An Analogy for God's Providence

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Sure, keeping in mind that God “lets in” everyone willing to submit to him in obedience, which, by one of my assumptions, is a necessary condition for heaven to work. (I take WLC’s view that God makes salvation available to everyone whether they’ve heard of Jesus or not, though Christ’s death and resurrection is still the basis of that salvation.)

Nope.

If God chose to only create the people who he knew would be saved in this world, that would place those people in different circumstances, in which they could very easily make different choices and end up not being saved after all. Also, it probably is not possible to create only those people who would be saved, particularly given my assumption about essentiality of origins.

Skipping to that point:

That assumes that our souls are completely independent of our bodies, as if God can attach any soul to any body whatsoever. Such a view effectively takes human beings to be entirely spiritual, rather than both physical and spiritual. The majority Christian views (as far as I know) is that our souls and bodies are much more tightly interdependent than that - the identity of the soul does not float free of the body it is created for.

(Also, essentiality of origins seems an entirely reasonable metaphysical view about the individuation of substances, but I don’t have any desire to wade deeper into those weeds at this time.)

It doesn’t have to be. This brief life on earth is enough to mold us for, say, the first few years in heaven. Then our brief life on earth plus those first few years in heaven are enough to mold us for the next few years in heaven. And so on. So some of it does happen in heaven.

Lapses would make it short of the perfect environment required for heaven by my first assumption.

He condemns some people to hell - yes, even though he loves them - because they reject the necessary condition for entering heaven (obedience to God, which is necessary for the perfect relationships that make heaven what it is). He allows some to die as babies or be tortured because he ultimately brings good out of those evil circumstances - e.g. their eternal life that far outweighs any suffering on earth, say.

Are we going for volume? More people saved is better in some sense, but it is more complicated than that - see my response to @SlightlyOddGuy.

As for the non-elect, certainly they are considered too. God loves them and they have unique worth to him as well. Because he loves them, he gives them the opportunity to be saved just as the elect. He wants them to take that opportunity, and it is within their power to do so. But they don’t.

So in one sense God creates the non-elect for the same reason he creates the elect - he loves them, he wants to have a relationship with them, and they have unique value as persons themselves (their mere existence is itself something good). Because of that they are not “sacrificed” for the sake of the elect. They are ends in themselves and not mere means. But he also knows that they won’t ultimately be saved, so in a secondary sense he creates them so that he can bring other goods out of their circumstances as well (e.g. the salvation of the elect).

Seems time enough for me. What makes you think more time wouldn’t just result in people becoming more set in their ways, rather than changing their minds?

Of course, in some sense it certainly isn’t fair that some people get more time than others. But I doubt perfect goodness requires fairness in that sense (of exactly equal circumstances). It just requires that God judge everyone with the circumstances that he did place them in taken into consideration.

First, what keeps the Christian from sin in heaven (perfectly) is the same thing that keeps us from sin on earth (imperfectly) - namely, reliance on God’s power to do what is right. As for how we go from imperfectly relying on his power to perfectly doing so, there are a couple of options. Maybe it is a sudden transformation, but it is one that we undertake by choice. Or maybe we undergo a gradual transformation in our disembodied state between death and resurrection. Or maybe we undergo a gradual transformation after the resurrection, during the millennium of Revelation 20 and the subsequent judgement. Or maybe there isn’t any intrinsic difference, and God has just chosen a world where everyone who has been saved freely refrains from sin for eternity.

Reflection on my own life is sufficient to make it quite plausible to me that moral growth can come from times of difficultly or experiencing moral failure (and the consequences thereof). I suppose your mileage may vary. Note that I did not say that it is necessary:

I’m not claiming that he can’t, just that we aren’t those kinds of beings. Nevertheless, it remains good for God to create beings like us (see again my comments about there being many ways things can be good).

This is perhaps veering into a tangent, but let’s say God could have created beings that don’t learn from experience and instead just know things immediately and innately. In fact, that’s what some philosophers (Aquinas, perhaps most famously) say angels are. The downside being that, because they don’t learn from experience, don’t perceive the world they way we do, they can’t change their minds once they make a decision, and so aren’t capable of redemption (explaining why Scripture seems to indicate the humans, but not fallen angels, are able to be saved). Now, the reasoning behind that gets into metaphysical issues that I’m still working through, so for now just take that as one perspective. But if you’re curious, Ed Feser writes something about it here.

Again, I never claimed it was neccessary in all cases. So, for example, I think that God (again, using middle knowledge / foreknowledge) could arrange things so that those babies or children who die before being old enough to be held morally accountable would freely choose to obey God and so are saved.

God can create a world that began to exist 5 minutes ago with the appearance of billions of years of age, but not a world that began to exist 5 minutes ago with actual billions of years of age. If something has an essential dependence on a history (such as beings who learn from experience), God can’t create them without creating that history - the alternative is just a facsimile.

This isn’t to deny that God could have created a world entirely populated by people who get that experience in heaven, like babies who die very early on in life as I suggested above. It’s simply to say that he has chosen not to do so - or at least, he has chosen to create people who do reside in this mortal coil for a time as well. And I see nothing wrong with that. I am glad, after all, to be alive, despite life not being perfect - and throughout the history of the church many saints who have experienced tremendous suffering have still said, at the end of their lives, that God is good.

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I appreciate that. :slight_smile: Like I said, more could be said in defense of these assumptions… it would take more time than I have to do so, though.

“Best possible world” needs nuance. The idea that all worlds can be ordered on a single axis from better to worse is one I find highly dubious - rather, there are a (possible infinite) variety of ways a world can be good. I would claim that our world is the “best possible” in some sense, but that doesn’t exclude there being worlds God could have created which are better than ours in other ways. See more about that in the paper from Alexander Pruss that I linked.

To this I would say that the locus of value is not in pleasure or absence of pain, but in people themselves. God loves us - he isn’t just doing some utilitarian calculus to maximize pleasure. Of course, because he loves us, he desires our good, and pleasure is a good. But it’s also important to note that pleasure isn’t the only good. Moral character is good. Knowing God is good. Some goods arguably can only be exemplified in response to evil, like courage or self-sacrifice. So it is much more complicated than just weighing pleasure vs. pain. (Again, I think the paper from Pruss helps flesh out what I mean here.)

I believe you are thinking along the right lines (and I appreciate the steel-man!). I would agree that “well-being” is a better (and broader) concept than pleasure, but again, I think there’s more than one axis - and as a result, an incredibly great variety of worlds that are “best possible” in some sense. E.g. maybe there is no other feasible (given human free choices) world for God to create where everyone who is saved in this world is saved, without the world being worse in some other respect. There may be worlds where more people are saved, but in those worlds at least some of the people who are saved in this world are either lost or never exist in the first place.

At the level of generality I was shooting for, I don’t think our fallen nature impacts the discussion too much - in particular, even without a fallen nature, free will still implies the possibility of disobedience to God (see Adam and Eve, and Satan). If we were to bring in any specifics of salvation history, I would want to point to Christ’s sacrificial death and the resulting availability of redemption for us as one of those “goods that can only be exemplified in response to evil” that I mentioned. :slight_smile:

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Well, that sure showed me.

So God sacrifices the many for the benefit of the few?

Interesting view. I hadn’t heard that before. But how can the soul then be separated from the body when you die? And how can it be given a new and quite different spiritual body in heaven?

And even if a physical body is necessary, why isn’t God in control of that too?

Well, if it happens in heaven, why is the brief life necessary, since it’s an infinitesimal (literally) fraction of the whole? How does that ensure that one remains steadfast afterwards?

How can a person in this world be perfect before reaching heaven? Are you perfect? Will you be later? And if so, how?

You didn’t answer the question. You have claimed that the souls that enter hell were necessary in order to educate the elect. God, in other words, created them as cannon fodder. How is that loving?

And how can babies enter heaven, when a lengthy period on earth is necessary (as you have stated) to educate one for salvation?

Yes, and he knows in advance that they won’t. You are still dodging the consequences of your scenario. God is making people for the purpose of providing an environment for the elect, knowing that those people will all go to hell. That’s not love. That’s evil.

Well, that’s a load off my mind, then.

None of those options makes any sense, but the last one is the most absurd. I submit that based on our experience in this world, nobody could possibly fit that criterion.

Ah, then a life on earth is in fact unnecessary for at least some people. You have once more contradicted yourself. I see that you have also implied that most dying babies are going to hell.

But in a world created 5 minutes ago with the appearance of history, nothing has an essential dependence on a history. The fake is indistinguishable from the real in its effects.

Then you see nothing wrong with him creating people who end up in hell, with full knowledge that they will, even though they are superfluous to any benefit to the elect. (Even if they weren’t superfluous it would be reprehensible, but their irrelevance is the cherry on top.)

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Sigh. @John_Harshman, what is your intent in responding to me? I ask this because it will help me know whether you are merely misunderstanding me (in which case, I’d appreciate it if you go back and read what I’ve written more carefully) or deliberately and falsely accusing me of making claims that I did not make.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Comments on An Analogy for God’s Providence

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The analogies are of course not perfect, but you are missing the point if all you point out is where they fail.

God doesn’t “require” it in the sense of forcing us to do these things arbitrarily just because he’s more powerful. To be “good” is to be no other than to fulfill the natural function which we were created to do, which is to imitate God in our capacity as a human. This function isn’t arbitrarily imposed - it’s a reflected in our ontology in being an animal with a rational soul. To be good is simply to exist in the most optimal way. Sometimes we call this “flourishing”. To be evil is to deviate from this natural function and live your life in a sub-optimal way, because you’re not doing what you’re designed to do.

The above holds true for creatures with free will as well those who don’t. However, it is more noble for a free-willed creature to freely choose the Good compared to one who doesn’t have free will.

I don’t see how this example is relevant. You may not disobey your boss in that matter, but I can see you (or anyone else) freely disobeying your boss in other matters. In addition, your obedience to your boss is the result of many years of good education and upbringing by your parents and teachers to obey authorities and superiors in order to achieve certain worthy goals. It is not instant, and there are people who would disobey their boss even in simple, obvious things.

Perhaps God figured out that the way is precisely “I’m going to put them on Earth with the possibility of sin and suffering, then personally come into the world, save them, and gradually form them into morally perfect human beings.”

It’s different, because in my model the infinite God needs to intervene in a special, direct manner to give a taste of the infinite to a finite material creature. In your proposed model, the finite creature attains infinity on its own through its natural capacities.

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There were a number of points in your last response where you attributed claims / implications to my view which I already explicitly denied. Such as:

To elaborate on that: God creates the non-elect for their own sake. The life he gives them is still good, even though it fails to attain to the ultimate good that God desires for them and offers to them (and even though that failure is an evil). It is only in a secondary sense that he creates them for the overall purpose of achieving the salvation of the elect.

This is perhaps easiest to see if one takes an annihilationist view (which is a biblically viable option, in my opinion), but it is still the case on the traditional view (eternal conscious torment) as well. On the traditional view, the torment of the damned in hell is the just punishment for rejecting God, the ultimate good, and continuing to do so for eternity (just as those who are saved continue to accept God and choose a right relationship with him forever, so those who are condemned continue to reject God and choose to sin forever). And just punishment of evil is itself a kind of good. (It is refraining from just punishment that would be injust and thus evil.)

If hell (or even annihilation) sounds like a disproportionate punishment to you (“reprehensible”, even), I suggest that stems from a differing view on the magnitude of the sin of rejecting the ultimate good. (And please recall that I believe everyone has the opportunity to go to heaven: no one in hell is there by hapless mistake.)

I never claimed that souls that enter hell were necessary in order to educate the elect. Here’s what I did say:

Which also belies your claim:

Because I never denied that it was unnecessary for some people. You are reading contradictions into what I have said, not out of it.

And where, exactly, did I imply this?!?

Correct that I see nothing wrong with God creating people he knows will end up in hell (with what I’ve said above in mind).

Wrong that their existence is irrelevant to the benefit of the elect - that fact that the existence of the damned is not necessary in the abstract for some people to be saved does not mean that there are not specific people (a vast number of them) who will be saved who could never have been saved, or who could never have even existed, without conditions contingent on the existence of those who will end up in hell.

Correct again that this mere benefit to the saved does not (at least by itself) justify God’s creating those who would end up in hell.

But wrong again for believing that creating them is reprehensible merely because they end up in hell. As I said above, their creation is, in fact, good. God allows them to bring their lives to evil, but his foreknowledge of that does not make him morally responsible for it. (I suppose I should have explicitly listed “Molinism satisfactorily resolves the tension between divine foreknowledge / predestination and human freedom” as one of my assumptions, since that plays in here.)

My apologies if any of these misunderstandings are my own fault, and sorry as well for becoming exasperated. Perhaps there is, as @AlanFox suggested, a lack of a shared language here.

In response to some of your other comments:

The alleged contradiction was between:

God uses his foreknowledge (specifically, middle knowledge) to ensure that, in the world he creates, everyone who is saved and enters heaven freely obeys him for eternity (though it is possible for us to choose to sin in heaven, in fact, we won’t. See Molinism for how that could work).

and:

To have free will while nonetheless being guaranteed to choose rightly, with no possibility of going wrong, requires having an infinite nature, i.e. being God.

There is no contradiction: in the first case I state that it is possible for the saved to sin in heaven, but God uses his middle knowledge to make sure it doesn’t happen. The second case is discussing a being for which there is no such possibility. A grasp of how Molinism resolves the tension between divine providence and free will helps to see the distinction I am making here (and also how God could accomplish what I suggest in my point 5), but I don’t have time for a crash course.

In the broader view that I’m assuming with my point 8 earlier, everything is dependent for its identity on the way it comes into existence. An acorn that grows naturally can’t be the exact same acorn that God creates supernaturally in some other possible world, for example - they have different origins. This dependence is metaphysically necessary, something even God does not have control over, because nothing has an identity until it exists, so the identities of things only come into existence alongside the things themselves (and can’t be interchanged with the identities of other things). That’s the basic idea, at least.

Given this, the soul’s identity is tied to the identity of the body, since it comes into existence bound to that body. And the identity of the body is just as tied to its physical origins. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the soul can’t be separated from the body at death - its identity is dependent on the body, but not its continued existence.

God could, perhaps, create souls separately and attach them to bodies, but he has not done this, and that would be to create different kinds of beings than he has in our case - essentially spiritual beings only contingently attached to bodies.

To reiterate:

And appearance is not identity.

This is part of the “lack of shared language” problem. In these eschatological discussions (about heaven and hell in the future, after everyone’s mortal life has concluded), the Christian conception of “heaven” is more properly “the new heavens and the new earth” - a recreated material universe (albeit changed more fully permeated by spiritual reality). What exactly that will look like is not something any of us know, of course, but it seems safe to assume that it will be temporal. Building a clock will probably not be first on anyone’s priorities, but it should be possible to do so. :wink:

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I don’t see how those analogies pertain in any way to my point.

And that is not the sense in which I used the word “require.”

There are some things that this omnipotent, omniscient being wants or needs or requires to happen.

Why accomplish these things thru the actions of much less powerful beings who might not do what is required?

The point is that there are things my boss can be quite certain I will not do. But he is not omnipotent. He did not create me or my nature. If he had, he could have done it so that any of the things he requires me to do I will do of my own free will, just as I will of my own free will avoid smashing my head against a wall.

If we as finite material creatures are doing things that aid in the realization of God’s infinite plan, then God is achieving the supernatural by means of the natural, something you consider logically incoherent.

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  1. You’re imputing a requirement of efficiency to God, namely, it seems inefficient and foolish to use something imperfect to accomplish something when you can use other, better means. But efficiency only makes sense for humans who have limited resources. God has unlimited time and capabilities and is thus not bound by these things.

  2. As I have argued, it’s not clear to me that “perfect efficiency” is possible.

The point under contention here is whether it is even possible for an “omnipotent” being to do things in the way that you describe. As I said, God’s omnipotence is not without bounds.

That doesn’t follow. The natural is indeed a component, or part of the means by which the supernatural is attained, but without direct supernatural intervention, it will never reach it.

To take some (imperfect) analogies: I can buy a pile of bricks, but without a plan and construction workers to execute the plan they will not magically become a house.

I can chop a lot of firewood and put them into a pile, but without a match they will not become a burning campfire.

Q: An omnipotent being doesn’t need construction workers to create the house. He can do it instantly!

Yes, but the point still holds: without the omnipotent being intervening (whether by conjuring up construction workers or instantly turning the bricks into a house), the pile of bricks remains a pile of bricks. Once you’ve decided to create a pile of bricks which are not capable of assembling themselves, you have to do something to get them to become a house.

Q: So why create a pile of bricks in the first place, instead of conjuring up a house instantly?

Indeed, it doesn’t seem efficient. But what I wasn’t looking for efficiency? What if I just liked the idea of building houses from bricks instead of instantly conjuring them, and I had unlimited time and resources? Or maybe I’ve already built a thousand houses using my instant conjuring abilities and want to try something else? The possibilities are endless here. More importantly, note that if I want to obtain a brick house, I need bricks.

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But if they all go to hell, then what does the quality of their brief lives matter? Still doesn’t seem much like love to me. And your “secondary sense” is mere weaseling.

That traditional view is just plain evil. The annihilationist view is clearly less evil. Anyway, what about those in the middle, who would be more like normal people, neither consistently evil nor consistently good?

Why? What theory of punishment requires that evil be punished? And what sort of evil could possibly be commensurate with punishment for eternity? Christian theology can be scarily evil.

Yes, we have quite different views. Are you serious? I reject God because I don’t think he exists, based on all the evidence I can see. Am I worthy of eternal torment therefore?

And you do’t see that as morally problematic? You’re saying that in order for some people to receive a benefit other people must suffer infinitely. Have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?

I see your justification for this as troubling.

Why? Because you say so? What is the justification for creating people who will end up in hell, when he could have created only people who wouldn’t?

But is that assumption justified? It doesn’t seem to be.

So? What difference can different histories make if they result in identical current states? This seems an odd, mystical view of time.

But “this” can’t be given, as it makes no sense. You tie yourself in knots.

Isn’t the real world just like that, since God created it and everything in it so as to produce a particular result? This just illustrates the impossibility of free will given an omnipotent, omniscient creator.

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The new heavens and the new earth are a material universe (or at least, that is what seems to be taught in the bible). And being material implies being temporal. (At least, I have no concept of what something material but atemporal would be like.) Furthermore, the language in the bible seems to directly teach that the new heavens and new earth will be temporal (at least, when it says things like “forever and ever” it appears to be indicating an endless duration, not some timeless state).

Assuming annihilationism is false - in hell their existence is still something that is good, even something that they desire. (The Scholastic theory of good and evil holds that the existence of any substance is good in and of itself, and especially so for human beings as persons.) On the traditional view (or at least, certain forms of it) their wills are hardened so that, even experiencing torment, they don’t want to stop existing - what they really want is to keep on sinning. So they do, and so they continue being punished for it.

(If that traditional view of the continued value of the existence of the damned is false, that seems a strong reason to believe in annihilationism.)

That is your opinion. How do you know God does not still create the non-elect primarily for their own sake, and only secondarily for the sake of the elect? Are you saying we can’t make that distinction? Or that it is definitely the other way around? How do you justify that claim?

I recognize that that is your judgement. Obviously, I don’t share it, and I’ve explained why.

Nobody is “in the middle” in the afterlife. How does that work? I’ve given some possibilities already:

Your response to them was:

To which I must reply, I’m sorry you feel that way, perhaps you could flesh out what doesn’t make sense (or, since you are looking for an explanation that’s “at least self-consistent”, point out where the internal inconsistency lies). The last once, as I’ve mentioned, requires a grasp of Molinism to make sense of it.

It’s called “retributive justice”. C. S. Lewis is as good a place to start on it as any.

Eternally rejecting God, the ultimate good.

Or your judgement of good and evil is flawed.

Yes, I am serious.

As for you, if you don’t believe that God exists because of the evidence you see, that isn’t rejecting God. (Unless - and to be clear, I am in no way suggesting this is true - you were willfully dismissing the evidence or deceiving yourself in some way so that you could ignore God’s existence and the moral requirements that would imply for your life.) So no, I don’t think you deserve eternal torment or annihilation because of your intellectual judgement about God’s existence.

If I am right, however, then at some point - be it in this life or after - you will have the opportunity to accept God’s authority and his moral requirements, or reject them. And at some point it will become too late to change your mind about it. And as I see it, rejecting God, who is the ultimate good and of infinite worth (and, if annihilationism is false, continuing to do so forever), is a very grave wrong indeed.

The reason those in hell are being made to suffer eternally (or are annihilated) is not for the benefit of the elect. Instead, it is the just punishment for rejecting God. The benefit of the elect is the (again, only secondary) reason those people were created, not the reason for their punishment. So the story (which I have not read, only heard of the premise) does not appear analogous to me.

Because we’re responsible for our own free choices. God’s foreknowledge of our choices does not cause us to make them.

The justification is the good that he brings from those circumstances, which is unique and different from (i.e. with value incommensurable to) the good that he could have brought about without those circumstances.

How do you know? Do you have a reasonable level of understanding of Molinism? Have you read the reasons for believing the Molinist position, objections to it, defeaters for the reasons for it, responses to the objections? I have (to the best of my ability and resources) and judge it to be a very reasonable position. But as I said, I don’t have time for a crash course explaining why.

Identity of indiscernibles is actually a widely rejected view in philosophy, so this is far from as odd and mystical as you assume. But I don’t have time to get into that, either.

How so?

No, the real world is not like that, since human free will and divine providence are perfectly consistent with each other. (See again: Molinism.)

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I’m sorry, but that’s just evil. The Scholastic theory is nonsense. It also assumes that after death nobody is capable of learning from experience.

You have to assume that eternity in hell is something people want and enjoy in order to make sense of this. It seems to me that nobody would actually want to keep on sinning if they were suffering excruciating torment for it. Assuming that refraining would end the torment, that is. I also don’t see how anyone in hell would have the opportunity to commit sins.

Sure. We can presumably agree that all people on earth commit sins every so often. Nobody sins all the time and nobody is good all the time. So this ability of God to assure that everyone, without exception, maintains either constant goodness or constant sin eternally after death requires an immediate transformation in the characters of all souls in the afterlife. But if God is transforming your character after death, where’s the free will? And why couldn’t he do that at birth rather than after death?

What justice requires infinite punishment for finite offenses?

But the punishment is actually for rejecting God during your brief life. Nobody gets to accept God after death, right?

True. But in my opinion, it’s your judgment that’s flawed.

So atheists go to heaven, then? Only those who believe in God are capable of rejecting him? That sounds as if only Christians can go to hell.

This is the first time you’ve suggested a choice after death. Are you willing to stand by that? And is that only one opportunity? Why only one? Now, if it’s in this life, what makes you think that would happen? Will it happen to all non-Christians?

More weaselry, I’m afraid. They wouldn’t be punished if they hadn’t been created. God can’t escape responsibility. This is again the paradox of omnipotent, omniscient creator vs. free will and human responsibility. They’re incompatible.

Of course it does, when he made us the way we are. He makes some people who choose the right way and others who choose the wrong way, and he knows what he’s doing when he does it. There is no escape from responsibility.

So you imagine. How do you feel at the prospect that you may be bound for heaven only at the cost of condemning several others to eternal torment? Are you OK with that?

No. Happy to look at it if you want to explain why I should believe it.

So much the worse for philosophy, if so.

So you claim. I see a contradiction, as I have tried to show on several occasions. Certainly just repeating “Molinism” is not a useful argument.

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@John_Harshman, when you say you are looking for an explanation that is “at-least self-consistent”, I take it you are only asking me to provide an explanation that is consistent with my views, not necessarily yours. For example: you say you see a contradiction between human free will and divine foreknowledge and providence. I don’t. And you haven’t actually shown such a contradiction; that would require an argument starting from premises I accept to an explicit contradiction of the form “A is true AND A is false”.

So there are implicit premises which you accept and I deny. I’m providing a self-consistent explanation here, but it isn’t going to be consistent with everything you hold (otherwise, we wouldn’t have a disagreement in the first place). If it doesn’t look self-consistent to you, please go ahead and draw out the contradiction. I’ll give you a freebie:

  1. God foreknows and predestines all human choices.
  2. Some humans choices are free.

No explicit contradiction there. If you add:

  1. No human choice is free if it is caused externally.
  2. If God foreknows and predestines a human choice, it is caused externally.

Then you get a contradiction (you can logically derive “no human choice is free”, the denial of 2). But the Molinist does not accept 4. (God knows what any possible person would do if he were to create them and place them in a given circumstance, but it remains within that person’s power to act differently in that circumstance. They are not caused to act that way by what God foreknows; rather, if they were to act differently, God would have known that instead.)

(No, I’m not going to get into Molinism any further than that - even less the reasons you should believe it, since it is predicated on theism in the first place, which you reject! Come on man, until I get to heaven, I don’t have unlimited time!)

What is, exactly, and what is evil about it?

And you base this assertion on what? Are you familiar with the Scholastic theory of good and evil (which is not just about moral good and evil, but a completely general theory of what constitutes goodness or badness in all forms), and the reasoning behind it? Or are you rejecting it because of one unintuitive consequence?

What it assumes is that no one in hell does “learn from experience” in the sense of repenting from sin due to their punishment. Whether they are capable of doing so is a different story. Again, I’ve outlined different possibilities for how that works (for the flip-side of those in heaven perpetually refraining from sin, but they can be applied vice versa to those in hell). On some of those options they do retain the ability to repent, but don’t exercise it. On others, the inability is in some way self-imposed.

Sin is not just about actions, but willful thoughts and attitudes. So they have every opportunity to commit further sin - all they have to do is continue rejecting God and hating what is good. E.g. a fundamental part of the obedience to God required for heaven is an attitude of selflessness, a willingness to put the good of others before your own. But those in hell don’t have and don’t want that attitude - they are selfish, and they want to be selfish. That rejection of what is good - selflessness, love for others over yourself - is a rejection of God, a sin meriting punishment. (Thank God he makes it possible to be saved from that punishment!) Instead of recognizing the good for what it is, they willfully continue rejecting God and hating the good.

As for the “excruciating torment” bit - it is no necessary part of the doctrine of hell that everyone there experiences the maximum possible suffering, all the time. It is consistent with belief in hell that the passages describing it are metaphorical and even hyperbolic, and it is consistent too with the goodness and justice of God that there is proportionality in the punishment received in hell.

(And again, if it turns out that defenses of the traditional doctrine fail, that is more reason for holding annihilationism instead, which I’ve already stated seems to me to be a biblically viable option.)

Not necessarily, because the possibility of choice one way or the other doesn’t entail that both possibilities will eventually be chosen. Again, Molinism makes it possible for God to predestine things for this to work out without negating human freedom. (Why would God predestine people to sin for eternity? Maybe he works it out that anyone who would have repented in hell accepts God in this life instead and never goes there in the first place.)

If there is some kind of transformation of character, it is conditioned by one’s free choices and ultimately self-imposed by the free acceptance or rejection of God. And he can’t do it at birth (at least, not in all cases) because the “transformation” is still predicated on free will. (I put transformation in quotes there to include the view that those in heaven/hell are simply predestined to forever refrain from / continue in sin without an immediate transformation of character.)

I think it is possible for an atheist to go to heaven (though they would not be one by the time they got there). But I am not saying that one has to believe in God to reject him - knowing what is good and choosing evil instead (at some fundamental level) is also a rejection of God, the ultimate good.

I’d stand by it as a possibility. It’s something God could allow. What I’m claiming more than that is that God does not send anyone to hell unjustly.

Since it’s their own rejection of God that condemns them, not my salvation, I don’t have to be OK with that.

Are you acquainted with the literature on identity of indiscernibles, and why it is widely rejected by philosophers? Is their reasoning inadequate, and how do you know? And is it somehow inconsistent for me to hold the view in question here?

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No, I’m asking you to provide an explanation whose pieces are logically consistent, i.e. involve no mutual contradictions. Just because you don’t see the contradictions, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You have to present arguments.

That’s certainly an implicit contradiction. Predestination is incompatible with free choice. I will grant that foreknowledge would be compatible. Of course free will is self-contradictory all by itself; it’s an incoherent concept.

Why?

If so, then God doesn’t know what they would do. And that seems to contradict the idea of predestination. You’re using words, but they seem to morph in meaning as needed.

Yes, and he wouldn’t have created them. He creates only those people who will act as he desires. It’s his responsibility.

What I was responding to. You can’t be bothered to look? You have justified eternal torment by claiming that the sinners want to do it. That’s just rationalization. And what does “their wills are hardened” even mean? How were they hardened? Who did it? Is this another of the post-death transformations you rely on?

On your statement of what it proposes.

Neither makes any sense. You’re claiming that there are two sorts of people only: those who, after death, will never sin and those who, after death, will always sin. Neither of those types resembles real people in any way. Where do real people go after death?

But only before death, right? After death it’s impossible.

Weasel wording again. You’re saying that hell, for some people, might be a OK place with no torture? Or just torture on alternate Thursdays? Or what?

Of course not, but taken as a statistical point about populations, surely there must be some variance. And yet you require that everyone in heaven or hell must be 100% consistent, and there must be no third option for people who aren’t so inhumanly consistent.

Sounds like an abrogation of free will again. You really can’t avoid it.

Notice the weaselry designed to allow newborns into heaven. Now why can’t he do it in all cases if he can in some cases? You destroy your own argument.

I think we may have different notions of evil, and that something is hiding within that sentence. Is disbelief in God evil?

There seems no justice involved in infinite punishment for finite sin.

No, you’ve said that some people who go to hell exist (as a secondary purpose according to your weasel wording) in order to help you go to heaven. Did you forget that part?

No. But feel free to justify this patently absurd notion. I await your argument.

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How am I supposed to present arguments when I don’t see the contradictions? Show me the supposed contradictions, and I will try to respond to them.

Yeah, we’ve been down that road before, and it’s more of the same. You claim it is incoherent, I don’t see the contradiction. Again: please demonstrate that my premises logically entail A and not-A.

I answered in the very next sentence.

Again, read the very next sentence.

Now, you’ve conceded that divine foreknowledge is not inconsistent with human free will:

But on Molinism the way God predestines things is exclusively via his foreknowledge. He’s not causally forcing things to go the way he predestines them. There’s no abrogation of freedom.

Perhaps he would not have created them if they would have chosen differently. Perhaps he would have, and given their different choices, they would have gone to heaven instead of hell. So yes, being in control of their existence and the circumstances they are in, there is certainly a sense in which God bears responsibility for what they do. But also since God does not cause them to choose as they do and they could have chosen differently, there is another sense in which they bear the responsibility for their own choices. The question is which sense of responsibility is more important, and that again is just going to be another preconception / implicit premise where we disagree.

Sinners in hell want to sin, so they keep on sinning, so they keep on being punished for it. (This isn’t infinite punishment for finite sin, it’s ongoing punishment for ongoing sin.) And the more they sin, the more habituated they become to sinning and to ignoring their conscience, and the less likely they are to change. That’s what I meant by “hardening”.

I’m saying that God is just, so the punishment will be appropriately proportional to the sin.

Death, resurrection, the judgement, and afterlife are extraordinary circumstances relative to our everyday experience. I don’t see it as so implausible that either i) God could predestine this consistent behaviour (without negating free will, as per Molinism), or ii) our characters are transformed in a way conditioned and dependent on our free choices (and so not negating free will either). Or some combination of the two. Again, where is the contradiction?

Because it is conditioned on their free will, as I said.

To make things more clear and specific: suppose God decides that he will make it so that all newborns who die are resurrected and grow to adulthood in heaven. Now all possible persons are such that if it were the case that they died as newborns and raised in heaven, either A) they would freely refrain from sin forever in some set of circumstances (possibly, allowing for some initial period of time where they can do wrong while growing into moral responsibility, e.g. during the millennium of Revelation 20), or B) they would sin at some point in any set of circumstances (after reaching moral responsibility). (A and B are exhaustive, so I don’t see any problem with this assertion). God knows which possible persons fall under A and B, and so he choose to create a world where only persons falling under A die as newborns.

(Why God doesn’t do that for absolutely everyone, not just those who die has newborns, has already been discussed in this thread.)

I’ve already given some thoughts on that question.

As your dismissal of it is based wholly on your (uninformed, by your own admission) opinion, and you have made no attempt to show why it is self-contradictory to hold such a view - I feel no need to do so.

Edit: added another response:

As I’ve already said, the reason that they exist is (in part) to bring about the salvation of the elect. That’s not the reason they go to hell. And your equating of those two just assumes that if God creates them knowing they will go to hell, then they bear no responsibility for their fate, which I deny.

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I think I have. Some of your preimises are mutually exclusive, and I’ve explained why.

I did. Accepting your propositions requires redefining words so they don’t mean what they mean, and it requires muddying just what it is that God does.

Never disputed it. It’s creation so as to produce a result that’s inconsistent with free will. He ordains all a person’s choices when he creates them. He could have created them so as to make different choices. He therefore controls their choices.

Not so, at least as you have described it. He creates only those people who will end up making the choices he intends for them, which his foreknowledge allows him to do.

Perhaps? It’s exactly what you claimed.

But they couldn’t have chosen differently, given that God created only those people who don’t choose differently. The creator can’t escape his responsibility. It’s his choice of whom to create that produces all future outcomes.

Why do they want to sin? Again, you assume that nobody can change his mind. Apparently there is no free will in hell. You still have no explanation for the total consistency of choice in both heaven and hell. Where are the inconsistent people, i.e. all people anyone has ever had any experience of?

Is punishment really just? Retribution or revenge is generally considered the worst justification for punishment. It isn’t considered valid in modern penology. It neither prevents recidivism nor compensates the victims nor rehabilitates the criminal. Why is God stuck at this primitive level?

If free will is to mean anything, it must be that one makes actual choices. The probability of one’s choices all being the same is so low that it beggars plausibility for every single person’s choices working out that way. Think of it: before death, everybody sometimes chooses sin and sometimes not; after death, everyone gets stuck. The transformative process you hypothesize after death abrogates free will, as it’s a manipulation by God to force a result. If your prior free choices strictly determine your future choices, future free will disappears. The fact that you are forced to equivocate among different stories is a clue that you don’t really have a handle on this.

Do newborns even have free will? What occasions of sin do they conceivably have, anyway? I suppose you think God is looking at what they would have done had they survived. But of course what’s the point of making newborns who end up in hell? How does that affect anybody else? And they’re being punished for things they didn’t do. Or if God only makes dying babies who would have been saved, why can’t he do that with everyone?

Discussed, yes. Justified, no.

Not sure I can locate them. But if I recall, you negated the question by claiming that atheists will be presented with a clear revelation at some point that they will have to willfully reject. Do you see how bizarre that claim is?

Have it your way.

It doesn’t matter why they go to hell. It matters that they do go to hell, which they wouldn’t have had they not been created for your salvation. In fact, isn’t it necessary in this scenario that they are the sort of person who will go to hell, to provide these lessons and examples for you? You can’t escape the fact (word used advisedly) that these people’s damnation is a direct result of their contributions to your salvation. Again, I suggest a reading of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Whether they bear responsibility for their fate doesn’t matter, because God bears responsibility too, even if not solely, and their creation is at least partly for your benefit. That’s messed up.

I do hope that nobody else here agrees with your views. The implications are unsettling.

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As far as I can see, you haven’t. You’ve claimed that certain things are inconsistent (predestination and free will, for example) and you’ve offered some explanations for why you think so, but those explanations bring in further premises which I don’t accept.

No, he does not control their choices. In a given circumstance, their choice is up to them, not God. God can place them in different circumstances, sure - but then in those different circumstances, facing a different decision, that different choice is still up to them, not God. God can’t just arbitrarily control the person’s choices. (Under the concept of free will that I am assuming, the person is not determined to choose what they do by their circumstances, so God’s control of circumstances doesn’t entail control of choices.)

God’s intent for them (in the sense of which world he chooses to actualize) depends on the choices they end up making, not the other way around. (In Molinist terminology: God’s creative decree is logically posterior to his middle knowledge, not logically prior to it.) It is possible for them to choose differently.

But not solely: the choices of those whom he creates also produce those outcomes, and those choices are not determined by God (though he foreknows them).

Yes, and actual choices are what are being made, in my view. As for the plausibility, yes, I am postulating a highly constrained outcome (though I don’t see it as implausible as you think it is). But on my view, this is partly why God chose this world even with all its imperfections out of all the innumerable possible creations he could have made - because it realized such a constrained outcome (including the saved in heaven freely refraining from sin for eternity).

Is this in reference to my comment that it could be a combination of the two options I presented? This isn’t equivocation, just a recognition that the stories aren’t mutually exclusive. (E.g. it could be that God predestines the consistent behaviour, and it is made possible for him to do this in part by a gradual transformation of character occurring by habituation.)

I have nowhere suggested that newborns exercise free will (in the sense of making choices for which they can be held morally accountable). In fact, I deliberate chose what I said to make it clear that I was not making such a suggestion.

No, that is not what I said. I’ll try to make it even more clear this time:

I never suggested that newborns even can end up in hell, or that anyone is ever punished for something that they did not do.

To repeat what I said earlier in the thread:

Yes, it does.

It is also the case that they could have avoided hell by making a different choice about whether to accept or reject God. (Two possibilities if they would have made a different choice: God could have chosen to create them and they enter heaven, or God could have chosen not to create them, in which case he does them no wrong because they never exist to be wronged in the first place. And he does them no wrong in the original scenario because he gives them the opportunity to be saved, although they don’t take it.)

Given what I’ve already said about the different senses in which people and God bear responsibility for their fate - why does their responsibility not matter? I fully agree with you that if they couldn’t appropriately/justly be held responsible for their fate, it would be “messed up”, but that’s not the case in my view.

I do not see the claim that God will eventually reveal himself to everyone (such that everyone will eventually have the opportunity to accept or reject God) as particularly bizarre, no.

I’ll point out that retributive justice is not the same thing as revenge. For the rest of this comment, I once again point to C. S. Lewis’s words on the subject.

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But you have claimed that God picks a world in which you make particular choices rather than one in which you make different choices. That’s control. It’s not just the circumstances of the world he chooses but the world that contains the choices of yours that he prefers. And you’ve also said that your choices are partly determined by circumstances. If he sets up the circumstances that’s at least partial control right there.

What does it mean for it to be possible to choose differently if they never actually do? And how can God’s intent depend on anything other than himself? His intent is expressed in the world he actualizes. If he had had a different intent he would have actualized a different world and a different you.

You have already said that he actualizes a world that contains the choices he wants. Yes, solely. You can’t give him control of creation without giving him control of your choices.

Isn’t it odd that this world, the only one that produces the behavior you suppose, looks so little like one in which that behavior is possible? You must admit that your ideas seem absurd based on what we can see of human nature. The born again still sin regularly, don’t they?

Yes. It’s not that they’re mutually exclusive. It’s that they’re both flimsy excuses for the implausible, and you feel a need to use them both to support your house of cards.

Clarity is not one of your gifts, I’m afraid. And just repeating verbatim what you had previously said is not an increase in clarity.

But they’re rewarded for something they didn’t do. And if newborns can’t end up in hell, we are forced to your idea that every dying baby was predestined for heaven because if they had lived to adulthood they would have been saved. Even you should be able to see how silly that assumption is. It also has the implication that baby murder is a good thing, as it saves a child from probable damnation. If we killed all the babies then we would promote them to heaven, and nobody would be damned. Presumably this selfless act would also save us. Disagree? Why?

Oh, well, that certainly answers me.

No, the couldn’t. They were created because God knew they wouldn’t have made that different choice. An opportunity he knows they won’t take, and in fact creates them so as not to take it, is no opportunity.

It doesn’t matter specifically in the current discussion of whether God controls their fate and bears responsibility for it. Are you saying that there can be no shared responsibility?

That’s because you fail to see the contradiction between predestination and free will.
I can’t hep you.

So everyone who dies an atheist has had this experience, rejected it, and goes to hell, then? Why has he waited 67 years to reveal himself to me? Mysterious ways? I see this merely as an excuse to save your world view from reality. Certainly you have no evidence that any such thing actually happens.

What’s the difference? I resist reading more from Lewis, whom I find long-winded and tendentious.

Urk. I read it. Lewis fails to explain what retributive justice is except that punishment is deserved. But why is it deserved? And why should it be inflicted? Not a word on that subject. My opinion of his reasoning and writing skills is confirmed, but no other purpose was served by that waste of time.