The Fieriest Problem for Eternal Hell

(the endless retributive version)

A number of Christians believe the following:

1. Some people go to Hell.

2. Hell is a place where people exist.

3. These people, once in Hell, can never leave, and will never stop existing.

4. The reason these people are in Hell is so they can be retributively punished for their earthly wrongdoings.¹

These Christians—sometimes called “infernalists”, for no reason other than that they’re too polite to say, “Please sir, stop calling me an infernalist 🥺👉👈”—frequently get a bad rep, from X-ians who think their view is evil and that they are Lord Voldemort.

While I don’t think defenders of the eternal-punishment-for-earthly-crimes-view of Hell are radically evil—indeed, I’m quite confident they are not, and wish people would stop leaping down the nice ones’ throats—I do think the view is a disaster.

When people initially encounter this view of Hell—often called the ‘Strong View of Hell’—their first objection is typically: ‘However many sins a person commits on Earth, and however weighty they are, there can only be finitely many of them, and they can only be finitely weighty. But it’s intrinsically unjust to punish people infinitely for finite sins, because just punishments are proportionate, and an infinite punishment for finite sins is infinitely disproportionate. So, the Strong View of Hell is false, assuming God doesn’t do intrinsically unjust things.’

Strong Viewers typically say, in reply: ‘Sure, we accept the proportionality principle, but our sins are infinitely weighty, so the punishment they deserve is infinite.’ It’s this line of thought I’ll respond to here.

Why would someone think our sins are infinitely weighty? Consider the following principle:

Status Principle: When one wrongs a being, the greater that being’s dignity, the greater the wrong—and, hence, the greater the punishment one deserves. There is no upper limit to this. If one wrongs a being of infinite dignity, the punishment one deserves is infinite.

If you accept the Status Principle, then—so long as you think God has infinite dignity (or honour, or greatness, or whatever)—you’ll also think the punishment one deserves for wronging him is infinite. And if you accept that sin always wrongs God in some way, then any sin one commits—no matter how small—deserves an infinite punishment.

That’s not to say, on this view, that the punishment deserved for every sin is equal. The Strong Viewer can, and typically will, say that some sins are worse than others, and that while all sins deserve a punishment of infinite length, worse sins deserve a punishment of greater intensity.

Why would someone accept the Status Principle in the first place? Those who do are motivated by examples where the same action becomes increasingly wrong depending on what kind of being the victim is. Consider the following series of beheadings:

• Peter beheads a tulip.

• Peter beheads a gecko.

• Peter beheads a bonobo.

• Peter beheads Graham.

• Peter beheads the Son of God.

With the plausible exception of the tulip, each beheading in the series is prima facie wrong—if Peter has no reason whatsoever for beheading these creatures, he has decisive moral reason not to. But, as we move down the list, each beheading seems worse than the one before it. It’s worse to behead a bonobo than a gecko, worse to behead a human than a bonobo, and worse still to behead the Son of God.

Though definitely not the only explanation of this intuition, the Status Principle does provide an explanation: each beheading in the list is worse than the one before it because each victim (supposedly) possesses more inherent dignity (or honour, or greatness, or whatever), in virtue of the kind of being it is, than the victim before it. That’s the basic motivation.

But even if you accept that thinking to a limited degree, why accept that there is no upper limit on how much punishment one can deserve for committing a wrong, and that—if the being wronged has infinite dignity—the deserved punishment can be infinite? ‘Basically’, Strong Viewers would say, ‘because that makes the theory simpler, and holding that there is some sharp cut-off point somewhere—some precise level of wrongdoing beyond which a wrongdoer stops deserving any additional punishment—is arbitrary, so why do it.’

So this, in short, is the view: When one wrongs a being, the greater that being’s dignity, the greater the wrong, and, hence, the greater the punishment deserved. But, as Strong Viewer Oliver Crisp puts it, “the dignity of God is infinite, so the seriousness of an offence committed against God is infinite, or infinitely surpasses that of other kinds.”² Thus, the punishment we deserve—even for tiny sins—is infinite, supposing those tiny sins are partially sins against God.

The Strong View, in my even stronger view, is deeply implausible. I’m not going to try to tell you where, precisely, its reasoning goes awry. Instead, all I want to show is that it does.

Consider the following case:

Holocaust Biscuit Tin: Knowing you’ll probably steal a biscuit from my biscuit tin, I hide sensor at the bottom and don’t tell you about it. When you steal a biscuit—instead of sounding an alarm—the triggered sensor sets off a machine that consigns every sentient being in the universe to a gas chamber.

Obviously, it’d be wrong to do this. You shouldn’t steal my biscuits, but, equally, I shouldn’t put a device at the bottom that detonates a universe-wide holocaust if you do.

Here’s what would be even worse: If the holocaust triggered by the device was infinite and everlasting. In that case, by stealing the biscuit, you would have taken yourself to only be finitely wronging one person (stealing a biscuit, from me), when, in fact, you were unwittingly imposing an infinite harm on every sentient creature in the universe, now and for the rest of infinite time.

From the latter case, we can extract a general principle:

All else equal, it’s wrong to put someone in a situation where—though they only believe themselves to be doing a finite wrong—they are actually doing an infinite wrong.

What we learn from that is this. If the Status Principle is true, and God exists, and even small sins wrong him infinitely, then it’s wrong—all else equal—for God to put us in a situation where we have the ability to sin, but without any knowledge of the fact that every small sin is an infinite wrong.

Yet, of course, we do have the power to commit tiny sins, and, if they really are infinitely bad, we have absolutely no intuitive knowledge of how bad they are. Stealing a paperclip seems wrong, but not infinitely so. Thus, if God exists, and the Status Principle is true, and tiny sins are partially sins against him, and God—a perfect being—never does anything wrong, it follows, granting what I’ve just said, that God would never put us in the situation we’re actually in.

But, of course, it is what it is, and we are in the situation we’re in. Thus, it follows either that God does not exist, or the Status Principle is false, or tiny sins aren’t sins against God, or God does immoral things. None of these conclusions are compatible with the view just considered.

I think the best move for the Strong Viewer who wants to remain faithful to the Strong View is to weaken the Status Principle so it says, instead:

Status Principle*: When one wrongs a being in a particular kind of way, the greater that being’s dignity, the greater the wrong—and, hence, the greater the punishment one deserves. There is no upper limit to this. If one wrongs a being of infinite dignity in this particular kind of way, the punishment one deserves is infinite.

What particular kind of wrong would do here? The only kind of wrong I can see somewhat sidestepping the problem I’ve been pressing is the emphatic, and fully informed rejection of God—who embodies perfection—in favour of evil. This couldn’t be the casual kind of rejection of God that people often do on Earth (say, a thirteen-year-old who rejects God after listening to Joe Rogan talk about how Moses probably hallucinated the burning bush incident because he was high on the bush’s smoke fumes, and concluding that religion is the DMT of the masses.)

The kind of rejection it would take to dishonour God infinitely—supposing the Status Principle* is true—would have to be decisive, clear-headed, and fully aware of how grave it is. It’s unclear whether a rejection of God of this magnitude has ever truly happened on Earth, or whether it even could, given our cognitive limitations.

If a decisive, clear-headed, fully informed rejection of God was the only sin that could send us to Hell, that would make slightly more sense, since—by stipulation—you’d be aware of the gravity of what you were doing.

I think even this version of the Strong View is bananas, but it’s not as bananas as one which says you should be punished infinitely for stealing a paperclip.

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. Crisp, Oliver D. (2003). “Divine Retribution: A Defence”. Sophia 42: p. 40.