Theodicy and Eternal Suffering: Hell and Predestination

Back in 1997, a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the fourth in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

There are two kinds of people who complain about the existence of Hell. One kind thinks that Hell is terrible because a God of love wouldn't send anybody to Hell, no matter how bad they were. The other kind is willing to admit that God only sends bad people to Hell, but says that it's God's fault that they are bad in the first place. The first heresy is known as Universalism; the second is the Calvinist heresy, which you probably know as predestination. You use a sort of combination of the two, so we'll have to deal with both. ...continue reading...I'll start with Universalism. (By the way, "heresy" just means "false belief about God," not, "Somethin' that any infidel scum who believes it oughta get Inquisited.")

[Note to Calvinist lurkers: I deliberately use the term "Calvinist heresy" rather than "Calvinism." The Calvinist heresy is what you get when a Calvinist goes off the deep end. I do not mean to imply that everybody who calls himself a Calvinist is a teacher of false doctrine. Please, no responses accusing me of reprobation. ;) ]

The Universalist's central belief is that Hell is such a terrible place that God sees to it, or at least ought to see to it, that nobody ever goes there. Now this doctrine is usually a pretty shallow one, but occasionally it is expressed with some sophistication, as when a Rice University philosophy professor told my wife, "I can't accept a God who would impose infinite punishment for finite wrong." Still, sophisticated or not, the Universalist usually has fallen into one of two traps. He may think (1) that nobody would choose Hell if given the choice between Heaven and Hell; in other words he may neither understand the nature of Hell nor realize how thoroughly evil human beings can choose to become. He may think (2) that in the last analysis a "God of love" would take away a man's free will rather than allowing the man to choose to make himself miserable. You've added a twist which is new to me; you seem to argue (3) that God should have been smart enough to tell who would damn themselves and who wouldn't, and then should only have created those who wouldn't.

You express your Universalism in these words: "Why would a loving God create a creature who would fall? Why would God give man free will if, by exercising it according to our own conscience, we go to Hell?...And what kind of a God could sit back and let it happen?" Now the answer to this is one you won't like, because it will appear that I am contradicting Scripture, and you will want to write me off as a weaseler. I am not, for reasons I will explain in a bit. But first, here is the answer.

Nobody goes to Hell in the first place, or stays there once they arrive, for any reason in the world other than that they want to. "The gates of Hell are locked on the inside."

Now don't start thumpin' your Bible just yet. Let me explain. I don't mean that the damned actively desire Hell, as such. But the alternative is Heaven, which is worse than Hell. To be in the presence of God is agony for the sinner. (Think of the most embarrassing moment in your life, and imagine how you feel when you're around the people who know about it. Uncomfortable and embarrassed, right? Now imagine that you can enter Heaven only if you are willing for God and everybody to know every detail of the most shameful things you've ever done. Do you see how Heaven could be a terribly public, and therefore horribly uncomfortable, kind of place, at least at first?)

Now God has gone to a lot of trouble to turn His Presence into our joy. But before we can enter into joy we have to let go of the sin. Those in Hell are those who have come to desire the sin more than the joy. Don't say that this is ridiculous. I have, even if you haven't, been in moods where I was angry, where I knew I was hurting myself and nobody else by staying angry, where I knew that if I would just take a deep breath and laugh at myself I'd feel a whole lot better, and where I knew it was outright wrong for me to be angry — and yet I said to myself, "Hell with it, I'm going to stay mad." In fact I've been angry, been caught off guard by something funny, started to smile, and then forced myself to keep scowling because I knew that if I started laughing I wouldn't be able to stay mad. Make that mood permanent, and you have the choice of Hell over Heaven.

As for the bit about "according to our own conscience," which I assume means something along the lines of "doing our best on the limited evidence we had, so if we screwed up it's God's fault for not giving us better evidence": We are assured by Paul that God wants everybody to be saved, and by Jesus Himself that anyone who genuinely seeks God will find Him. Therefore if we are genuinely doing our best, we will find that sooner or later — perhaps even after we die — we will meet God and have the opportunity to accept His grace. But many times we think we are seeking God when we aren't really — at least, we're looking for something we call "God," but the real God isn't the sort of thing we want to find, or would accept if we were brought face to face with Him. The God we want is like Santa Claus in P.J. O’Rourke’s explanation of how God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat, in which P.J. sums it all up by saying, “In fact, Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way except one: Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”

If we’re looking for Santa Claus and calling our search for Santa Claus “my search for God,” then when we do meet the real God, Whom we don't want, and are forced to choose between Him and Hell, it is not necessarily surprising that many of us choose Hell.

To see God as He is, is to see myself as I am. As long as I am unwilling to face that truth about myself, Heaven is a place of even greater torment than Hell. Hence the quotation whose source I don't remember: "The wrath of God is simply the love of God as perceived by those who reject it;" or the Lady Julian's words on being given a vision of the wrath of God: "I saw no wrath but on man's part;" or, to quote C. S. Lewis again (from memory, so not necessarily word for word), "There are in the long run only two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says at last, 'Thy will be done;'" or, finishing up with Dorothy Sayers, "If you insist on your own way, you will get it. Hell is the enjoyment of your own way forever."

But of course that is precisely the complaint of some Universalists: why wouldn't a God of love at some point say, "Okay, that's enough; you've hurt yourself long enough, and now I'm taking away your free will for your own good"? Why wouldn't there come a time when God says, "I've had it; My will be done, for your own sake"? Or there's your view (if I understand you) that it would be better for such a person not to exist at all than to exist in everlasting Hell, and that God is therefore blamable for having created the damned in the first place. May I suggest that here once again you and your fellow Universalists are positing the existence, and judging the desirability, of cosmic alternatives? — a pastime less than obviously useful for minds not built on the cosmic scale. At any rate, it is certainly clear that if Hell is as I have described it, then God cannot be blamed for the obstinacy of the damned unless we think He owes it to them to wipe out their free will and force them to be happy and like it — unless, in other words, we are suffering from CKIAS. Nor can we complain of "infinite punishment for finite wrong," since the wrong is as infinite as the punishment (for if the wrong ever came to an end, so would the punishment).

There is also a possibility raised by Edwyn Bevan in his very thought-provoking book Symbolism and Belief. He suggests that perhaps the torment of the damned is seen as everlasting (i.e., of infinite duration) from the point of view of the blessed, but experienced as a single moment (though a moment that never ends) by the damned. I do not know whether Bevan understood or even ever read Einstein, but the effect is precisely the same as if we were to say that Hell moves eternally at the speed of light relative to Heaven (for to the stationary observer, time for an object moving at the speed of light appears to have frozen). In such a scenario the damned would not feel as though their torment had lasted a billion years; indeed they would not feel as though their torment had lasted ten seconds. It would seem to last merely an instant. Only they would never get to the next instant; it would never be for them ten seconds later. They would not experience Hell as infinite in duration, and yet it would be everlasting. (What becomes of the objection to "infinite punishment for finite wrong" if the "infinite punishment" is not experienced as punishment of infinite duration?)

I mention this possibility, not at all to say that I believe that's how it would be. I have no idea whether that's what Hell is like or not. My point is precisely that nobody knows what Hell is like, and therefore anybody who tries to appeal to the experience of the damned in Hell in order to prove God unjust has full-blown CKIAS. For we know only that the experience of the damned is something that would leave us shuddering in horror if for an instant we tasted it, not being already damned ourselves. More precision than that is not available to us — yet such precision is necessary if we are going to use the experience of Hell as a lever for the condemnation of God.

To sum up: God has chosen to create a universe in which people are given the choice between existing in unimaginable joy and existing in self-damnation, and in which some choose self-damnation, a mode of existence we cannot imagine. You think that (a) there's no reason He couldn't either annihilate the damned entirely or overrule their free will or else refrain from creating them in the first place, and (b) morality demands that He do one of those three things. If you're saying, "That's how it looks to me, but of course I could be wrong," then there's hope for you. If you're saying, "No way I'm gonna excuse God for creating them and then letting them rot in Hell," then CKIAS is on the rampage and there's nothing more to be said until you are free of the virus.

Very well. On the basis of reason, eternal damnation doesn't prove that God is evil, if we suppose that God doesn't force people to go to Hell and indeed very heartily wishes that they wouldn't insist on going there. If the eternal-suffering form of Painful World is to have any hope of success, it must be on grounds of predestination: God forces people to suffer through no fault of their own. But you, I gather, would make precisely this objection. I think you would say, "I can't accept a God who would send a sinner to Hell for a sin that He forced the sinner to commit in the first place." I base this impression upon some quotations of yours, though the only context I have is your quotation of somebody else quoting you. Specifically:

Why would a loving God create a creature who would fall [note the implication that the Fall was inevitable]?

And:

How could God or anyone or anything know what has not yet happened? To say otherwise is to say the future is set in stone, immutible, planned. If that is the case, then every sin anyone will commit in that future has been pre-planned by God. That means, logically, God is the originator of sin. I'm sure you don't believe that, and yet, if all has been determined by God in advance, and is a self-fulfilling plan, then God is logically the originator of all that is to happen, including my thoughts being typed on this keyboard for this group and your response, and any sins or non-sins committed forevermore.

And:

And what kind of a God could sit back and let it happen? What kind of God could, before the beginning of time, decide who would and would not be saved, and yet make them anyway, having condemned them to hell before the beginning of the world?

From this I conclude that you are saying that if sin and the Christian God both exist, then the sin is God's fault, and where does He get off punishing us for His own mistake? If that's not what you're saying, I apologize, and the next ten paragraphs are irrelevant to you. Assuming that is what you're saying:

If your conclusion were valid, your indignation would be appropriate (except for the CKIAS involved in your assumption that your personal, ex hypothesi arbitrary moral code is binding upon God). As it happens, however, the conclusion is plainly invalid. I have the impression that you are mature enough to take the following criticism in terse, tact-free terms, so even though I don't want to hurt your feelings I'm not going to waste time pulling punches. This is a clear instance of the fallacy of bifurcation, in which you wrongly assume that there are only two choices, prove that one of them is a bad choice, and conclude that the other is therefore the right one. Your error lies in the assumption that God exists within, and is constrained by, the time continuum. That is to say, you assume that the time continuum governs all reality instead of being a (created) part of it. Besides this, you are begging a whole host of questions when you say that "planned" and "determined" and "foreseen" and "immutable" are all more or less synonymous.

Here's an argument that is just as good — logically speaking — as yours. "If anyone knows what has already happened, that means the past is set in stone, immutable, planned. If that is the case, then every sin anyone has committed in that past was planned by God. That means, logically, God is the originator of sin." Pretty unconvincing, n'est-ce pas? You know what you chose to do yesterday, and you can't change it now; does that mean your choice was an illusion?

Imagine that I steal your car, and when the police catch me I admit to stealing it. But then I say, "Yes, but the past is immutable, ergo planned, ergo determined, so therefore my choice wasn't real." Would you then say, "Oh my goodness, I guess I won't press charges"? Somehow I doubt it.

You see, then, that the apparent contradiction between immutability and freedom is not actually a contradiction between the two concepts, but only a trick of our perspective. From our perspective reality is divided into the past, in which we made choices which were free though now they are immutable and known to us; the present, in which we are making choices which are free and known to us and at least partially mutable; and the future, in which we shall make choices which will be free though now they seem totally mutable and unknown to us. But notice that the nature of the choices is not changing, only the tense in which we describe them. The reality is the same; our perspective on it is changing.

Here's where the bifurcation comes in. We "see" our actions in three modes. There is the mode in which we see the present, in which knowledge and freedom aren't in conflict. Thus I can say, "Jordan's driving to the hoop!" without taking away MJ's freedom to drive or not to drive as he pleases. There is the mode in which we see the past, i.e., in memory, in which we have knowledge of our past choices but no longer possess (in the present) the ability to change them (though we did have the choice back when the past was present). And then there is the mode in which we see the future, where we don't actually know what our actions will be at all (though we will have both knowledge and freedom when the future becomes the present).

Now your argument depends on the assumption that either God knows the future as we "know" the future or else He knows the future as we know the past. If the former, He doesn't really know at all, and therefore is not omniscient. If the latter, the future is fixed just as the past, and there is no more free will in the future than there is in the past. (Note the difference between saying, "There is no free will in the past," i.e. we can't change it now, and, "There was no free will in the past," i.e. we couldn't change it then. The leap from, "There is no free will in the future," to, "There will be no free will in the future," is equally invalid.) From these two options you conclude that either we don't have free will (in which case sin is God's fault) or else God isn't omniscient. But what if God knows the future as we know the present? That possibility you completely ignore, thereby committing the fallacy of bifurcation.

Yet surely it is obvious that the mode of perception that most nearly corresponds to reality is the mode in which we perceive the present rather than that in which we perceive the future or the past. The past is immutable (for us) precisely because it is no longer real for us, at least not the way the present is. The future is unknown for us because it is not yet real for us, not the way the present is. If God knows all times perfectly (which is what omniscience properly understood involves), then we would expect Him to know them as they really are. Therefore the mode in which we would expect God to know the past and future is that in which we (given our limitations) can know only the present. Yet it is precisely this mode that you exclude, without justification, at the very beginning of your argument.

Maybe I should just quote C. S. Lewis on the subject. From Mere Christianity:

But God, I believe, does not live in a Time-series at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours: with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960. For His life is Himself.

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.

The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent difficulties in Christianity...

Another difficulty we get if we believe God to be in time is this. Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call "tomorrow" is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call "to-day." All the days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never suppose that your actions at this moment were any less free because God [or anyone else, for that matter] knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way — because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already "Now" for Him. [pp. 147 ff. in the Macmillan edition]

And, as Lewis (I think) says elsewhere, "Obviously to watch a man do something is not to make him do it."

So your argument for predestination (based on the supposed contradiction between God's foreknowledge and man's free will) doesn't hold up, and neither does the objection to Hell on the basis of "a loving God wouldn't send people there." There remains only one hope for the eternal-suffering form of Painful World: the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, specifically that version which claims that God Himself has admitted in the Bible that the damned do not really have free will.

I am going to take a calculated risk here. I am going to assume that you are not a Bible-based Calvinist heretic, saving us both the trouble of a full refutation. For our purposes here it should be sufficient to say (a) that most Christians think that Calvinists who deny free will are wrong, (b) that the Bible itself includes passages that plainly say that God wants everyone to be saved, contradicting the doctrine that He created people whose sole function was to be damned, (c) that since Calvin's argument starts from the belief that God exists and has spoken in Scripture, it can't possibly be used to prove that God does not exist, and (d) that even if we were to grant Calvin's highly dubious conclusion, we would still be left with the problem of calling God's behavior "evil" when there is no standard of good and evil besides the nature of God. I would think that sufficient refutation for our purposes.