Hell No: The Case Against Eternal Damnation

the doctrine of Hell attributes the worst possible action to the best possible being

Photo by Vishwanth Pindiboina on Unsplash

---

Well, I was feeling so alone
When the congregation sang
Of Jesus Christ and Lucifer
And the price that I would pay
But the preacher told me not to fear
For they know not what they say
“Yeah , the history is on your side
And it always ends the same

It always ends the same,” he said
“Always ends the same
Ah, remember, dear, this too shall pass
And it always ends the same”

— “Television”, You Won’t.

If you feel a certain dissonance between (a) being a morally perfect being and (b) allowing someone to suffer forever to the benefit of no one, you’ve grasped what philosophical theologians call the ‘Problem of Hell’.

The Problem of Hell by Jonathan Kvanvig.

Prima facie, it’s puzzling why a perfectly good God would let humans languish forever in Hell — not just for a time, but for all of time. I think this puzzle is irresolvable: theists should just deny the doctrine of eternal Hell.

Here, I spell out my case for why.

I. The Strong View of Hell

According to Jonathan Kvanvig, the Strong View of Hell makes four claims:

1. There are people in Hell;

2. Hell is a real place;

3. Once the damned are in Hell, they never leave, either by going somewhere else or by falling out of existence;

4. The people in Hell are there to be punished for earthly wrongdoings.¹

Here are two different versions of the Strong View, and why I don’t like either of them.

(a) “It’s Infinitely Wrong to Steal a Wispa Bar”

According to some Strong Viewers, it’s OK for God to punish sinners forever because all sins are infinitely wrong, and so the people who commit them deserve to be punished eternally.

In other words, small-seeming sins like stealing a Wispa bar deserve an eternal punishment. Why would that be? Here are two answers I’ve heard:

1. God is a being of infinite dignity. Since the moral gravity of an offense scales in proportion to the dignity of the being you offended, any sin against God is infinitely wrong, and deserves an infinite punishment. When you steal a Wispa bar, you wrong God in numerous ways: by wronging the shopkeeper, who is made in God’s image; by violating the Eighth Commandment; by using the finger’s God gave you to pilfer bars of chocolate; etc. Therefore, stealing a Wispa bar deserves eternal punishment.

2. God has created infinitely many people and, somehow, stealing a Wispa bar wrongs either all or infinitely many of them. Wronging infinitely many people is infinitely wrong and deserves an infinite punishment. (I get this suggestion from Marilynn Adams’s excellent paper, “Hell and the God of Justice”.)

Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, the moral assumption that stealing a Wispa bar is infinitely morally wrong. (I don’t grant this in real life, but I want to be ecumenical.)

Now imagine the following case, which I’ve blogged about previously here:

Holocaust Chocolate Shop: Knowing you’ll probably steal a Wispa bar from my chocolate shop, I hide a sensor below the Wispa bars and don’t tell you about it. When you steal one—instead of sounding an alarm—the sensor sets off a machine that consigns infinitely many people to a gas chamber.

Here are two intuitions I have about this case: (1) it was wrong for me to put the sensor under my Wispa bars and not tell you about it, given that I knew there was some chance you’d try to steal one; (2) even though it was wrong of you to steal my chocolate, and even though doing so turned out to be infinitely bad, you don’t deserve infinite punishment for stealing my chocolate. (Why? Presumably because you lack mens rea: even though you knew it was objectively wrong to steal my chocolate, you didn’t know stealing it would be infinitely bad. As a result, you aren’t liable to be punished infinitely, even if you’re liable to be punished a little bit.)

If stealing Wispa bars is infinitely wrong in the way some Strong Viewers say, we can extract the same two lessons: it would be wrong for God to put us in situations where we’d be tempted to do steal Wispa bars without telling us that stealing Wispa bars is infinitely wrong, and then punish us eternally if we did.

But as it happens, people who steal chocolate bars, buy vanity licence plates, or commit other small-seeming sins haven’t the faintest notion that these sins are infinitely wrong. People know, in their hearts, that it’s wrong to purchase vanity plates, but few, if any, have the intuition — or have revelation from God informing them — that ordering an “I<3 AWOL” plate (looking at several of you) is infinitely morally wrong.

From this, we can retroactively deduce that since God would never do anything wrong, it’s not infinitely wrong to steal chocolate bars in the way Strong Viewers claim, and that even if it were, it’d be unjust to punish chocolate thieves forever, since they don’t know the magnitude of their crimes.

You might object: “But there’s a difference between what God does and what you did in Holocaust Chocolate Shop. A difference I say! In Holocaust Chocolate Shop, you chose to make stealing your Wispa bars infinitely objectively wrong by slipping a sensor under them. In contrast, if stealing a Wispa bar necessarily offends against God in his infinite dignity, God didn’t make it the case that stealing one is infinitely wrong.”

Granted, this is a difference, but I think we can modify the case to squash the difference away. Once we do, it becomes clear that the difference is morally irrelevant:

Metaphysical Holocaust Chocolate Shop: In my chocolate shop, there’s a metaphysically necessary law of nature that sets off an infinite holocaust every time someone tries to steal a Wispa bar. Knowing you’ll be tempted to steal one, I open my doors to you without telling you what will happen if you steal my chocolate.

Here, I didn’t make it the case that stealing a Wispa bar caused and infinite harm — such was decreed by a law of nature. Even so, it would be wrong to give you the tempting opportunity to steal a Wispa bar without telling you the consequences of doing so in advance, and wrong to punish you infinitely if you went ahead and pilfered one.

(b) “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”

Here’s a different way of spelling out the Strong View, which dodges the objection I just gave.

In the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 12: 30-32; Mark 3:28-30; Luke 12: 8-10), Jesus teaches that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable. According to one traditional interpretation, ‘blasphemy against the Holy Spirit’ = ‘rejecting God’s free gift of salvation’.

Taking this thought and running with it, a Strong Viewer might say the following: “Stealing Wispa bars isn’t eternally punishable, but rejecting God’s free gift of salvation is, because it amounts to rejecting God: a being of infinite dignity/majesty/status/goodness/or whatever. The damned languish in Hell forever not for stealing Wispa bars, but for committing the one crime worthy of infinite punishment: rejecting an infinite being.”

How does this view dodge the objection I just gave? Here’s how: rejecting God’s gift of salvation in a final way — you might think — just requires doing so in full knowledge of God’s infinite dignity/majesty/goodness/whatever. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be an informed rejection. So, by stipulation, Strong Viewers can claim that the one sin deserving of infinite punishment can’t possibly be committed in ignorance of how morally serious it is (which was the problem with the ‘God punishes people forever for minor infractions’ view.)

Here is my big worry for the second version of the Strong View: Strong Viewers owe us some account of why rejecting God — in contrast to rejecting, say, me (🥺👉👈) — is an infinitely bad crime deserving of infinite retributive punishment.

Presumably, the story they give will be something like: “Rejecting God deserves an infinite punishment because God is a being of infinite dignity, majesty, status, goodness, or whatever, and so rejecting him is infinitely bad.”

The underlying assumption here is that the wrongness of a rejection — and the degree to which it deserves punishment — scales in proportion to the dignity, majesty, status, goodness, etc., of the person being rejected.

This prompts two obvious objections, which are closely connected to one another:

1. It seems like rejecting someone’s help isn’t the sort of crime that deserves retributive punishment. For example, suppose a son, Peter, rejects financial help from his Father, Paul, both because Peter (irrationally) hates Paul, and because Paul’s gift comes with the expectation that Peter will have to improve his moral character upon accepting the money. Clearly, Peter should accept the pay out; but rejecting it doesn’t seem like the sort of mistake he could be justly punished for.

2. Let’s grant that rejecting God wrongfully slights him. It still seems like the degree to which slighting someone deserves punishment doesn’t scale in proportion to that being’s degree of dignity, majesty, status, goodness, or whatever. To see this, consider a different sort of slight: an unjustified slap. Suppose the Archangel Michael wrongfully slaps Human Henry, and Human Henry wrongfully slaps the Archangel Michael. (Suppose, for the sake of the thought experiment, that both slaps were equally hard and painful, but that the Archangel Michael has a greater degree of dignity, majesty, status, goodness, or whatever.) Question: does Human Henry deserve a harsher punishment? Intuitively, no. A slap is a slap. But in that case, it’s hard to see why we should accept the idea that the degree to which slighting someone deserves punishment scales in proportion to that being’s dignity, majesty, status, goodness, or whatever.

II. The Escapist View of Hell

Photo by Alfred Leung on Unsplash

According to some infernalists, the gates of Hell are locked from within: the only reason the damned are in Hell, and the only reason the remain there, is because they choose to live in rebellion to God. Because God respects the religious autonomy of his creatures, he allows the damned to torment themselves in Hell (which is just the place you go after death if you don’t want to live alongside God.)

Following Andrei Buckareff and Allen Plug, I agree that if there is a place of post-mortem estrangement from God, it will operate on an open-door basis. Insofar as God loves us for the people we are, he won’t stop loving us just because we choose to reject him. (More weakly, even if God does stop loving those who reject him, he’d surely still desire that all be saved, and re-enter a loving relationship with him. Why? Because that would be a better state of affairs, and a being with perfect preferences would prefer better states of affairs to worse ones, all else equal.)

As Buckareff and Plug contend: “if God longs for reunion with us this side of the eschaton, then it would be arbitrary and out of character for God to cut-off any opportunity for reconciliation and forgiveness at the time of death.”²

Buckareff and Plug are neutral on whether anyone in Hell ever will choose to escape their self-inflicted torment and rejoin God. By my lights, their agnosticism is unfounded. If a good God exists, and the gates of Hell are locked from within, we should be highly confident that, eventually, the entire population of Hell will flood straight out through them.

Why? Here is my argument: if God never stops wanting us to freely re-join him, he will never stop trying to persuade us to freely re-join him. Attempting to persuade someone to do something — unless the persuasion is deceptive — doesn't undermine autonomy or consent. Consider: if you’re about to jump into an infinitely deep hole, me trying to convince you not to jump by pointing out the cons of jumping is not coercive, manipulative, or consent-undermining.

In the fullness of time, there are tons of ways God might persuade us to join him in an autonomy-respecting way: talking to us, exposing us to moral exemplars, putting us in situations where we’ll freely find love, friendship, and other virtue-inspiring relationships, correcting our misunderstandings, showing us what Heaven is like, holding up a mirror to our sins, etc. Over infinite time, it’s unreasonable to think that God — given comprehensive knowledge of our psychology — couldn't find a way to convince us to re-join him in a way that respects our autonomy.

Suppose worst comes to worst, and we don’t respond well to God’s persuasion — suppose, further, that God knows he won’t be able to persuade us, even given infinite time. In that case, I think it would be entirely permissible — indeed, obligatory — for God to coercively fiddle with our psychologies in order to make us more responsive to right reason.

The decision to choose endless torment over endless bliss is irrational, in the broad sense of ‘irrationality’, where to be ‘irrational’ is to fail to respond rightly to the reasons we have. This falls out of a more general principle that if an option is good for you, good from the point of view of the universe, and bad for nobody else, it’s irrational not to take it (unless there’s an equally good/better option available.)

Since escaping Hell is good for the escapee, good from the point of view of the universe, and bad for no-one, it’s irrational not to choose to escape Hell. As a result, if someone is in Hell, they are being irrational for staying there.

Presumably, the irrationality of the damned is caused by some feature of their psychology. Assuming this feature of their psychology is inessential to their personal identity, God could manipulate their psychology to get rid of it. If God had no other way of getting someone to see reason and escape eternal suffering, would he be justified in manipulating someone’s psychology in this way?

Plausibly, yes! Suppose someone is about to jump into an infinitely deep pit, and some feature of their psychology makes them so irrationally allured by bottomless pits that they won’t respond to your persuasion. In that case, if you had a neuro-corrective ray-gun that could fix this bug in their psychology, and if you had exhausted all of your non-interventionist options, it seems permissible to fire the ray-gun right at them.

For the same reason, if worse comes to worst, and God can’t persuade a sinner to come around — even in the fullness of time — God would be justified in paternalistically fiddling with their psychologies to make them more reason-responsive.

III. Conclusion

I used to see the doctrine of Hell as just another doctrine — implausible, but a Thing It’s Fine To Defend. Now, I think it’s not only implausible, but blasphemous — perhaps the most blasphemous doctrine we’ve contrived.

Suppose you met a Christian who declared: “I believe in in impeccability of Christ — Jesus of Nazareth never once sinned. I also believe that, between the ages of 17 and 24, Jesus was an active serial murder.”

If that would be blasphemy of the highest order, how much graver is the blasphemy of attributing to God — a perfect being — the worst possible act or omission?

1. These conditions are based on the taxonomy in Kvanvig, Jonathan L. (1993). The Problem of Hell. Oxford: Oxford University Press: p. 25. Anthony Rogers and Nathan Conroy suggest adding a fifth condition—the Hell will exist for an infinite amount of time (Rogers, Anthony and Nathan Conroy. (2015). “A New Defence of the Strong View of Hell.” In: The Concept of Hell, edited by Benjamin McCraw and Robert Arp, pp. 49-65, New York: Palgrave Macmillan: p. 50.) I left this out because—depending on how one interprets the word “leaving” in Kvanvig’s original taxonomy—there is no need to add another condition saying that those consigned to Hell will never stop being in Hell, and the invocation of time needlessly rules out possible views on which Hell exists timelessly.

2. Buckareff, A. A., & Plug, A. (2005). Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell. Religious Studies, 41(1), 44.