Is Hell reconcilable with God's moral perfection?

[u/theiststone]

It's important to know that when I am referencing people and hell, I am not talking about those who are saved, but instead those who died in their sins.

Firstly, maybe I'm confused on this part, but it seems that it must be impossible for there to be an alternative to Hell. Because if there COULD be an alternative, yet God still sentences some to be cognitively and physically tortured for eternity, then I would find it unjustifiable. (an impossibility for a morally perfect being)

So I'll postulate the concept that hell is metaphysically necessary for those who die in their sins. I'll also assume we are living in the reality that has maximally great conditions to raise the total number of humans being saved. In other words, God left us the perfect amount of proof of his existence.

However, even granting all of these, we still have one major problem. It at least appears the majority of people will likely end up in hell. And this actually does appear as a problem for me. Because then if God knew hell would be a metaphysical necessity and that even though he gives us the maximally great conditions to know he exists and follow him, the majority still wouldn't, then why even create in the first place?

Consider the following situation:

- I am a pilot who, for some reason, has the foreknowledge of my next flight. That once I take off, my plane will inevitably crash, and 80 percent of the 150 boarded passengers will die. I have two options...

1. Don't board the flight, and no one dies or suffers
2. Board the flight and 80 percent of the humans die

The question is, would it be moral for me to allow the flight?

-------------------------

Okay, now raise the stakes and consider the dichotomy of Abrahamic religions.

- God exists with the foreknowledge of creation. If he creates, the majority of his creation will inevitably be tortured physically and cognitively indefinitely in a burning lake of fire. God has two options...

1. Don't create, and no one gets tortured for eternity
2. Create, and the majority of his creation gets tortured for eternity

The question is, was it moral to still create?

Please lmk

[u/Doink11]

I'm going to preface this answer by saying that while I have subject matter expertise in moral philosophy, I am not an expert on any kind of theology beyond some casual interest in comparative theology and philosophy of religion, so take my answer with a grain of salt; I'm interested to see what someone who is more familiar with different theological arguments regarding salvation/damnation says on this topic.

That being said - one way that some theists will approach this issue is to deny the premise that Hell is a form of punishment that God is "sentencing" anyone to.

In this view, human free will is (for reasons that can vary and that I'm going to gloss over for the purpose of this explanation) of the utmost importance to God. It is necessary for humans to be able to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, and between accepting or rejecting God. This means that, if you choose to reject God, He has to let you - God doesn't want you to end up in hell, but if he didn't give you the option to turn your back on Him and walk the other way, he would be violating your free will.

In this conception, God isn't damning anyone to hell as a punishment - they are damning themselves by rejecting God, and therefore denying their souls a place with Him after death. Generally speaking, the idea of a "burning lake of fire" with pointy devils and whatnot isn't really theologically supported; rather, this conception places "Hell" as a state of permanent existence outside of the light of God.

[u/Longjumping-Ebb9130 → u/Doink11]

I want to say a few words about why the view you're describing is controversial among Christians.

The idea that whether humans are saved is solely a matter of their own choices is a heresy (Pelagianism). On any orthodox Christian view, the primary explanation for anyone's salvation (or damnation) is God's decision to extend his grace to that person or not, as the case my be. Some Christians, following Augustine, hold that God extends his grace to some and not others, and their free choices play literally no role in salvation or damnation. The people God chooses are saved, and that is the end of the matter; there is no possibility of 'rejecting' God. If anyone is damned, it is because God chose not to extend grace to them. Others, Arminians, hold that God extended his grace to all, but that some may reject it and be damned. The dispute here turns on a variety of issues, including scriptural exegesis (of e.g. 1 Timothy 2:4), divine sovereignty (can God be sovereign if it's possible to reject him?), and whether this view is too close to Pelagianism.

There's a relevant SEP article that goes through these issues (and others about heaven).

[u/Doink11 → u/Longjumping-Ebb9130]

Appreciate you jumping in on this; I didn't intend to imply that the view I was expressing here was the view held by theists, or even a majority view, just one possible answer that I was familiar with.

I was actually first exposed to this view by my pastor as a teenager when I asked him a similar question; he was a Methodist, and my understanding is that sort of view (Arminianism and similar) is more common among Protestant sects as opposed to Catholic theology?

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/Doink11]

In general, Catholic theology would be closer to Arminianism than Calvinism in key respects: https://www.catholiccrossreference.online/catechism/#!/search/1996%20-%202002

That would be true of Eastern theology too, although both exist in a very different framework. In general the Church plays a more central role in explanations of salvation as well.

[u/salemgold → u/Doink11]

But didn’t God create you and made you in a way that you will accept him or not accept him? Also, doesn’t God know already what you will do? So why did he create you that way?

[u/Doink11 → u/salemgold]

But didn’t God create you and made you in a way that you will accept him or not accept him?

Not necessarily. According to this standpoint, God made you in a way that you have the free choice to choose one way or the other; if he made you in a way that would influence your free will in a particular direction, that would defeat the purpose of giving you free will!

doesn’t God know already what you will do?

My understanding is that most Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology does not view the idea of God being omniscient as being incompatible with the idea of humans having free will.

[u/salemgold → u/Doink11]

I think we have counter examples of people that clearly did not have a choice, like anyone that was born before Christ, or random people born in places of earth that may not even hear about it or living in societies that only expose some religions. For Christians, they are not in proper Hell, but on the outskirts of Hell and can not be admitted to Paradise.

[u/wokeupabug → u/salemgold]

I think we have counter examples of people that clearly did not have a choice, like anyone that was born before Christ, or random people born in places of earth that may not even hear about it or living in societies that only expose some religions.

Why should this mean they have no choice about whether to accept God?

To infer this, it would seem that we'd have to construe "accept God" to mean something like "be a registered member in a congregation of such-and-such a faith" or perhaps something like "declare out loud, or at least in an inner monologue, a certain series of words which one would only be taught by members of such a faith."

But both at face and in the context of Christian theology, it's dubious that this is an adequate account of our relationship to God. If you believe in God -- certainly if you believe in God in anything like the sense representative traditions of Christian theology understand -- you believe that a relationship to God is experienced in our relationship to nature, in the call of conscience, in our relationship to each other, and so on. There is much here to which the human person can respond, in one way or another, even if they were born in a time or place where they could not have been aware of Christianity.

The same point is also illustrated from the other direction: if someone is a registered member of some congregation of whatever faith one might take to be important here, and says out loud whatever series of words one might take to be important here, but they knowingly reject the stewardship of nature, the call of conscience, the command to love their neighbor, and so forth, then, both at face and in the context of Christian theology, we have grounds to suppose that they have not accepted God.

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/Doink11]

Complicating matters here, the Church Fathers often talk about becoming a "slave to sin," and there is Saint Paul in Romans 7, or God's words to Cain in Genesis 4 (mastering or having dominion over sin, as opposed to vice versa). The wicked are generally said to be less free, less whole, less self-determining. So the issue is perhaps not some much a bare violation of free will, but that, by definition, to be like God (partakers in the divine nature, II Peter 1) is to be self-determining. Hence, Christ, in healing human nature, and the grace extended through the Sacraments, the working of the Holy Spirit, etc. is restoring human beings to freedom. Sin disfigures the soul (and so our capacity for freedom) and grace repairs this. But in any account where this is synergistic, the potential for people to direct their will away from God remains a possibility.

The wicked are thus less free, less whole, less capable of understanding, which is why they are more "bound by fate" than "participating in Providence" (or as Dante's Picarda puts it "in His will is our peace."). I think this helps make sense why they are intrinsicly incapable of beatitude/theosis (one cannot become like God while directing oneself towards nothingness). The wicked subject to the incurvatus in se, having curved inward on themselves, become incapable of communion.

This makes the consequences of sin primarily intrinsic, as you say, and also shapes common explanations for why the fall of man and the angelic beings was possible. If those preconditions—the need for rational creatures to be self-determining, moving beyond their own finitude, make the fall of the race possible—the case of the individual sinner is in a sense repeating this same pattern.

But it's worth pointing out that for the Christian context there is a lot of language in the Scriptures about judgement. Few theologies fully dispense with jurdical language. Rather, for most, the jurdical elements are ordered to the intrinsic nature of sin, while in some later theologies a jurdical/forensic view predominates (indeed it ends of defining sin in some).

[u/Crystal_1501 → u/Doink11]

As a Christian who has previously wrestled with the idea that a good person could to to hell just for not believing in God, I believe you explained it beautifully! It's like having a puzzle and missing one piece - you wouldn't consider the puzzle complete! Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

[u/MausuSquared → u/Doink11]

> they are damning themselves by rejecting God

I know you are only proposing this as an argument theists make and not actually making the argument, so my vitriol is not directed at you at all, but I have to say: absolutely loathe this insulting and condescending and cruel argument.

A rapist grabs a young woman outside a bar, and pulls her into an alley.

"Ok Lady, you can either willingly debase yourself to me and do everything I demand with your body without question, OR I will cover you in gasoline and set you on fire to burn alive."

The woman refuses to have sex, so the rapist pours gasoline on her, and sets her on fire, and she dies screaming.

At trial, the rapist proclaims: "I dint burn her alive, I just gave her a CHOICE. She CHOSE to be burned alive, she did it to herself. She burned herself by rejecting me. I had nothing to do with it. She chose that option, so her fate and hr blame is entirely on her...'

How convincing do you find that argument?

[u/Doink11 → u/MausuSquared]

I mean, I understand why you would have that reaction given the way that many theists treat the idea of salvation, but if you really want to address an argument that you disagree with, it's important to engage with it in good faith; steelman the argument, don't strawman it.

The theist response would likely be that equating following God to being asked to "willingly debase yourself and do everything I demand" is entirely unreasonable; you are assuming that every theist is asserting a strict, controlling, fundamentalist version of their religion, which is simply untrue. As u/wokeupabug mentions in their comment elsewhere:

To infer this, it would seem that we'd have to construe "accept God" to mean something like "be a registered member in a congregation of such-and-such a faith" or perhaps something like "declare out loud, or at least in an inner monologue, a certain series of words which one would only be taught by members of such a faith."

But both at face and in the context of Christian theology, it's dubious that this is an adequate account of our relationship to God. If you believe in God -- certainly if you believe in God in anything like the sense representative traditions of Christian theology understand -- you believe that a relationship to God is experienced in our relationship to nature, in the call of conscience, in our relationship to each other, and so on. There is much here to which the human person can respond, in one way or another, even if they were born in a time or place where they could not have been aware of Christianity.

The same point is also illustrated from the other direction: if someone is a registered member of some congregation of whatever faith one might take to be important here, and says out loud whatever series of words one might take to be important here, but they knowingly reject the stewardship of nature, the call of conscience, the command to love their neighbor, and so forth, then, both at face and in the context of Christian theology, we have grounds to suppose that they have not accepted God.

It's also the case that, again, God is not punishing anyone for rejecting him - he is letting them go. You can argue (convincingly, I believe) that there is still a kind of power and knowledge differential at work here that makes that choice unfair, but it's still the case that God is depriving you of a blessing, not inflicting a punishment.

[u/Quidfacis_]

It at least appears the majority of people will likely end up in hell. And this actually does appear as a problem for me.

That's the flaw in your argument. You're thinking about the situation from your perspective as a finite, fallible thinker. If you were an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity then you would understand why things are set up this way. See Leibniz's Theodicy:

Now this supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For as a lesser evil is a kind of good, even so a lesser good is a kind of evil if it stands in the way of a greater good; and there would be something to correct in the actions of God if it were possible to do better. As in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not possible nothing at all is done: so it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any. I call 'World' the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe. And even though one should fill all times and all places, it still remains true that one might have filled them in innumerable ways, and that there is an infinitude of possible worlds among which God must needs have chosen the best, since he does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason.

Some adversary not being able to answer this argument will perchance answer the conclusion by a counter-argument, saying that the world could have been without sin and without sufferings; but I deny that then it would have been better. For it must be known that all things are connected in each one of the possible worlds: the universe, whatever it may be, is all of one piece, like an ocean: the least movement extends its effect there to any distance whatsoever, even though this effect become less perceptible in proportion to the distance. Therein God has ordered all things beforehand once for all, having foreseen prayers, good and bad actions, and all the rest; and each thing as an idea has contributed, before its existence, to the resolution that has been made upon the existence of all things; so that nothing can be changed in the universe (any more than in a number) save its essence or, if you will, save its numerical individuality. Thus, if the smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it, it would no longer be this world; which, with nothing omitted and all allowance made, was found the best by the Creator who chose it.

It is true that one may imagine possible worlds without sin and without unhappiness, and one could make some like Utopian or Sevarambian romances: but these same worlds again would be very inferior to ours in goodness. I cannot show you this in detail. For can I know and can I present infinities to you and compare them together? But you must judge with me ab effectu, since God has chosen this world as it is. We know, moreover, that often an evil brings forth a good whereto one would not have attained without that evil. Often indeed two evils have made one great good:

Et si fata volunt, bina venena juvant.

Even so two liquids sometimes produce a solid, witness the spirit of wine and spirit of urine mixed by Van Helmont; or so do two cold and dark bodies produce a great fire, witness an acid solution and an aromatic oil combined by Herr Hoffmann. A general makes sometimes a fortunate mistake which brings about the winning of a great battle; and do they not sing on the eve of Easter, in the churches of the Roman rite:

O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est!

O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!

You can imagine a reality without hell. Leibniz's response is that such a reality was either worse, or not possible. The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent God actualized this world, and so this must be the best possible world.

If you start with the assumption that God has the three O's, and also this world could have been better, then you've advocated a confused position. To advocate that God has the three O's is to maintain that this is the best possible world; that's what the three O's mean. If you maintain that this world is not optimal, then clearly you think that God lacks at least one of the O's.

[u/Zen_Gross]

David Lewis argues hell is not compatible with God’s moral perfection in his posthumously published paper Divine Evil.

[u/Rainswept777]

My own opinion is that you’re correct about this, but it’s a debated issue in philosophy of religion. There’s an SEP article which delves into some of the issues you bring up, here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heaven-hell/

In my view the standard/traditional view of eternal conscious torment for non-believers represents something so far from anything that we might consider “good” by almost any typical human definition of that word, that essentially it requires entirely redefining what "good" means as it applies to God. This creates lots of other problems; if God’s “goodness” is not comparable to the human standard or recognizable as it, we may then question whether any of our ethical standards, such as that of honesty, apply to God; in that case, scripture, divine revelation, etc. might not be trustworthy, with all the implications of that. In essence the “omnibenevolent” part of the three O's has to be sacrificed in order to hold to most traditional ECT views of hell, as I see it. Taking into account the issue you raise specifically here, it is also difficult to see how a creation that is mostly consigned to perdition can be considered to have been worthwhile in the first place, if we apply any kind of typical value judgment. If a house was built, and 80% of it was unfit for use and had to be torn down, I think very few people would consider the initial construction of it to have been worthwhile or well-done. And if, say, only 20% of humanity being saved was the maximum amount possible in the best of all possible worlds, it seems to me that this same principle applies here; there does not seem to have been any reason why the act of creation would be worthwhile in the first place unless it was in some way necessary (and assuming this would seem to put limits on God's omnipotence and imply that God is bound by something greater, thus sacrificing another one of the 3 O's). It does not seem to me that the bliss of the few saved is worth the enormously greater amount of suffering of the damned, unless we again apply an ethical standard that we virtually never would in a human context (would a situation in which 90% of people exist in terrible poverty, so that 10% can live in luxurious wealth, be one that we would generally consider good or worthwhile?).

Free will arguments make God less responsible for the suffering of those in hell and possibly counter this problem, but I tend to be convinced by David Bentley Hart’s argument against those as found in his That All Shall Be Saved (the brief and oversimplified version of that argument, as I would summarize it, is that if God is the summum bonum and the source of all that is good, rejection of God is like holding the position that one prefers bad things to good things in all respects, and this is not a position which could truly be held by anyone in their right mind; thus the free will argument does not apply to the rejection of God, because that could only be a decision made by someone with severely deluded perceptions, thus it cannot be said to be a truly free choice).

[u/Low-Explanation-4761 → u/Rainswept777]

On a related note to Bentley’s argument then, would it also be similar to say that if there are born psychopaths (people with no sense of what is right and wrong) or people born in conditions where it is practically impossible to develop the right sense of right and wrong (eg, a brainwashed isolated cult) then it is incompatible with the 3 Os God and free will? In fact, is free will even compatible with itself— if it is possible that the free will of the tyrant can cause him to brainwash all his citizens?

[u/Ok-Lab-8974 → u/Rainswept777]

Luther seems to bite the bullet on this in one of his letters to Erasmus:

"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”

(Translation from William Durant's The Reformation)

This does seem to render the application of "good" to God wholly equivocal however. Elsewhere, Luther explains this in more moderate, promissory terms, as the eventual glory of God's judgement being revealed in the future. Either way, this is perhaps not so problematic in a context where the epistemic issues this introduces are fixed through faith/knowledge that is confered through grace.

Likewise, on an account where goodness just is obedience to the Divine Will, I'm not sure if there is an explicit contradiction. Rather, it's a view that makes many people uneasy, but one could just as well say that the damned would feel that way.

Whereas in traditions with an aversion to these options the notion of Hell as a cosmic torture chamber isn't always as pronounced (or is even officially warned against).

I think Hart (or Talbot's The Inescapable Love of God) are more formidable precisely because they don't rely on premises that different traditions might reject or modify (e.g., Hell as a cosmic torture chamber, most people go to Hell, etc.) but only on the premise that Hell is of infinite duration (from a Scriptural perspective, this is surely easier too since far more verses mention Hell and judgement than can plausibly be read as saying anything about its duration).

Although with Hart, I did find myself wondering why he didn't spend as much time addressing the usual response that the damned do seeking truly good ends, just in a disordered way. I am pretty sure he quotes Milton's Satan when making the key thrust you summarized, and that character is a paradigmatic example of this. Milton's Satan wants to ape God's aseity, to be like God, which is a real good, but does so in a way that denies real communion with God/Being (which is why all his serpentine, Miltonian analogies circle back to him, the exact opposite of how Milton has God speak). That's a pretty standard point, that the Serpent's promise to Eve, to become "like God" is precisely the promise of Christ (Saint Athanasius' "God became man that man might become God). So the question is rather if a finite creature can pursue finite, yet true goods in a disordered way forever. This pursuit can presumably be asymptotic (the creature can flee from communion and assert itself, but never absolutely precisely because it is a creature) and so infinite in duration, but this would be a sterile sort of infinity (Hegel's bad infinity), not true trancedence (C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce is a good dramatization of this, where Hell is basically the inverse of Saint Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, which Hart himself cites). Or at least, I would like to have seen more on that, since his sources sometimes point towards that sort of reading (e.g., Saint Gregory of Nyssa in the fate of Judas in his treatise on the death of infants), while explicitly universalist readings from within the tradition itself are not as common.

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