, with some worries being much deeper than we let on.

Getting out of self-deception does not feel to me like the unburying of a known truth. Rather, it feels like the walls I had put up to protect myself have collapsed, and now I'm psychologically able to believe according to the evidence that had been there all along.

Counter argument: Deception is the act of deliberately causing someone to believe wrongly. In order to deceive, you must know what is right so that you can lead your target astray. So when you deceive yourself, there must be a part of you that knows what's right to lead the rest of yourself astray.

My response is that self-deception is not deception in the ordinary sense, but is a failure of self-honesty. The failure to be honest with oneself, much like the failure to be smart or brave, is not an intentional act but the result of the quality of one's character in that moment.

What does it mean to be irrational? Believing against reasons

I'm sure there are many components to irrationality, as all substantive philosophical terms have layers.

Here's one layer: To be irrational is to believe against reason.

You have 'reasons' plural and you have 'reason,' sometimes spelled with a capital R. Reason (capital R) is related to reasons, but for now I'll focus on reasons. To be irrational is to believe against reasons. Reasons are answers to why questions and are marked by reason-markers. The standard English reason-marker is 'because.' Why did you [do, say, think, believe, desire] X? Because... [insert reason].

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-internal-external/

The Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM): "Desires are necessary and beliefs are not sufficient for motivation."

Counterfactual Motivation version of reasons-internalism (CM): "An agent has no reason to do A if there is no possibility of her being motivated to do A."

From these two, it follows:

The Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR): "If there is a reason for someone to do something, then she must have some desire that would be served by her doing it."

I reject HTR. So, I must reject either HTM, CM, or both. I agree that desires are necessary for motivation and that beliefs are not enough by themselves. I'm not sure whether beliefs are necessary for motivation. It seems like primitive animals have desires and thus motivations, but they don't have beliefs, at least not propositional ones. I imagine a creature that is complex enough to have desires, which requires consciousness, would be complex enough to have at least non-propositional beliefs. So I accept HTM, reject CM.

 

I accept Moral Rationalism (MR), which says: "if something is morally wrong then there must be a reason not to do it."

 

I accept Moral Absolutism (MA): "Some actions are morally wrong for any agent no matter what motivations and desires they have."

 

I want to clarify MA. I slightly take issue with this exact phrasing from the SEP article. My version is more like:

 

MA*: Motivating reasons are not always justifying reasons. If the real reasons to refrain from an action outweigh the real reasons to perform that action, then performing that action is wrong no matter what motivations or desires a person might have for performing that action.

There are internal reasons and external reasons. Internal reasons are the actual reasons a person would give for doing, saying, thinking, believing, or desiring something. Then you have external reasons, which are judgment-independent reasons for doing, saying, thinking, believing, or desiring something. When your internal reasons match external ones, you are being rational. When your internal reasons fail to match external ones, you are being irrational.

 

This is closely related to explanationism in knowledge. If the truth of the proposition explains your belief, then you have external justification. So external reasons and external justification refer to the same idea.

 

External reasons are mysterious. Are they abstract objects floating about mysteriously in some Platonic Realm?
 
If someone says there are no good reasons to believe that the earth is round, that is a false claim about external reasons. If you believe you are going to heaven because someone said you were, that's not a good reason to believe this, unless there was something very special about this person, such as them claiming to be God and performing miracles that only God could perform.

 
Inevitably, it seems like we are forced to, in some way, disparage the quality of the person (qua organism) who believes against reasons. Of course, we can do this is a judgment-free way. This is easy when you already reject free will and thus reject personal blame. Without personal blame, there is no internal irrationality. That is, no person (qua subject) can be blamed for their believing against reasons. Either they believed against reasons because they were ignorant of the reasons to believe, or did not possess the cognitive capacity needed to understand the reasons to believe, or because they had been brainwashed or indoctrinated, or so on. All these factors are beyond the person's control. It's no one's fault that their internal reasons fail to match up with external reasons whenever there is such a mismatch.
 
Inevitably, to make sense of external reasons, it also seems that we are forced to appeal to what smart people believe or would believe, or what a person would believe were they a smarter version of themselves.

 

Graham Oppy has said that he believes in "doxastic permissivism," which is the view that there are multiple, incompatible positions that can be rationally taken on an issue. So he says that belief in God is rational, if anything because there certainly are people who are intelligent, rational, well-informed, who are genuine truthseekers, etc., who genuinely believe that God exists. But he also says there are no good arguments for God. He also says he is virtually certain that God does not exist.
 
First, it doesn't make sense to say that there are two opposing rational positions on an issue. If reasons are such that they pull equally in two opposing directions, then the rational thing to do is to be agnostic. You shouldn't be confident in either position. If there are reasons that pull in two opposing directions, but most of the weight is in favor of one side, then it makes sense to favor that side.
 
Two, it doesn't make sense to say that belief in God is rational despite there being no good arguments for belief in God. A good argument for God would expose good reasons to believe in God, the kind of reasons that would explain why people well-connected to reality (through their intelligence and knowledge) believe in God.
 
If there are no good indications that belief in God is caused by the existence of God, then belief in God is not rational, especially if there are good indications that belief in God is caused by other things.
 
Justification is that connection between belief and cause of belief that allows you to see that 1) it must be the case that reality is causing your belief, or 2) that reality's causing your belief is the best explanation for your belief, or 3) that it's very likely that reality is causing your belief, depending on how we define justification.

 

That connection is made up of reasons. So good reasons are those reasons that fashion the right kind of connection, a connection that won't lead you astray. Bias causes us to believe for bad reasons, which is why there is such a taboo around bias (i.e., accusations of bias feel harsh).

Mitigated Pessimism and the Meaning of Life

The central question of the meaning of life is: why live?

People clearly do live. So people clearly must have reasons for living, something causing them to get out of bed and to put one foot in front of the other. We can then ask the descriptive question and the normative question:

 

Descriptive: What are the actual reasons people have for getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other?

 

Normative: What reasons should people have for getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other?

 

The descriptive question is empirical, and as such requires survey data to answer. But the answers are so obvious that such data may not be needed. People live because: 1) they have an inner biological urge to live; 2) because the alternative, choosing to die, sounds horrible; 3) because they are curious about human history and want to bear witness to how things unfold; 4) because they have some kind of addiction and they can't wait to get their next fix; 5) because they have some kind of obsession or vision and feel compelled to work toward satisfying the obsession or realizing the vision; 6) because they feel excited and joyful about life due to their children, other family members, friends, or wider community who need and/or want them and make them feel welcomed, included, and like they belong; 7) because while they do not necessarily feel excited or joyful about life, they do feel morally obligated to live for the sake of those who want and/or need them to live, such as children or other family members and friends (or for the sake of some other perceived moral obligation); 8) because they feel excited by their religion and that they have a God-given purpose in life; 9) because while they do not necessarily feel excited by their religion or that they have a God-given purpose, they do feel obligated to live for religious reasons and that God would be wrathful toward them were they to reject their earthly life; 10) because their job and/or hobbies give them a sense of excitement and purpose; 11) because life is fun, exciting, dramatic, interesting, and so on, and being dead sounds really boring in comparison.

 

Certainly, everyone lives for some combination of the above reasons.

 

The next question is: should we be living for these reasons? Are these good reasons to live?

If the answer is no, and there are no objectively good reasons to live, and the choice to live is thus purely arbitrary, then life is absurd. Life is absurd when there are no truly good reasons to live and yet you live anyway as if there are truly good reasons to live.

If the choice to live is arbitrary, then there would be nothing wrong with flipping a coin and living if it comes up heads and choosing to die if it comes up tails. And yet we strongly feel that that would be an insane thing to do. We feel strongly that living for the above reasons is perfectly rational, details pending. Certainly, the smartest people in the world choose to live, and they choose to live for some combination of the above reasons. So if that combination of the above reasons is good for the smartest people in the world, why wouldn't they be good for you or me? (To refute this point you'd have to show that self-death is more common among the smartest humans, which, if I'm not mistaken, cannot be shown because it's not true. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if self-death was more common among people who fail at life, and that life failure was more rare among the smartest people, and thus that self-death was less common among the smartest people. Though, there are likely conflicting factors. Smarter people might disproportionately feel higher pressure and expectations, causing despair.)

If you allow for objective reasons, and if you further grant that there are objectively good reasons to live, then life is not absurd, at least not for those for whom those objective reasons apply. Life is absurd for those who live and yet have no good reasons to live, or who have good reasons to live but better reasons to die.

People will say that "the absurd" refers to our demand for life to be meaningful, and life's subsequent failure to give us any meaning. The terms 'meaning' and 'meaningful' are vague, so let's put it this way: ..."the absurd" refers to our demand for reasons to live and life's subsequent failure to give us reasons to live.

 

But Camus also describes the absurdity of life as related to contradiction, juxtaposition, ridiculousness, and futility. At the heart of it, absurdity is the contradiction between life and death. Life commands us to live by letting us be born, and validates our existence. But then life contradicts itself and commands us to die and thereby invalidates our existence. With existence comes glory and with death, humiliation. Life conspires to both glorify and humiliate us. We naturally assume there is a good reason for our existence, only to discover that there really isn't. We naturally assume that there is a good reason for death, only to discover that there really isn't. Religion very nicely explains both the purpose of life and death (at least, Christianity nicely explains this, at least at first until you start questioning things and it all falls apart). But with the discovered falsity of all religions, we are left with an indifferent universe that couldn't care less whether you were born or whether you died. It turns out that our lives and deaths are purely the result of the chaos of random particles smashing together in ways governed by laws of nature that are there because they have to be because that's just the way things must be. Often, people die shortly after being born, accentuating the pointlessness and stupidity of it all. When life feels like one big joke, that's when you know you've encountered the apparent absurdity of life.

 

If the absurdity of life is a problem, then it is a psychological problem relating to a person's personal calculation over whether the reasons for them to live outweigh the reasons for them to not live. If a person calculates that they have overwhelmingly better reasons to live than not, then there is no problem. If a person calculates that they have roughly equal reasons to live and die, then they will struggle, even agonize, over the choice to live.

 

If you want to make the absurdity of life a philosophical problem, then you have to argue that because there are no objectively good reasons to live, everyone is failing to live on the basis of reason. Therefore, if someone wanted to live their life according to reason, which sounds like a very rational thing to want, then that person really shouldn't live their life at all. And yet they do. And it's this contradiction of living as if you have good reasons to live when objectively you do not that amounts to the philosophical problem of absurdity. But if we can argue that the reasons we live for are objectively good (which, we can), then the philosophical problem is solved. There is no contradiction.

 

On the other hand, if a person believes there are no objective reasons of any kind, then there are no objectively good reasons to live or not live (or do or not do anything), then this should result in a total paralysis of choice for the person who aims to live according to what reason says. Or, if this person says we needn't live according to what reason says, and instead must live according to what we want, then whether a person ought to choose to live or choose to die is incredibly simple: do whatever you want for whatever personal reasons you have, and there is no right or wrong answer. (And this, says the antirealist, is not meant to be taken as a command. If antirealism is true, there are no true moral commands. So as far as the antirealist is concerned, you may do whatever you want for whatever personal reasons you have, or you may choose to act contrary to your wants for whatever reason. Though, inevitably, everyone acts according to some desire of some kind.)

 

The person who insists that the absurdity of life is a real problem, they might have something like the following in mind. Consider the flip side to the central question of the meaning of life: why die?

 

For a person to choose to die they must be in the throes of some kind of despair. They must be pessimistic about their ability to maximize flourishing by living, and therefore believe that the next best thing, minimizing suffering, requires them to end their life. I've argued elsewhere that choosing death implies unbearable suffering. Unbearable suffering then, of one kind or another, explains why someone should choose to die rather than live.

 

We can divide the reasons to die, call them factors of despair, into three categories: broad factors, regional factors, and local factors.

 

Broad factors are those tragic facts about life that are deeply built into the nature of life. These problems can never be solved. The fact we live in a fundamentally neutral world, which is infinitely disappointing for the person who expected our world to be fundamentally good, is a broad factor of despair. So are factors pertaining to death, the imperfection of human nature, the inevitability of pain, ignorance, and so on. To be broadly pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of reality as a whole.

 

Regional factors are those tragic facts about the lives of those around you. These are the tragic stories on the news, stories of horror, war, murder, and so on. They don't affect your life other than the fact that they give you an idea of the kind of world you live in, namely, a bad one, and thereby depress you. To be regionally pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of the lives, or future lives, of other people.

 

Finally, local factors are those tragic facts about your own life. To be locally pessimistic is to be skeptical about the goodness of your life or future.

 

There is the goodness and badness of your life, the goodness and badness of the lives of those around you (in your family, city, country, or planet, depending on how far you zoom out), and, zooming all the way out, the goodness and badness of reality itself. There is the goodness or badness of these things in the short term, and in the long term.

 

The person who argues that the absurdity of life is an objective problem is saying that because we ought to be skeptical about the goodness of reality as a whole and about the goodness of our planet, this is cause for us to feel despair.

The distinction between broad, regional, and local factors of despair might not matter at all, because really there are only two things that matter: your psychology and your circumstances. If your circumstances are such that you are aware of the suffering of millions of people, and your psychology is such that you cannot ignore this suffering, then you will suffer too. If your circumstances are such that reality as a whole is tragic because everyone dies in the end, and your psychology is such that you cannot ignore the fundamental tragedy of life, then you will suffer. If your circumstances are such that you are suffering from poverty and disease, and your psychology is such that this bothers you, then you will suffer.

The question of absurdity then is whether we should be bothered by something we are not bothered by. If someone isn't bothered by the fundamental tragedy of life, and if they aren't bothered by the wretchedness of our world, and they only care about the details of their own life, then does that mean this person is irrational, or insensitive, or small minded?

 

I don't think so. If someone is locally optimistic while broadly and regionally pessimistic, then they can acknowledge the badness of reality and the badness of the world while acknowledging the goodness of the details of their life. Such a person can be rightly optimistic about their ability to flourish.

 

The worry is that a genuine truthseeker will be sensitive to the badness of reality and the badness of our world, and will thereby feel despair. We are rationally obligated to be depressed, says this line of thinking. You can only avoid despair by burying your head in the sand, by ignoring reality, and by living according to a noble lie.

 

But that's not right. If you zoom out, you will see a hopeless picture of walking corpses living on the edge of societal collapse in a world that will likely soon become uninhabitable on a planet that will eventually be destroyed in a universe that will eventually die, all part of a reality that is fundamentally indifferent to your suffering and absurd in its simultaneous insistence on your life and death.

 

I grant this, and to this extent I grant that pessimism is true.

 

But if you zoom in, you see people's faces and futures, fears and failures, pains and joys, laughter and life, and the many remaining days of their lives that they still have yet to live. You see the undeniable goodness of their happiness, the undeniable badness of their pain, and the undeniable superiority of their happiness over their pain, and thus the undeniable meaningfulness of making their lives better for the time being.

 

The truthseeker is sensitive to regional and global truths, but they are just as sensitive to local truths as well. Our experiences are undeniably real and true. Nothing is more real than pain.

 

So if a truthseeker lets the broad truths of life dominate their mind, they will come out deeply pessimistic and in despair. But if they let the local truths of life dominate their mind, they will find plenty of meaning both in terms of the flourishing to be maximized and the suffering to be minimized.

 

So the philosophical problem of absurdity returns to a psychological problem. If you find yourself living in the moment and being sensitive to local truths, letting the truth of the present dominate your mind, then broad factors of despair won't become local. But if you find yourself incapable of ignoring the broad truths of life, and you can't help but let the big picture dominate your mind, then broad pessimism will become local. You should be skeptical of your ability to flourish if your ability to flourish depends on your circumstances and your psychology, and your circumstances are such that you are living in an infinitely disappointing world and your psychology is such that you can't get over the fact that the world is infinitely disappointing.

 

People say that you shouldn't worry about those things beyond your control. If that's right, then local factors are all that really matter. But that's just the issue: if someone's psychology is such that they cannot help but have their minds dominated by broad truths, then that is a local fact. And so really there are only local factors of despair.

 

The problem of absurdity then is person-relative. It's no different than other local problems, like that of health, poverty, ignorance, stupidity, a lack of opportunities in life, and so on.

 

Most people's minds are, for obvious reasons, dominated by local factors, as that's what's right in front of them day to day, that's what their survival depends on, and that's what they can control. But I don't see how someone could be faulted for being highly sensitive to the broader facts of life. Practically speaking, they might be worse off, but if the person in question has local factors of despair anyway, then it's tempting to look toward life as a whole for some sign of hope. If it's despair all the way down, then the solution for this person is to choose death. But this will not apply to the vast majority of people, who are rightly locally optimistic.

Two short clips vs William Lane Craig

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

Here Craig defends God's command of the mass killing of Canaanites, including Canaanite children.

There are obvious consequentialist reasons why a good God would never command the horrific commandments of the Old Testament. But even on virtue ethics, God should be disturbed by the fact that his followers would have the character such that they would be willing and able to kill children. And on deontology, God is treating the Canaanites (and other enemy tribes) as means to ends (God's glory, God's justice, letting his chosen people know that God favors them) rather than ends unto themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-afEhw7c0

This is about the "Low Bar Bill" controversy. Here Craig backpedals on what he said about Christianity being worth believing in even if there were only one in a million chance of it being true. In context, this is Craig's conversion story, where he converts to Christianity at 16 years old. So I would think that Craig would say something to the effect of: That's what I believed then, but now I believe that it would not be reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to believe in a worldview if you believe there really were only a one in a million chance for that worldview to be true. And then he would go on to say that Christianity is very likely true. Maybe Craig would say this if questioned on it.

But bizarrely, he doesn't give this clarification, and in fact says something even more confusing. He says: "And so for me I was saying that, really if there was any sort of reasonable chance of believing in Christianity, it was worth it, in view of the promise that it holds out and the tremendous benefit of knowing God and finding eternal life." (I take it he means reasonable chance of Christianity being true. "Reasonable chance of believing" doesn't make sense.)

Does Craig think that a one in a million chance is a reasonable chance? What odds would Craig give rival worldviews, like atheistic naturalism? Surely, a number of worldviews must add up to 100% for Craig, right? (At least, worldviews that roughly correspond to worldviews defended by various authors on earth.) Unless Craig thinks there is a yet-to-be-discovered worldview that will dwarf all current worldviews in probability, then this is right, and obviously as a Christian surely he would put Christianity at 100% or at least very high. 

Elsewhere I've seen him refuse to give such a percentage. I believe this happens in his debate against Kevin Scharp. Looking it up... Well, the transcript doesn't show that exactly (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-evidence-for-god), but Craig seems to think that you need at least 51% confidence to believe in something:

"If you think it’s more probable than not, if you think this is more probably true than false, I would guess I would say that is enough for belief." (Now, Craig has just recently released his Volume 1 of his Systematic Theology in which he discusses belief and faith. So he may have updated views. I'll see if I can get my hands on a copy and return to this topic.)

So for Craig, a one in a million chance would not be anywhere near sufficient confidence for belief. And yet for Craig, belief is required for saving faith. (See: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/can-an-agnostic-be-a-christian)

There are a number of confusing items here, so let's take them one at a time.

First, Craig says that you can be an agnostic and a Christian. Yet, in the same post, he says that saving faith implies belief. That's a contradiction.

Second, most Christians would not consider you to be a Christian if you were agnostic. If your answer to Jesus' resurrection and/or God's existence is "maybe" or "I don't know," it's really hard to consider you to be "baptized in the Holy Spirit" or "regenerated" or "a new creation in Christ," or a "Child of God," or any spiritual term describing a saved Christian.

Third, arguably faith requires more than mere belief, but something closer to certainty.

Fourth, Craig says Kierkegaard and Karl Barth both were agnostic and yet "personally knew God." That doesn't make any sense.

Fifth, Craig says you can believe something and have your belief be rational even if the belief is not justified by argument. I think that's right, because we rely on foundational beliefs in order to even be capable of making an argument. These pre-argument beliefs cannot be supported by argument without circular reasoning, and I reject circular reasoning. Craig mentions phenomenal conservatism, which is a form of foundationalism which says it's rational to believe something if it seems true to you, provided there are no defeaters. There are defeaters for Christian belief, many of them, so it's weird for Craig to offer phenomenal conservatism as a way to justify Christian belief apart from arguments. Plantinga's properly basic belief also requires an absence of defeaters, which Christianity doesn't have. I don't like "warranted true belief" as a model of knowledge anyway, preferring explanationism or infallibilism.

Sixth, if Craig thinks Christian belief is properly basic apart from arguments, then why would he call Kierkegaard and Barth agnostics? If they personally knew God then they had belief that was properly basic and thus rational despite not having arguments.

Seventh, if Christian belief can be justified apart from arguments, then why care about the probabilities of Christian belief at all? Why not say, "Yes, there is only a one in a million chance that Christianity is true. Doesn't matter. I don't need arguments. Evidentialism is false." Or say: "Christian belief cannot be one in a million because I have a properly basic belief that it's true and there are no defeaters." Or if a belief's being only one in a million counts as a defeater, then on Craig's own view it would not be rational to believe in Christianity.

On the goodness of an infinitely good sacrifice

Christians believe sacrificial love is a good thing. Indeed, sacrificial love is apparently so good that it justifies the horrors we see on earth. Without evils, there would be no opportunity for sacrificial love (along with many other virtues). So, evils are necessary to enable sacrificial love.

 

I think this is stupid, and here's why.

 

Imagine God is a sadist. He loves playing with creatures like they are toys. One day he comes to you and says, I will send you to hell for eternity. You will wish for death every day and will be unable to die. In return, all other humans will go to heaven, where they will be high on life forever. They will have no idea of your sacrifice, because you shouldn't sacrifice yourself for the sake of your own glory, but for the sake of the people for whom you are being sacrificed.

 

Or, you can choose to do the selfish thing. You will go to purgatory forever, and everyone else will go to hell forever. But, you have to live with yourself, knowing what you have done. However, purgatory is not hell, so if you wish, you can choose to die.

 

If you sacrifice yourself, then you perform an infinitely good sacrifice. Sacrificial love does not get any better than this. (We could imagine you sacrificing yourself for the sake of an infinite number of persons, but set that aside.)

 

Question: Is the goodness of such infinite sacrificial love worth being in hell forever?

 

It's hard to see how it could be. If you choose to save yourself, then you are infinitely selfish. But what's so bad about being infinitely selfish? It's not like you are being tortured forever. If you choose to be sacrificed, you get to enjoy having a clean conscience. But if your reward for having a clean conscience is suffering so bad that you wish for death but can never die, then it's hard to see how having a clean conscience is worth it.

 

Compared to a worst possible fate, any other bad fate is by definition better. So the bad fate of being an evil person or a selfish person, as bad as it is, by definition cannot be as bad as suffering a worst possible fate.

If God's aim is to get you to understand just how deep his love is for you, and that's why he is incarnating to sacrifice himself on your behalf, there is a much, much, much better way for God to show his love: by talking to you, by saving you from your unfortunate circumstances, by healing you and your loved ones, by interacting with you instead of being hidden, by giving you a life worth living. The whole earth thing is just a giant waste of time. Even worse, we conclude that there cannot be a loving God because of our understanding of love (and God does nothing to change this understanding) and because of the evils of earth (and God does nothing to prevent or cure these evils).

 

The only thing that matters is conscious experience – the real experiences real people really have. Magical goods are worthless. If your axiology leads to the justification of eternal conscious torment, then your axiology is clearly mistaken.

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.