A question for those of you who believe in an omnibenevolent God but also in hell: How do you reconcile the two?
Some believers invoke the “free will defense”, but this makes no sense to me. It seems that God could easily save everyone, sending no one to hell, without violating anyone’s free will. Here’s how I described it recently:
It’s similar to a technique I’ve described in the past whereby God could have created a perfect world sans evil without violating anyone’s free will.
Here’s how it works:
1. Before creating each soul, God employs his omniscience to look forward in time and see whether that soul, if created, would freely accept him and go to heaven or freely reject him and go to hell.
2. If the former, God goes ahead and creates that soul. If the latter, then he doesn’t, choosing instead to create a different soul that will freely accept him and go to heaven.
Simple, isn’t it? Any omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God could easily come up with something like this or better, rather than sending billions of souls to hell with no chance of a reprieve.
Theists, how do you respond?
I don’t view God as omnibenevolent, only selectively so, to His own delight, primarily. So I don’t try to reconcile the two ideas, since I don’t agree with God being omnibenevolent, but rather one who delights in shattering intelligently designed clay vessels for sport as well as inflicting unimaginable cruelty on those he chooses.
If there is design in the biological world, there is a lot of designed cruelty and biological warfare. This is a picture of things to come in Hell. If one accepts ID, one is confronted with intelligently designed cruelty….
The only certainty a conscious finite creature might ever have is pain, beyond that, most truths are accessed through faith.
Yes!
Sal,
Do you think this God is worthy of worship?
I’m not a theist. And, back when I was, I already had doubts about hell. But I suspect the view of many Christians will be that God doesn’t put people in hell — they put themselves there.
Still god’s fault if god is anything like the omni-all god (most) christians believe in.
Because god, being the loving and all-knowing parent – if it is what they say it is – might be willing to respect my free choice to run to my room and slam the door against the parent to sulk on my bed. But never willing to stand idly by if I were in there torturing myself by burning my arms with cigarettes, nor to let some other person keep me there burning me, either, even if I had gone voluntarily to begin with. And even if I were merely sulking, not actively being harmed, no parent would be happy with letting me choose to isolate myself from loving contact for eternity. They would find a way, eventually, to entice me back out into the place of family. No human parent would be allowed to excuse their own inaction/negligence by pretending it was the child’s fault because “they put themselves there” – and remember, we are all god’s children.
There are a couple legitimate ways out of the problem, besides blaming the victim:
There is no hell; christians could admit it’s something they made up along the way to aid them in enforcing laws and social norms on “evil-doers”.
There is a hell (and it’s painful) but it’s always of limited duration. There is always spiritual rehabilitation and the stepping stones to remorse, forgiveness and full redemption into god’s heaven are always visible and within reach of each prisoner of hell.
Umm, I suppose there’s more, but not that I can think of at the moment.
Well gee. Looky here. A thread where keiths is not asking, “Hey Mung, you believe in hell don’t you? So why don’t we smell burning flesh all the time?”
Argument against the existence of God:
I don’t smell burning flesh.
Therefore, God does not exist.
I can absolutely understand why a person in their “young teens” might find that convincing. They could be certain that Christianity was absurd, and yes, even false. Ah youth. It stinks.
Mung,
Just like every other thread.
It must be depressing for you to realize how ineffective you are as a witness for Jesus, Mung.
Okay, Mung, here are some more questions for you. I hope you won’t run away from these.
1. Do you think hell is real?
2. Do you think that people who die in unbelief are sent there?
3. Do you believe it is a place of torment?
4. Do you believe that God allows people who are unhappy there to leave hell and join him in heaven?
I don’t even like keiths, but this is ridiculous. Nothing you wrote is responsive to what keiths says, and I can’t see any reason why you would want to be so far out of bounds.
I don’t know what keiths gets out of poking at you, and I don’t know what you get out of poking at keiths, but of the two of you, I figure you’re the one who is more likely to be able to (and have a motivation to) refrain.
Do, or don’t, as you wish.
Blame my worthless sense of humor if your comment was just a joke.
hotshoe,
Probably more or less the same things you get out of poking at fifth.
well, yeah, more or less 🙂 Keeps my teeth shiny.
But I’ve got even less mind-reading skill than I do sense of humor, so I try really really hard not to assume other’s motivations …. only to grant that they are getting something out of what they choose to do.
hotshoe,
There’s also annihilationism, which holds that the torment is finite and ends in the destruction of the damned souls. Of course, many Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of even that much mercy. They prefer a doctrine of eternal torment.
But remember, kids, Jesus loves you, even when he’s torturing you for eternity. He just has his own peculiar way of showing his love.
It seems to me this is an extraordinarily good argument; one that would confound the most creative theist. I don’t see how they could find a way around it without compromising one of their non-negotiable tenets about God: omnipotence, hell, omnigoodness etc. I think the solution that Sal has found would be completely unacceptable to most theists and sophisticated theologians might say his solution is logically incompatible with God
You are stood in a room with a Hindu. You believe your religion is true, he believes his religion is true.
What do you say to convince the Hindu that he is wrong and you are right?
Yes, because it doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what the Designer of all things thinks.
The real question you’re asking is should we like a God who creates things like bone cancer and birth defects, who inflicts more cruelty in this world upon humans than all the tyrants in history combined (since after all He created and sustained tyrants like Nebuchanezzar to Joseph Stalin to Pablo Escobar).
I don’t think any parent of a sick child or suffering loved one will naturally be thrilled that God acts so cruelly. So my answer to your question is God may demand our respect for Him, but I certainly don’t think it is natural we would be thrilled about it. We would be terror struck more than love struck. Many remain resentful for the rest of their lives over the hand they’ve been dealt and the human condition. I can understand that…..
Jesus said:
Reminds me of Pablo Escobar who would chainsaw his enemies. In the days of Jesus, people understood those words because that’s how business was done by tyrannical rulers. There is the wrong notion Hell is separation from God, but the Bible teaches God watches the torment He inflicts.
Lot of days I wish I could believe there was no Intelligent Designer, because if there is an Intelligent Designer, he is unimaginably cruel.
People misinterpret what it means when the Bible says God is merciful and loving. The correct interpretation is that He is merciful in the sense he spares some from the cruelty he doles out. He is loving to those He is merciful toward by granting them forgiveness and access to His protection in the next life.
Now, for those who think there is no intelligent design, I can understand why they think they have nothing to worry about.
But if one really studies how the Jesus is described in the Bible, they will appreciate passages like this (which seem to be avoided by most modern day preachers):
Lots of days I wish I would lose Pascal’s wager because it would mean the suffering of most of humanity would not be forever but end when they expire.
What a horribly depressing view of God you have. You certainly put the lie to the idea that all believers believe in God as an emotional crutch.
For your own well-being I would say you should look up the theologians who claim to be able to prove God’s more benevolent qualities. Either that or reconsider the overwhelming evidence that there is no intelligent designer!
Sal is a poster child for religion as child abuse.
Then there exists a possible God which has the quality of omnibenevolence which is superior to the one you believe in.
I don’t use the phrase child abuse lightly. It’s one of the few things I know anything about. I’ve heard dozens of kids describe abusive parents in terms that parallel Sal’s description of God. I am not being metaphorical when I think this teaching is abuse.
I don’t think the belief that the soul is eternal is motivated by the need for there to be eternal torment for the wicked rather for the need of eternal reward for the righteous.
As for Jesus, He seems more like the bleeding heart liberal of the group. But what is a God supposed to do if you freely choose to reject Him?
Ask what you would think of a human parent who tortured a child.
I would judge a God more harshly
Trouble is, people back in the day had all the direct evidence you could ask for of God’s existence. Burning bushes, worldwide floods that were forewarned, people turning to salt and all sorts of things like that.
These days nothing like that seems to happen. So it’s odd how at one point God was happy to turn up in person and give direct evidence of it’s existence, and now we just get faces in toast or clouds.
If free will exists,even an omniscient God cannot know the exact choice someone will make, but He could know every possible outcome of every possible choice.
Well,we have William
So you worship a God out of fear, both in this life and another. And eternal punishment is not enough,He makes the material world a house of horrors as well. Perhaps what you believe in is a omni malevolent God, one which provides hope in order to make despair deeper, good to make bad more painful.
Pain and beetles.
Yes, this is one of the only reasons I fight so hard against christianity – we live in a world where religion is given special privileges on the ingrained presumption that it is beneficial – but christianity is is irredeemably corrupt in its foundation of abusing children by teaching them a doctrine of hell. Teaching a child that they might, at any moment, die and be sent to eternal hellfire is – by any objective standard – child abuse. If christianity has any benefits to adults, that cannot possibly outweigh the balance of the damage christians inflict upon innocent children by teaching them to submit and love the abusive god who happily sends its children to hell.
I think it’s not a coincidence that religion attracts pedophiles. Kids are, in a sense, groomed to expect a combination of love and abuse from authority figures. Not to mention, groomed to expect that abuse is inescapable.
Sal’s description of an abusive father is classic. Most kids will tell any lie rather than be removed from an abusive home. Heaven and hell work on fundamental bits of human psychology.
newton,
Then why not admit the souls of unbelievers to heaven after a finite amount of torment — sort of like the Catholic purgatory? Or better yet, just forgive everyone and welcome them all?
Then you need to reread your Bible. Jesus talks about hell far more than anyone else in the Bible, and he talks about hell far more than he talks about heaven.
A perfectly loving God would set up a separate paradise for those who reject him.
There’s a rather interesting scene at the end of Lewis’s that Hideous Strength where the villains have died and are on their way to heaven, but turn away because they can’t stand the light. Or something like that. It’s been a long time since I read it, but my take was that no one is turned away.
I think your idea of a separate paradise is alluded to in Milton. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Takes theology at least to the Marvel Comic level.
newton,
Libertarian free will of the kind that Christians posit is actually incoherent, but I assume its truth for the sake of arguments like the one I presented in the OP. The problem isn’t a clash with God’s omniscience, however.
Think of it this way: God is supposedly timeless, which means that time is just like a spatial dimension to him, spread out for his inspection. He can observe a future event by looking in a future “direction”, just as we can observe an event happening to the right of us by looking rightward. In neither case does the observation imply control of or interference in the event; they’re both just observations.
Another analogy: A car is traveling down a road. At any given time, the occupants of the car see only their immediate surroundings; they don’t know what’s coming further down the road, and the things they’ve passed are no longer “present” to them, except in memory.
You are in an airplane above them. From your godlike vantage point, you can see the entire road at once, including the landmarks they’ve passed as well as the ones they have yet to encounter. Nothing about that implies that you are changing the landscape in any way.
These analogies aren’t perfect, and there’s more to be said about how choices can be free even when the outcomes are already known by God, but that’s the general idea.
In the hologram version of physics, all things can be conceived of as existing on a surface. I forget the rest.
But at least some physicists take your image literally. I think.
petrushka,
That sounds right, based on what I’ve gleaned from Lewis’s apologetic works. I’ll have to read some of his fiction — the only thing I’ve read so far is The Screwtape Letters, which is really more apologetics than fiction.
Does That Hideous Strength stand alone, or would I need to read the earlier books in the trilogy?
Haven’t read any of ’em.
Have heard many comments from other people that Hideous Strength is gawdawful, boring, and a thin veneer over his preachiness.
I wouldn’t waste my time on it. Pretty sure you have more interesting and/or important things to read …
petrushka,
Yes, where our three-dimensional view is really just an approximation that works well at low energies and on macroscopic scales. The cool thing about those theories is that in them gravity is actually a fictional force, in the sense that it isn’t present on the two-dimensional surface — it emerges as a consequence of the holographic “projection”.
How much pain can you endure? It’s the third of a trilogy.
I think Lewis and most Anglicans (I was Episcopalian) believe that hell is separation from God, rather than punishment administered as vengence.
That, I assume, absolves God of being vindictive and cruel. I’m pretty sure Lewis implies that the decision about one’s ultimate destination can be made after death, regardless of how shitty you’ve been in life. Perhaps purgatory is like a drug rehab center. Could be interesting, in the hands of Monty Python.
Too bad they never did the Inferno trilogy.
That’s probably about right.
I read the first two, and the preaching was already there. But they were not too bad. I quickly got bogged down on “That Hideous Strength” and I have no interest in returning to it. That was several decades ago.
hotshoe:
Yeah, I have a huge backlog. But Lewis is still hugely influential, so I think of reading his stuff as oppo research.
petrushka:
Neil:
Okay, so it sounds like I might be better off starting (and possibly ending) with the first one.
Keiths,
Btw, that was a pretty good OP. It highlights the problems with the sugar coated version of the Christian God vs. what is actually presented in the Bible.
Dawkins characterization, though deeply flawed, is actually closer to the truth than the sanitized version one gets out of most modern day pulpits:
The problem with Dawkins view is that he is treating God as if God were a mere man rather than a true deity. It is not accurate in that sense (treating God like he were a mere man) but accurate in as much as it highlights God’s wrath over what humans view as inconsequential.
Few of us would condemn the human race for eternity for getting deceived by a snake over forbidden fruit. I mean, it was only one minor shoplifting offense not much over a kid robbing a cookie jar as far as human affairs go, but evidently quite a different matter to God who has wrath a plenty, and where pretty much every infraction is a capital crime deserving of hell.
I’ve exterminated lots of insects and a few rodents cruelly. I suppose the critters would view me as a malevolent genocidal bully, whereas many fellow humans view me as complete sweetie pie. Such is the problem with Dawkins point of reference in judging the goodness of God. He’s looking at it from Dawkins perspective much like the bugs I exterminated were looking at it from a bug’s perspective. FYI: I think I want to buy me a :
Bug A Salt.
[For the record, I try to treat animals and birds humanely. I’ve never beaten a puppy nor does the idea appeal to me. I’ve never shot birds for sport like a certain evolutionist who was obsessed with fire arms and who quipped, “how I love shooting”.]
and
Incidentally, that would mean aborting the fetuses of any pregnant women.
Does this bother me? Yes, I said as much here:
and other places. But such cruel acts by the Old Testament God (including Noah’s flood which was even more genocidal), are only the tip of the iceberg compared to Hell.
Burning Hell
Sal,
Like newton, I get the impression that your relationship with God is based on fear, not love.
Makes it kind of hard to follow what Jesus called ‘the greatest commandment’, doesn’t it?
Can you really summon that kind of love for someone you regard as “unimaginably cruel” who delights in watching the torment he inflicts on those whom he damns?
hotshoe_,
Thank you.
Christians disagree about Hell:
Four Views on Hell
All You Want to Know About Hell
Christians disagree on just about everything, including the divinity of Jesus.
Ooh, I love it.
You won’t love this one:
Conversation With the Devil but I quote the lyrics myself almost everyday. 🙂 Check it out.
Ah, then you must be a better person then Charles Darwin who did indeed beat a puppy! How wonderful you are Sal, and how evil that Mr Darwin was for doing such a thing! You are indeed wonderful!
“the LORD’s love is with those who fear him” Psalm 103:17 🙂
There is something attractive about someone who isn’t too nice. But more seriously, the simple answer is yes, and it is not something I have to summon but rather something that comes naturally. Loving my neighbor and enemies — that’s another story.
Like beautiful music or a beautiful sunset, or anything in our frail corrupted minds we view as “good” — it must have an ultimate analog from which it all proceeds. Even when I fell in love with a married woman, at some level, though my desire was wrong, I knew what was special and beautiful about her came from a higher power. What is good and bad according to our personal tastes might be misguided and corrupted, but it still gives us a picture that there might be an ultimate good somewhere, and that ultimate good is God.
I saw a very scenic view today as the sunlight came through the small forest in my backyard. I reminded me of higher beauty and benevolence. It is hard not to love the source of all goodness.
The difficulty is not supposing God is good, but rather supposing we are deserving of hell. I personally wouldn’t want someone to go to hell because the tiny infractions they commit that even I can overlook. Hell seems overkill for a lot of offenses. Even death for small offenses seems hard to appreciate. For example:
So even someone (Uzzah) trying to do good by preventing the ark from falling, got toasted!
So to answer your question, yes, there is something the ultimate source of all good that I want, something beyond the cruelty and harshness in this world, and where that will be found is outside of this life and world, and that is the hope that inspires love of God.
This is a sentimental rendering, not literally what I believe, but sort of the right emotional sentiments:
If the intelligent designer created pain, he also created joy. Those who are in hell will perceive Him as the source of their cruel pain, those in heaven will perceive Him as the source of joy and love. I don’t see why that is contradictory. We humans are a pain to the things we destroy while simultaneously a source of joy and love to the things we bless.
One can love God if they believe they are ultimately blessed in the end despite having to bear their crosses in this life.
What a childish idea. What sort of being would punish those it created for behaving badly for 100 years with an infinity of punishment.
Your god is a psychopath.
Who said you stop behaving badly when you die?
I’m actually agnostic on the length of punishment. If it is forever I would guess that is because hell is a more just and loving alternative than annihilation