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 think that’s right. Knowing that something will happen doesn’t make it happen. E.g., my knowing that my wife will disagree with me when I suggest not taking a vacation next year, doesn’t mean that she’s not free.
Presumably God would have similar (but much better) knowledge with respect to all actions–including freely undertaken ones. In other words fatalism is fallacious.
There’s a great article on this by Ryle called “It was to be” in his little book Dilemmas.
Absolutely right. The important point is that one’s knowing something–past, present, or future, doesn’t make it true. It needs to be true for anyone to know it.
Knowing that something will happen means, is some frame of reference, it already has happened.
Knowing what your wife is likely to say is not knowing what your wife will say. Knowing the sun will come up tomorrow is not knowing the sun will certainly come up tomorrow. Bayes is not god.
I saw a performance of Screwtape Letters in Boston a couple of years ago. Really annoying. as I find most of Lewis.
You are saying here that knowledge is something other than justified true belief. IMO, I know that my wife will say p tomorrow, if I believe my wife will say p, I’m justified in believing she’ll say p, and she does say p. You may say that my justification is insufficient to provide knowledge, but I would maintain that that’s just because you don’t actually know my wife.
Of course if she dies between now and then or undergoes a personality change or something, then it will not be true that I knew it today. But your position entails that nobody can know anything about the future–or, I’d guess, the present or past either. That makes the bar to knowledge too high in my opinion. I think lots of people know lots of things–even things like which horse will win a fixed race tomorrow. It’s not Bayes I rely on, but a common sense understanding of what “know” means.
Furthermore, as Ryle points out, fatalism is just based on confusion. Knowing doesn’t make things so. Quite the contrary.
Your opinion, which I don’t share. I think it’s our lot in life.
It doesn’t imply that we need to worry continuously that all our molecules might simultaneously jump to some uncongenial spot in the universe. We can have effective certainty without absolute certainty.
I can look out at the sky and be certain it will not rain in the next five minutes. I cannot be as certain about this evening. I can have little certainty at all about next week.
This why science has replaced theology among grown-ups. And has become the modal form of thought in philosophy (even if it hasn’t stormed the walls of academic philosophy).
Brains are fuzzy logicians. They deal rather well with Bayesian propositions. They act on probability rather than certainty.
Fifth and his intellectual cohorts were dominant until about a hundred years ago. now they are museum pieces and loons.
I haven’t said anything about absolute certainty, only knowledge. You and Fifth are making precisely the same move here. Somebody says they know something and the response is, “Yeah, but you can’t be absolutely sure, can you?” Obviously, one can mean whatever one wants by the term “knowledge,” but I maintain that your view and Fifth’s is heterodoxical. We know lots of stuff, even stuff like the date of future elections.
ETA: I should add the difference between your view and Fifth’s for completeness. You say we don’t know anything, he says that we do, because God. My position is that we do, but without God. That’s because my conception of knowledge is weaker than either of yours.
I’m the realist here–you two want an ideal to be met. He says it is, you say it’s not.
walto:
petrushka:
Yes (roughly speaking), but that doesn’t refute walto’s claim. Even then the knowing isn’t responsible for the happening.
From the OP:
Keiths is wise to point out God could do things differently, but errs in what is better or worse, at least as far as the God of the Bible versus the distorted sugar-coated version of modern day pulpits. I view God as omniscient and omnipotent, but NOT omnibenevolent, only selectively so.
That is consistent with the notion of ID, whereby only certain outcomes are desirable out of a free space of many possible and actual outcomes. What do I mean? See this essay:
http://www.creationevolutionuniversity.com/insight/?p=86
What did the Apostle Paul actually teach vs. what is heard in the typical modern day pulpit hungry to fill the pews and make more dinero?
God had foreseen who He is going to roast ahead of time and even has a role in making them even more worthy of punishment. Yikes!
The Intelligent Designer has known things in advance outside of time.
That seem like a separate question from the belief in a eternal immaterial soul, but if Hell was temporary it would lose much of its power to command obedience. A temporary Hell would also devalue Heaven as a reward if everyone ended up there.
newton,
You don’t think a million years or so of excruciating suffering would be an adequate deterrent?
Sure, but that’s the price you pay for claiming an omnibenevolent God. And ironically, Jesus makes that very point in his parable of the prodigal son:
Perhaps He does, but you have to die to find out.
Great insight on a tragic fact of reality that extends even to human endeavors. The superbowl is meaningful because there are losing football teams.
Compared to eternity? Nope
True, so does that change human nature?
The bigger the risk,the more rewarding the win.
Predicting what someone will do has a level of uncertainty, knowing does not. If God knows, before the choice ,the result due to His omniscience then free will is a illusion. Isn’t that the standard theistic complaint that materialism reduces the mind to physics, we are meat robots.
So I am not saying God knowing makes it happens, but if God can know then everything is deterministic. Maybe
Hi KeithS,
I actually discussed some of the issues you raise in another post of mine: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/do-christians-worship-many-gods/#E
The short answer to your question is as follows. Your objection assumes that God’s knowledge of our choices is logically prior to those choices, enabling God to “look ahead,” so to speak, and see what each of us would do. Your objection also assumes that there IS come objective fact of the matter as to what each person would choose, when placed in a given situation, before that person even exists. In other words, you’re assuming a Molinist account of Divine foreknowledge. I, on the other hand, accept a Boethian account, according to which God’s knowledge is logically (but not temporally) posterior to our choices: God knows what we choose to do because that is what we choose, and not the other way round. There is no fact of the matter as to what I would choose in situation X, which God could know prior to His act of creating me.
You write that God could easily save everyone, sending no one to hell, without violating anyone’s free will. This would only work if there were people who are infallibly predestined by God to go to Heaven. Now, I don’t believe God predestines anyone to Hell, but I do believe there are a few saints (e.g. the Virgin Mary) who were predestined for Heaven in this way. This predestination need not violate their free will, as such people would still have a choice as to WHICH good deeds they would perform, on the way to Heaven. So you might ask: why didn’t God predestine us all to Heaven, as He did with the Virgin Mary? Couldn’t He have done that, and thereby prevented anyone from going to Hell?
The answer is that He could have created a world full of people like that, but those people wouldn’t be US. The Virgin Mary’s role in God’s plan for the redemption of the human race is part and parcel of her very identity: she wouldn’t be the person she is, if she were not the mother of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer. With ordinary mothers, it is otherwise: they would still be the persons they are, even if their children were never born. My having radically free will carries with it the awful possibility of my being eternally damned. But I cannot wish that I had been created without this kind of radically free will (which the Virgin Mary lacks, although she still has a libertarian free will of sorts, which can choose between two alternative goods). Were I like that, I wouldn’t be “me.”: that is, I wouldn’t be who I am, as a person. And since I cannot logically wish to be someone other than myself, I cannot logically wish that God had created me without radical free will.
I hope that helps.
Winning is defined as success. It is not the opposite of losing.
You have two kids. One cannot be a success unless the other is a failure?
Give me a break.
walto,
Or we’re god’s thoughts as he considers whether or not to instantiate this particular universe. I don’t like our odds.
Think I can get the people in the pews to send me money to support this heresy?
I find that a stimulating thought. Is that god mentally masturbating? Is god thinking about thinking god’s thoughts recursive?
Sorry, that is why conservatives hate participation medals.
Yep.
The scum-sucking christians must want hell to exist because they want this life to be a zero sum game – they get to be the good ones who win and go to heaven, but someone else must lose. There MUST be a hell before they can feel their win is really of value. Not only that, it can’t be a temporary hell – if everyone eventually reaches heaven, even after a million years of torture, it “devalues Heaven as a reward”.
Honestly those people make me want to vomit.
I don’t like zero sum games. The emphasis on winning an losing creates the false impression that no one wins unless someone loses.
Life is tough, but not that tough.
Hotshoe, we have at least on foot on the same page, but I have to ruin it by saying I do not think the answer to failure is to bring down the winners. I don’t have an easy answer, but it has to involve treating people as individuals and getting them to judge their advancement against themselves.
Everyone but the conservative knows that conservatives suck. So fuck them for hating “participation medals” and fuck them for teaching their children (by word and example) that the only thing that really matters is winning first place (because anything else than first is just a slippery slope to second to third to fifth to “participation”). Fuck them for sucking the joy out of being able to be part of a team even if your team doesn’t win, the joy out of being able to having the courage to get up on stage or dance or put your art into the county fair, even if you know you really will be the worst artist in the show. Fuck them for being such shitty inadequate human beings that they won’t ever be really happy unless they can see someone else being ground into the dirt, because they think there can’t be real winners unless there are also abject losers.
Petrushka is right.
But not far right. Just skeptical of politics.
Hi Vincent,
I remember having a similar discussion with you over logical and temporal priority. Let me see if I can track it down before responding — it could save us some time. 🙂
keiths:
newton:
What temptation in this life would be worth a million years of continuous, relentless agony?
Besides, even an eternal hell is only a weak deterrent against sin. Sin all you want — just make sure you repent and believe before you die. (The risk is that you’ll die suddenly without a chance to get your soteriological affairs in order. It’s interesting that luck is a huge factor in salvation — I think that will be the topic of my next “Questions for Christians” post.)
You could always wear a scapular, no? And make sure you’ve got one on your bedpost?
🙂
The prevalence of sin is prima facie evidence that most believers don’t.
I don’t agree that knowing is required to have no level of uncertainty, partly because, if it is, nobody knows anything. I don’t think that’s how most people use the word “know.”
Determinism is the view that every event is causally determined by prior events and laws. That could be true without anybody knowing anything, and, if determinism is true and consciousness is a late development, determinism was true long before anybody knew anything.
Fallibalism is the view that all is fated, because everything that happens was already GOING to happen. But consider, if I went downtown today, it was true yesterday that I would go downtown today. In fact, it was true for the last million years that I would go downtown today. But it doesn’t follow from THAT that it had to happen that I would go downtown. Similarly for knowledge–it’s just an epistemic relationship to some truth or other; it can’t make anything happen either.
Only force (prior causes) can actually make stuff happen. Knowledge involves truth, but it doesn’t involve force. Like it being true yesterday that I would go downtown today, if somebody believed with justification that I would go downtown today, we could say that this person was right, even that s/he knew it, if we consider the justification for the belief sufficient (I told her, I never lie, I’m healthy, I have a means of transportation, I go downtown every Wed., etc.) But her knowledge didn’t make anything happen: it was rather that my going downtown–whether freely or not–made the belief she had yesterday true!
I was just thinking that the view that truths can make things happen might be related to the Gambler’s Fallacy. There, the view is something like “The numbers have all come up four times already except 6 which hasn’t come up at all. If mean reversion is true and the lottery is fair, 6 has just GOT to come up before a lot of those other numbers come up a fifth time!”
But truths don’t make things happen, so…don’t bet on it!
🙂 – I liked it.
Damnation
keiths,
If sin ruled you out without a path back, religion would have no power over people.
The death penalty has been demonstrated to not be a deterrent. Why is hell any different?
It is not that no one wins unless someone loses rather winning is meaningless as a test.
On the bright side when they lose ,it means a lot more.
Sex,drugs and rock and roll
It is a better deterrent than no hell at all, but you are correct it works better on some than others
I agree, but most people are not omniscient . An omniscient God knows everything that can be known with perfect certainty. By definition
Again I agree, but determinism undercuts the concept of moral responsibility. If your actions are determined by your education, the structure of your brain, evolution then can one said be morally responsible?
This is a problem for the concept of primacy of unfettered free will as a moral agent. If an omniscient being can know with certainty what “free will” will choose then that choice is the result of knowable factors, not libertarian free will. You would be no more morally responsible than a materialist. And how can you judge others as being objectively wrong then?
Therefore the result of the exercise of libertarian free will can’t be known even to an omniscient being , the particulars of God’s Nature justifying beliefs.Of course the are those who believe in predestination which is closer to fallibalism.
I don’t think so. You are again claiming that knowledge makes things happen. A choice may or may not be the “result of knowable factors”–but either way, nothing results from either the knowledge or the knowability of anything. The act either results from the “factors” or it doesn’t. The act is causally determined or it’s not.
ETA: Now, you say that free will precludes the possibility of anything knowing what agents will do. If so, and some agents are indeed free, that might be a reason for restricting “omniscience” in the manner the keiths has suggested.
In my own private mystical imagination, god knowing is the same thing as god creating. Was there a post about we being god’s thoughts?
I suppose the upside of this view is that god would experience any pain that we feel, because we are god’s feelings. That takes care of any anger directed at god for creating pain. Hell would just be god forgetting or casting aside unpleasant thoughts and memories.
Theology for dummies.
petrushka,
That’s a pantheist picture, I think. We’re in God like cells are in us.
I’ve been a monist/pantheist since I heard the words. Somewhere around age 12. The idea of a guy in the sky never made sense to me. Things like singlarities and entanglement never surprised me. Nor does consciousness.
I was predisposed to this view by a drug trip. Twilight sleep during surgery at age 10. Ether was a rec drug. It went out of favor because people forget to breathe. You need an anesthesiologist.
Hell Yes / Hell No
Have you read it? Do you like anything specific that the author has to say?
I don’t know how the decent christians who object to the concept of an eternal hell are going to drag their I’ll-be-gloating-over-you-from-my-seat-in-Heaven brethren away from their unholy revenge theology.
But it can’t happen too soon as far as I’m concerned. I might even stop hating christianity if the majority of christians stop being the kind of perverts who delight in the picture of someone else being sent to burn forever.
hotshoe_,
To me, the basic problem is biblical literalism. I figure when not too many more years from now and Jesus still has not shown up in the sky and Christians have not mysteriously disappeared from the face of the earth there might be a return to a more nuanced biblical hermeneutic.
I give it ’till about 2068. That’s when all the “this generation” nonsense [the generation that was alive when Israel became a state in 1948 will be the generation that gets raptured] will no longer be tenable.
I have the Noe book. I’ve read other of his material and liked it, which is why I bought this book, but I’ve read only a small portion of it.
Here’s one passage I liked: