Imagine you find yourself in heaven after death, only to discover that the soul of your dearest love is suffering in hell. Would your bliss be marred by the suffering of your loved one? The “argument from love” challenges the traditional Christian conception of heaven and hell as places of perfect bliss and terrible suffering, respectively, on the grounds that no lover in heaven could be very happy if she were aware that her beloved was suffering in hell. Love requires (...) concern for the well-being of one’s beloved, thus apparently rendering heavenly bliss impossible for those who love an unreformed sinner. Here I defend a traditional conception of heaven and hell against the perplexing mismatch between the blessed souls’ love for the damned and apparent indifference to their plight. (shrink)

Marilyn McCord Adams’s perspective on the intimacy with God as a way of defeating horrendous evils in the course of a human being’s existence has been met with a series of objections in contemporary scholarship. This is due to the fact that the critiques formulated have focused more on the debilitating impact of suffering on the sufferer’s body and mind, on intimacy as mere intermittent relationships between God and humans, or on what is lost or gained from the presence or (...) absence of this intimacy with the divine being. Focusing on Adams’s appeal to esthetic arguments in theodicy and on her reflection on practical issues in theology, the article presents Adams’s perspective on intimacy as a relation initiated objectively by God at the creation and at Christ’s incarnation and continued subjectively throughout history by both God and every human being. Given its combining of objective and subjective features, this kind of intimacy is not to be understood as an exclusively private relationship of each individual with God, but rather as a process of communal advancing in rehabilitation and mutual healing that is initiated in the antemortem career and fulfilled in the post-mortem existence. (shrink)

A major source of disagreement among proponents of the traditionalist and conditionalist views of hell regards the proportionality criterion, according to which the justice of a punishment must match the severity of the offense. Conditionalists often argue that eternal conscious torment is too severe, given that the sins of any human being are finite. Traditionalists, however, typically insist that the perfect moral status of God requires infinite punishment for the damned. The discussion usually proceeds on the assumption that eternal conscious (...) torment is a more extreme punishment than annihilation. Here I challenge this assumption by identifying reasons to believe annihilation is actually a more severe punishment than eternal conscious torment. (shrink)

According to Michael Almeida, reflections on free will and possibility can be used to show that the existence of an Anselmian God is compatible with the existence of evil. These arguments depend on the assumption that an agent can be free with respect to an action only if it is possible that that agent performs that action. Although this principle enjoys some intuitive support, I argue that Anselmianism undermines these intuitions by introducing impossible options. If Anselmianism is true, I argue, (...) then both God and creatures may be free to do the impossible. (shrink)

In response to the problem of Hell, Buckareff and Plug (Relig Stud 41:39–54, 2005; Relig Stud 45:63–72, 2009) have recently proposed and defended an ‘escapist’ conception of Hell. In short, they propose that the problem of Hell does not arise because God places an open-door policy on Hell. In this paper, I expose a fundamental problem with this conception of Hell—namely, that if there’s an open door policy on Hell, then there should be one on Heaven too. I argue that (...) a coherent conception of Heaven cannot have such a policy. Hence, escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of Hell. (shrink)

Ted Sider argues that a binary afterlife is inconsistent with a proportionally just God because no just criterion for placing persons in such an afterlife exists. I provide a possible account whereby God can remain proportionally just and allow a binary afterlife. On my account, there is some maximum amount of people God can allow into Heaven without sacrificing some greater good. God gives to all people at least their due but chooses to allow some who do not deserve Heaven (...) to enter out of grace. Although this model implies a precise cutoff between those who enter Heaven and those who do not, I have argued that there is a precise point where God best serves justice and some greater good. Although God’s actions may appear arbitrary and ‘whimsically generous,’ it is merely because we are ignorant of the precise cutoff point that best serves his purposes. (shrink)

This essay aims to establish two theses. First, hell is unjust. Second, God ought not (or perhaps cannot) impose hell on human beings. In support of these theses, Stephen Kershnar argues that human beings do not deserve hell because they either cannot cause an infinite amount of harm or are not responsible for doing so. Also, since humans don’t have infinitely bad characters, hell can’t be deserved on the basis of character. Since humans don’t deserve hell, God may not (or (...) perhaps cannot) impose unjust punishments and hence may not (or cannot) send or allow persons to go to hell. (shrink)

The Christian conception of Hell as everlasting punishment for past sins is confronted with two charges of unfairness. The first is the inequity of an eternal punishment. The never‐ending punishment seems disproportionate to the finite sin (Kershnar, Lewis, Adams). A second and related problem is that the boundary between sins that send one for all eternity to Hell and those sins that are slightly less bad that are compatible with an eternity in Heaven is arbitrary and thus it is unfair (...) that sinners so alike are treated differently (Sider). Hell, as traditionally conceived, is then claimed to be incompatible with God's traditional attributes such as his commitment to justice, omniscience and omnipotence. The unfairness can be avoided by appealing to God's foreknowledge and a debt/atonement theory of punishment. My view is analogous to refusing to parole the unrepentant. If a wrongdoer is eternally defiant, then he can never be released from Hell for his debt won't ever be paid if he isn't reformed and reconciled with the wronged. So it doesn't matter that his initial sin was a finite wrong not deserving of infinite punishment nor a sin no worse than that of the penitent in Heaven. (shrink)

Elselijn Kingma maintains that Christopher Boorse and other naturalists in the philosophy of medicine cannot deliver the value-free account of disease that they promise. Even if disease is understood as dysfunction and that notion can be applied in a value-free manner, values still manifest themselves in the justification for picking one particular operationalization of dysfunction over a number of competing alternatives. Disease determinations depend upon comparisons within a reference class vis-à-vis reaching organism goals. Boorse considers reference classes for a species (...) to consist in the properties of age and sex and organism goals to comprise survival and reproduction. Kingma suggests that naturalists are influenced by value judgments and may rely upon implicit assumptions about disease in their choice of reference classes and goals to determine which conditions are diseased. I argue that she is wrong to claim that these choices cannot be defended without arguing in a circular manner or making certain arbitrary or value-driven judgments. (shrink)

On the traditional Christian doctrine: 1. People have free will (in Heaven as on Earth). 2. Those with free will can go to Hell. 3. Heaven is eternal. Many Christians also hold: 4. God is all powerful, knowing and good and 5. Free will can justify eternal suffering, evil, or hell. The paper argues that those who accept a version of Christianity that endorses 1–5 face a dilemma: Either deny that free will can justify suffering, evil, or hell or accept (...) that we can fail in heaven and so go to hell. It suggests that compassionate Christians may do best to i) give up on the idea that free will is valuable enough to justify significant suffering. This may require: ii) accepting that something has gone woefully wrong on Earth and iii) giving up the idea that people can suffer significantly in Hell, but allows Christians to maintain that iv) Heaven is eternal. (shrink)

A message scribbled irreverently on the mediaeval walls of the Nonberg cloister says this: ‘Neither of us can go to heaven unless the other gets in.’ It suggests an argument against the view that those who love people who suffer in hell can be perfectly happy, or even free from all suffering, in heaven. This paper considers the challenge posed by this thought to the coherence of the traditional Christian doctrine on which there are some people in hell who are (...) suffering and others in heaven who are not suffering. More precisely, it defends the following argument:1. No one who loves another can be perfectly happy or free from suffering if they know that their beloved is suffering.2. Anyone in hell suffers.3. Anyone in heaven is perfectly happy or at least free from suffering.4. There can be no one in heaven who is aware of the fact that his or her beloved is in hell. The paper argues that the first premise is eminently plausible and that those who accept t.. (shrink)

The Problem of Suffering (PoS) claims that there is a tension between the existence of a perfect God and suffering. The Problem of Hell (PoH) is a version of PoS which claims that a perfect God would lack morally sufficient reasons to allow individuals to be eternally damned to Hell. A few traditional solutions have been developed to PoH, but each of them is problematic. As such, if there is a solu­tion to PoH that is resistant to these problems, then (...) it deserves our attention. In this paper, I develop precisely such a solution. I call this the Unpopulated Hell View (UHV), which claims that Hell exists as a place where eternal damnation could take place, although it never does. First, I explain how UHV solves PoH. Next, I develop four objections against UHV and defend UHV against them. I argue that, although some of these objections do more damage to UHV than others, UHV has satisfying responses to all of them. Ultimately, I conclude that UHV merits consideration as a novel solution to PoH because it is less problematic than the traditional ones. (shrink)

While most discussions in natural theology focus on the existence and nature of God, recently the axiological implications of theism have been taken up by such authors as Kahane, Kraay and Dragos, Davis, McLean, Penner and Lougheed, and Penner. Rather than asking whether God exists, they ask whether God’s existence would be a good thing or a bad thing. That general question breaks down into more precise sub-questions, with a wide variety of possible positions resulting. Here, I argue that one (...) of these positions is possibly true, and that this possibility provides for a new defence against one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in the current literature: the problem of divine hiddenness. (shrink)

We discuss the philosophical problems attendant to the justice of eternal punishments in Hell, particularly those portrayed in Dante’s Inferno. We conclude that, under Dante’s description, a unique version of the problem of Hell (and Heaven) can be posed.