I recently stumbled upon a completely new argument against conventional Christianity. This argument has nothing to do with cosmology, biology, or geology; it’s purely philosophical.
This is pretty surprising, given that the history of theology is filled with many interesting attempts to prove or disprove the idea of God. “We are told that God is omnipotent,” the omnipotence paradox goes, “but can He create an object so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Then the problem of evil has it that “a being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.” Moses Maimodines was a highly regarded rabbi, but even he threw a harsh light on free will and omniscience by asking,
Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that the man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand how he would act, otherwise, God's knowledge would be imperfect…
As a teenager I was extremely attached to the idea of free will; as both a Christian and a hardcore libertarian at the time, free will was a really a big deal. Yet I was at least humble enough to know that I shouldn’t just believe in things because I wanted them to be true. So when I went to college a couple years early, and took a pottery class where I made a vaguely symmetrical pot, the consequence was that my friends had to listen to me talking a lot about this analogy:
This is what Christianity becomes without free will; whether we end up in hell because of our sinful nature, or we make the decision to accept forgiveness, is ultimately something we aren’t even responsible for.
At the time, I knew a few Calvinists who rejected free will, and they had extremely compelling arguments to support their position: If God is omniscient, then God knows what we’re going to choose. If what we choose is known beforehand, then when a moment of apparent choice goes by, we just do what we do. We couldn’t have chosen differently, so we weren’t even choosing things, we we’re just doing them.1 An unbeliever can’t help but reject God any more than a cracked pot can hold water, and that’s why the unbeliever goes to hell, because his nature is essentially evil. But ultimately these Calvinists came across as totally crazy, because the potter in this story is their picture of the Divine. This guy makes billions of cracked pots and then tortures them eternally. Is he a sadist? Is he insane? Is he just a really bad potter?
Maybe a Calvinist can escape this vision of God as a crazy potter by suggesting that “hell isn’t actually that bad.” I’ve heard many claims that hell is just annihilation, or just a waiting room before we leave, or maybe somehow not that awful. Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s witnesses take this position, saying respectively that we are burned up, or that we just cease to exist rather than suffering forever.
But I don’t know how a prostestant can escape passages like “trembling grips the godless: ‘Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?’”2 or New Testament verses like “And these will go away into eternal punishment,”3 and “the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.”4
Catholics aren’t such sticklers for Biblical literalism, but they’re stuck with the same place of eternal torture, and avoid blaming God through the classic means of evoking human free will, with “those who have responded to the love and piety of God going to eternal life, those who have refused them to the end going to the fire that is not extinguished."5 Orthodox Christianity probably has the most graphic depiction of hell; St. Macarius, one of the Desert Fathers of the early church, wrote that
Walking in the desert one day, I found the skull of a dead man, lying on the ground. As I was moving it with my stick, the skull spoke to me.
I said to it, “Who are you?”
The skull replied, “I was high priest of the idols and of the pagans who dwelt in this place; but you are Macarius, the Spirit-bearer. Whenever you take pity on those who are in torments, and pray for them, they feel a little respite.”
“What is this alleviation, and what is this torment?”
“As far as the sky is removed from the earth, so great is the fire beneath us; we are ourselves standing in the midst of the fire, from the feet up to the head. It is not possible to see anyone face to face, but the face of one is fixed to the back of another. Yet when you pray for us, each of us can see the other’s face a little. Such is our respite.”
“Alas the day when that man was born! Are there punishments which are more painful than this?”
The skull said to him, “There is a more grievous punishment down below us.”
“Who are the people down there?”
The skull said to him: “We have received a little mercy since we did not know God, but those who know God and denied Him are down below us.”
Hearing this, the desert father picked up the skull and buried it. When you think about it, that’s really about the only thing you can do in a situation like this. Maybe the skull should have been glad he was high enough to have a chance to see his compatriots suffering alongside him, and to have the possibility for some small respite now and again. Ultimately, hell is a pretty bad place.
But there’s actually something philosophically interesting about a bad place you go to forever and can never leave—especially if it’s the worst place.
Is Hell The Worst Place?
But is hell really the worst place? Imagine a rapist, murderer, or that guy who cut in front of you in line the other day—you know, someone who truly deserves it—going to hell. Imagine he dies, and his soul falls, screaming, into the fiery pit. Now imagine this guy lands, gets up, and looks around, you know, lighting a cigarette. He takes a puff, he shrugs and says “This isn’t so bad.” Right? He’s standing there, maybe a bit annoyed, checking his cell phone, that’s all.
To most of us, this scenario really seems surreal. Even atheists who don’t believe in hell are going to laugh, or scratch their head about the idea of some guy who goes to hell and doesn’t care. Why isn’t he miserable? Why isn’t he in agony? And the answer is that he just isn’t in hell. He’s not there. It doesn’t matter that I tell you “this place is hell, and ooh boy, is he there!” It just isn’t, and he’s not, because when we say hell, we mean the worst place. No cigarettes, no cell phones, nothing to look forward to, no upsides, nothing mitigates the awfulness of hell. How could there be? Hell is the worst place imaginable.
(You might take a moment to think about whether you agree with this or not.)
Granted, there are these stories the Orthodox have about some people better off in hell than others, and Dante liked to have hell neatly regimented into nine levels, which is two more even than the Muslims ever needed. But if so, then forget about the upper level, or forget about the upper six or eight levels; there’s a place at the bottom, the worst place you can get to, the worst place to be, where no price is too high to avoid falling into it: “if thine eye cause thee to fall, pluck it out. It is better for thee to enter into the Kingdom of God with one eye than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire, where ‘their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’”
Here is My Argument
If hell is the worst place, then, if you’re there, it can’t get worse for you. Not only is there no likelihood of things getting worse, there isn’t even the possibility of them getting worse. And there’s a word we have for a situation where there’s no risk of things getting worse: that word is safety.
Hell is a safe place.
People talk all the time about the threat of identity theft, the risk of a stock market collapse, or the danger of unemployment. Safety doesn’t just mean freedom from physical harm (although obviously people talk about the risk of dying), it means freedom from any worsening of your situation, whether emotional, financial, social, or physical.
Understanding this, the safety of hell is much deeper than the kind of safety you experience knowing you have airbags in your car, or a guardrail between you and the tracks of an approaching train. Hell is not just safe in the way buying Net Protect Pro can offer the concept of safety, or the way firearms can keep your children safe. Hell is safe in the most total and absolute sense that, so long as you are there, there can be no danger whatsoever, because there is no way things can possibly get worse, ever.
If hell is a place of total and perfect safety, this means hell is actually a relief from the danger of our mortal lives. The existence of hell puts us in terrible danger right now, because so long as we could end up in hell, our situation can become indescribably worse at any moment.
But once we’re actually there? Can’t get worse.
Thus, there is one clear sense in which hell is better than life on earth. The idea that safety is better than danger is something so obvious that it doesn’t really need much justificaton, but we can at least explore it long enough to note that possible and potential harms carry a cost proportionate to their likelihood: Risk = Probability x Severity.
Consider the situation economically. People will pay a financial cost simply to alleviate the risk of losing money; this is the purpose of home insurance or car insurance, not that they protect your home or your car, but that they take care of the risk that you may lose the economic value of your home or car if either of those things is lost. If you’re willing to pay money to avoid the risk of losing money, you understand that the risk of loss is on the same footing as actual loss. Essentially, risk can be seen as roughly equal to the probability times the potential cost of an actual loss. If I have a 10% risk of losing $1000, I’ll tend to think it makes sense to pay around $100 to mitigate that risk. Thus, just coming around and threatening to steal $1000 from me with 10% probabiltiy is about the same thing as actually taking $100 away.
This basically is just a way of explaining the obvious, which is that risk is bad, something we subjectively do not want, and safety is good, something we subjectively desire. Being in a risky place is, in a very real sense, bad; while being in a safe place is, in a very real sense, good. All else being equal, a safe place is better than a risky place.
So there’s a contradiction: hell (or the lowest level of hell, anyway) is the worst place. Yet, because it is the worst place, it is also safer than life on Earth. Safety is clearly better than risk. So the worst place imaginable is, at least in one sense, not the worst place imaginable.
Obviously the lowest level of hell isn’t as good as being on Earth. But what about extremely bad situations? Consider a living person who‘s being tortured. It’s possible to subject a person to a level of torment that drives out all conscious thought, just by burning them; this is what’s so bad about hell, this feeling of being thrown into a fire.
So OK, imagine a witch. Say there’s a witch—and she’s not a good witch, she’s really been cursing people around the village, killing babies, all that kind of thing, and by the way she also rejects God, so the probability of her going to the worst possible place in hell is quite high—and she’s been caught and sentenced to be burned to death. But as she’s burning, she then has an experience that‘s roughly commensurate with the experience of hell, while also being in very real danger of going to hell. Is such a person’s situation better off, or worse off, than the situation of the same person in hell?
If you say she is better off being burned alive than being in hell, how can this be, when she’s in danger now, and in hell she’ll be safe? Being safe is better than being in danger, so what offsets this danger? The possibility of getting heaven? This is extremely remote in her case, and it doesn’t seem that the low possibility of her getting to heaven offsets her high probability of going to hell.
If you say she’s not better off being burned alive, then hell isn’t a worse place. But we already said that hell was the worst place, so this doesn’t make sense.
Now we could talk about this witch for a long time, but she’s not the source of the paradox, she’s just a way of making it concrete. Ultimately, as soon as we start talking about hell—or at least, the lowest level of hell—as being the worst place imaginable, then it has to be safe. And as soon as we realize that hell is safe, it can’t be the worst place imaginable, because the worst place imaginable is maximally horrible in all ways.
Remember what I wrote before: No cigarettes, no cell phones, nothing to look forward to, no upsides, nothing mitigates the awfulness of hell. But safety mitigates that awfulness.
Unless we are to believe that safety is not a good thing to have, the worst place can’t be the worst place, and then, well, what is hell?
A Disproof of Conventional Christianity
This is a line of reasoning that struck me accidentally, out of the blue, just the other day—years and years after I stopped being a Christian. It has a similar flavor of many arguments against Christianity, but rather than going after some attribute of God by questioning whether omniscience is possible, or whether omnipotence is compatible with omnibenevolence in a world where evil exists, it goes after the idea of hell.
It works essentially by invoking a property of any closed set in mathematics: On the interval from -1 to 1, there is a lowest real number, -1. In the set of all imaginable places, hell is the “worst.” But one property of the worst place imaginable is that it is safe, which contradicts its own definition. So the set of all imaginable places can’t have a worst, and there can’t be any such thing as hell as commonly conceptualized by ordinary Christians.
But how do we square that with the fact that the Pope, and the Bible, and St. Maracius all seem to endorse belief in the conventional hell? We might say that none of them explicitly say hell is the worst place, just really bad. But if that’s true, then what place is worse? Detroit? The DMV? Doesn’t it beggar belief to imagine the Pope saying “OK, hell’s not, like, the worst place. It’s just, you know… really bad?”
As an agnostic, I’m not opposed to the idea of God. But I’m tired of free will—which only matters because without it we have to blame God for sending people to hell—and quite frankly, I’m tired of hell. Hell has been scaring people into Abrahamic religions for as long as anyone can remember; just like any other pyramid scheme, no sooner do you accept religion to assuage the conscience of aunt Beatrice than you’re stuck feeling scared for your own loved ones who don’t believe until you can convince them. It’d be a nice feeling to be able to do away with hell not only on grounds that there’s no reason to believe in it, but on grounds that it’s a flat-out contradiction.
Then again, this entire argument has been a foray into philosophy. Even if the chain of reasoning is sound (which it may not be, since I’m not perfect) its conclusion rests on the principle of non-contradiction. Yet as we’ve seen before, philosophy is a quagmire that can never prove anything, and if one wanders for too long there, even things like contradictions begin to seem possible. All you need to do if you’d like to avoid this argument is shrug and say “Maybe dialetheias are real, and hell is just another example.”
Sadly, unless somebody is able to fix philosophy, this is about the best we can do.
Anyone who saw Voyager will understand when I say that Tuvok has a point about how “A character's actions must flow inexorably from his or her established traits.”
Paul VI (1968) Solemni Hac Liturgia. https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/motu_proprio/documents/hf_p-vi_motu-proprio_19680630_credo.html
Thank you for this interesting and well written piece, as always a treat. But allow me to come with some counter arguments, really against the whole idea of scrutinizing the dogmas of any religion. The narratives of all religions are painted with broad brushes indeed and they are supposed to be mysterious, i.e. not logical at all.
Religion and logic are not at all compatible. In medieval times a lot of philosophers wasted their time trying to make these ends meet. And logic is still not the way to convince religious people that they are wrong, because a fairy tale is a fairy tale and cannot be treated as natural science (or logic).
Why is religion so important to so many people? Because of the fear of death, perhaps? Many people really, really don’t want it to be true that life ends when our bodies stop functioning. (We cannot know for sure, it’s a matter of taste what stance to take regarding this question and everyone is entitled to his/her own best belief.)
2300 years ago a philosopher, Epicuros, launched the idea that the soul is living in and by the body and cannot survive when the body dies, which according to him implies that death is nothing to fear. There is no hell and the gods are not at all interested in either promoting or punishing the mortals. (Neither did they create the world, according to Epicuros. To dismiss them altogether would probably have been a too great crime at the time.)
Philosophy doesn’t need to work with the most obscure and fabricated problems. It can also do as Epicuros and start at a fresher angle.
The concept of hell is not credible to modern secular people. But the concept of death is of course horrible to our individual-based lifestyle. ”If there isn’t life beyond death, then there is no meaning at all with life” one of my friends said.
Suppose there is no meaning, what are you going to do about that, I answered. Life in itself is such a marvel, just enjoy. And create some meaning to it as you go along. May the Force be with you.
Your argument that safety (via being in the worst place) is better than risk is flawed.
From the economics angle you are making the correct claim that it is reasonable to pay 100$ to avoid a 10% risk of losing 1000$. Where you go wrong is then saying that therefore the risk is as bad as the actual bad outcome. It becomes more clear when you consider the end states. Before insurance (or whatever you are spending 100$ on) the two states are having 1000$ (90%) or 0$ (10%). After spending 100$ to remove risk you get to 900$ (100% depending on the insurance). In this case it is obvious that safety is not better than risk; if it were you would be willing to pay up to 1000$, but instead you keep 900$ and call it a day. It isn't reasonable to just burn the 1000$ to do away with the risk of losing it.
The second issue is that you treat the worst thing happening to you as a point estimate instead of a recurring process when you discuss safety. If you lose a leg in an industrial accident it doesn't just suck for that instant, but you are losing all future value, or from another perspective, it causes you active problems every day for the rest of your life. Likewise with hell, the "safety" of it not getting worse, while possibly a mental relief, still comes with the eternal torment part. It isn't the possibility of things getting worse that is the torture, it is the actual torture. Actual torture with 100% probability is worse than potential torture with <100% probability, unless one is so neurotic that the fear of any possibility torture is less compelling than the torture itself. That is probably a non-zero percent of the population, but a vanishingly small one I suspect.
So, yea, one cannot claim that safety is categorically better than risk.