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

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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.