by Thomas Belt, DD
I’ll get right to the point. I’m shocked that reviews of David Bentley Hart’s recent That All Shall Be Saved which reject his universalism all fail to engage his moral argument. Perhaps there is a real will to misunderstand. But on the whole, the level of engagement with his arguments has been disappointing. His moral argument in particular still stands in want of a decent sparring partner (the debates of the past two years notwithstanding). For myself, I find that if this argument was the only thing David wrote (pardon the familiarity, we used to meet in a clandestine Baltimore pub), it would be convincing enough. Even if one were to neutralize the rest of his arguments in the book, the moral argument alone would make the majority view of hell (and its foul accomplice, “annihilationism”) untenable. A few reviewers mention it in passing. None engage it. Fr Andrew Louth nods in recognition of it but makes no attempt to expose in it any failure of reason.
If there is a will to misunderstand on the part of any, that’s difficult to address. But where there is honest confusion, clarification is worth a try. And since I possess little academic qualification, I feel especially qualified to demonstrate that the moral argument is not a complicated matter, that it can be grasped by simple folk (comme moi), and to implore reviewers to pick up the argument, restate it accurately, and then show where and how it fails. If it turns out I also have failed to understand Hart’s argument, this is a good place for others to set me straight. To make matters easier for those who have not yet read TASBS, I will be relying on Hart’s paper “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex Nihilo” unless otherwise indicated.
As I understand it, the moral argument for universalism runs as follows:
First, distinguish between God’s antecedent and consequent (or permissive) wills, between what God positively wills for creation (the final end for which he creates) and the evil and suffering he permits. This is not a distinction unique to universalists. Only the most ardent of Calvinists venture to deny any such distinction. In short, the possibility of evil (not its necessity) lies originally within the scope of God-given creaturely powers of choice because such agency is an essential means to our movement from origin to end in God. And in this case the possibilities God permits when acting free of necessity and ignorance finally reveal the moral meaning of God’s act of creation.
Second, note that God creates freely, unnecessarily, gratuitously. Were this not true, the moral argument would fail. Were God unaware of some aspect of creation or constrained by a power or agency other than his own goodness, these would diminish his freedom and qualify the moral meaning of its exercise.
Lastly, observe that in the consummation of all things, the distinction between antecedent and permissive wills disappears. The two modes of willing collapse, morally speaking. The morality of permission supervenes, in part, upon the risks God freely takes (risks for us, not for God). In the case of an eternal hell, the risk is infinite. Hart elaborates:
No matter how great the autonomy one grants the realm of secondary causes, two things are certain it seems to me. First, as God’s act of creation is free…all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute…his moral ‘venture’ in creating is infinite. For all causes are logically reducible to their first cause, and the rationale, the definition, of the first cause is the final cause that prompts it. And so if that first cause is an infinitely free act, the final end to which it tends is its whole moral truth.
He further explains:
It is a logical truism that all secondary causes in creation are reducible to their first cause. This is not a formula of determinism. It merely means that nothing can appear within the “consequents” of God’s creative act that is not, at least as a potential result, implicit in their primordial antecedent. So, even if God allows only for the mere possibility of an ultimately unredeemed natural evil in creation, this means that, in the very act of creation, he accepted this reality—or this real possibility—as an acceptable price for the ends he desired. In acting freely, all the possibilities that the agent knowingly accepts are positively willed as acceptable conditions of the end the agent seeks to achieve. If I freely and knowingly choose a course of action that may involve the death of my child, knowing that that death will then be an ineradicable detail of the pattern of what I bring about, morally I have willed his death within the total calculus of my final intentions, as a cost freely accepted, even if in the end his death never actually comes about. One cannot positively will the whole without positively willing all the necessary parts of the whole (whether those parts exist in only potential or in fully actual states).
Morally speaking the distinction between what God wants and what God permits with respect to creation disappears once what is permitted becomes a final end, at which point the true moral nature of God’s act of creation is revealed. Where all are finally reconciled to God, the disappearance of the distinction reveals a divine identity radically different from that revealed by the final loss and suffering of creatures. How creation comes finally to rest reveals the truth about God’s character.
That, I take it, is Hart’s moral argument for universalism.
It is not enough to show that the finally reprobate realize their end by God’s just permission through the abuse of their own God-given powers. The question is rather ‘What of the moral nature of this permission itself?’ It is entirely God’s, given the freedom of his act.
One attempt to defend the innocence of God in the face of an eternal hell seeks to ground the just consequence of perpetual suffering in an equally perpetual rejection of God. Fr John Manoussakis’s approach comes to mind. He grants that no single choice to reject God can have infinite consequence. However, many choices made over the course of a lifetime can habituate one in an evil disposition. While no single choice can achieve a state of irrevocable self-alienation, the process of habituation over time can produce this effect. And this disposition to become one’s choices, Manoussakis believes, must be as open to foreclosure as it is to fulfillment. The risks embraced must be proportionate to the joys to be gained. This seems obviously false to me, and I’ve not heard a cogent defense of it, neither from Fr Manoussakis nor Zachary Manis.
Regrettably, nothing is offered here to address the troubling moral questions. How are we to render morally intelligible the free and unnecessary exposure of those God loves to infinite loss and suffering? Can so irrevocable a foreclosure be responsibly and rationally chosen, even gradually over time, when the true nature of the consequence remains at best ambiguous? Could a God of infinite love and wisdom freely create under such conditions? It’s a rationale for creating freely under the condition of infinite risk that is needed and which has not been offered.
A similar attempt to defend the innocence of God in the face of eternal loss is made by Fr Thomas Joseph White in his 2006 essay “Von Balthasar and Journet on the Universal Possibility of Salvation and the Twofold Will of God.” He explains:
A theology that wishes to consider the question of the possibility of salvation for every human person, and a correspondingly real possibility of eternal loss, must try to keep in balance three theological affirmations. First, God’s grace comes to the aid of each one: There is no selective divine decision to exclude any creature from the possibility of salvation. Second, God is the unique primary cause of the existence, life, and movement of spiritual creatures, whom he sustains in being and governs providentially. Third, “hell” as a definitive state of separation from God has its origins in the spiritual creature insofar as it refuses God’s providential commandments and grace, incurring the judgment of God. Therefore, this situation (of refusal) is not of God’s own making, but rather of his permission.
Shortly thereafter he continues:
However, to say that we must believe that every human person is offered the possibility of being saved…is not the same as saying that we must hope for the universal salvation of all persons. Nor is it to say that it is incumbent upon us to believe that an infinite divine love should eventually overcome a finite creature’s free refusal of the grace of God…Least of all is it identical with the claim that if the creation is to be a “successful” expression of God’s absolute freedom and infinite love, then all men must be saved.
White fails to consider the moral distinction posed by creatio ex nihilo. He simply assumes that God is innocent of permitting an eternal hell so long as the responsibility for ending up there can be attributed to one’s powers of choice. But there is a crucial moral distinction between permitting transient (and thus redeemable) evils, on the one hand, and unending (irredeemable) evil, on the other. Hart again:
But let us say that somehow, mysteriously—in, say, Zosima’s sanctity, Alyosha’s kiss, the million-mile march of Vanya’s devil, the callous old woman’s onion—an answer is offered that makes the transient torments of history justifiable in the light of God’s everlasting Kingdom. But eternal torments, final dereliction? Here the price is raised beyond any calculus of relative goods, and into the realm of absolute—of infinite—expenditure.
And further:
… let us say God created simply on the chance that humanity might sin, and that a certain number of incorrigibly wicked souls might plunge themselves into Tartarus forever; this still means that, morally, he has purchased the revelation of his power in creation by the same horrendous price—even if, in the end, no one at all happens to be damned. The logic is irresistible. God creates. Alea iacta est. But, as Mallarmé says, “un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”: for what is hazarded has already been surrendered, entirely, no matter how the dice fall; the aleatory venture may be intentionally indeterminate, but the wager is an irrevocable intentional decision, wherein every possible cost has already been accepted; the irrecuperable expenditure has been offered even if, happily, it is never actually lost, and so the moral nature of the act is the same in either case. To venture the life of your child for some other end is, morally, already to have killed your child, even if at the last moment Artemis or Heracles or the Angel of the LORD should stay your hand. And so, the revelation of God’s glory in creatures would still always be dependent upon that evil, that venture beyond good and evil, even if at the last no one perishes. Creation could never then be called “good” in an unconditional sense; nor God the “Good as such,” no matter what conditional goods he might accomplish in creating.
Fr White supposes God’s innocence is secured by a distinction in God between antecedent and consequent wills in which responsibility for the infinite loss can be attributed to the damned. But this distinction vanishes when creatures reach their final end. To be sure, for universalists the distinction between what God positively wills and what he merely permits also disappears in the end. As creation rests in God as its final end, all things transparently express God’s will, and permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end. But in the case of irrevocable loss and suffering, what is freely and knowingly permitted by God for the sake of a greater good becomes morally equivalent to God willing that irrevocable loss and suffering. In other words, God freely permitting infinite suffering becomes morally equivalent to him choosing it as such.
I don’t see any way to deny the logic that binds first cause to final end morally speaking. The infinite God of love and wisdom who freely creates would not (‘could not’ is also fine) risk the eternal loss or suffering of spiritual creatures. And since God has freely created and is infinite love and wisdom, irrevocable loss and suffering are not among the risks we face.
But we do face other risks and we do suffer transient evils. So in bringing my reflections to a close, I’d like to share some comments recently made via Twitter by theologian Dr Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. I realize Twitter is an informal public setting, but his question is relevant to this ongoing conversation. He writes (Feb 9, 2023):
The universalist argument against an eternal hell as incongruent with the goodness and power of God — this convinces. I find it hard to draw the line between what God intends and allows. But why doesn’t the same argument work against creation and providence as such, given all the suffering?
He follows with:
I guess my question is whether the same moral objection could be brought against a God who saves face by ensuring all is well at the end. All’s well that ends well?
And he adds:
I’m not trying to cast doubt on God’s existence but perhaps trying to question the appeal to eschatology.
Why should the way the world finally turns out be of any relevance for our understanding the moral character of God’s act of creation and the nature of transient evils? What’s the moral relevance of God’s final triumph over evil to the actual sufferings of a groaning creation? Even if all turns out well in the end, does that justify all the transient evils strewn upon the path from origin to end?
Fair questions. I agree that if one stops with the distinction between antecedent and consequent willing, one is still left with questions. Why would permitting transient evils be relevant to creation’s final end? Does not a universalist outcome still leave a bad taste in one’s mouth when viewed in light of such horrendous violence and suffering?
Hart brings this up in the quote above when he says he believes that “an answer is offered that makes the transient torments of history justifiable in light of God’s everlasting Kingdom.” He doesn’t say what he thinks that answer is. Indeed, earlier in the same piece he suggests there is no answer, not at present at least:
Thus every evil that time comprises, natural or moral—a worthless distinction, really, since human nature is a natural phenomenon—is an arraignment of God’s goodness: every death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; and, until the end of all things, no answer has been given. Precisely because creation is not a theogony, all of it is theophany. It would be impious, I suppose, to suggest that, in his final divine judgment of creatures, God will judge himself; but one must hold that by that judgment God truly will disclose himself….
On the one hand, until the end of all things, no answer that justifies transient evils has been given. On the other hand, an answer is offered that makes the transient torments of history justifiable. I should note that when reading this paper, Hart did say “until the end of all things no answer has entirely been given” and I suspect (just a hunch) that more accurately expresses it.
Regarding Andy’s concern, I confess I cannot imagine what would help us approach answers regarding present evils more than a vision of the final end. In our own lives we are open to changing our view of suffering in light of ends intended and achieved. And we also take what we feel are justifiable risks for worthy ends. We are not unfamiliar with deeming ends to be worth risks.
My own sense is that the possibility of evil is one and the same with the possibility of our having to choose our way from origin to end in God. And we must choose. Creation is called to surrender its ‘Yes’ to being created. And this surrender is risky business, for in infancy and adolescence being able to say ‘Yes’ entails being able to say ‘No’. These are one and the same possibility that inheres in the only agency that can take the created journey from nothingness to plenitude in God. To Andy, then, I’d say there is no risk-free pathway to benevolent union with God.
Hart recognizes the risky nature of the gnomic terms in which creation must make its journey. He explains:
The importance of the gnomic will remains central to my argument throughout—indispensable, in fact. It is precisely the conformation of the gnomic will to the natural that is the process of salvation. My only claim—and an undeniable claim it is—is that the gnomic will can have no other ultimate end (no final cause, that is) other than the proper end of the natural will, which must be the eternal Good.
Perhaps Andy’s question remains: Is creation’s final rest in God worth the risk of even transient evils? Hart continues:
[I]t is one thing to attempt to judge the relative goodness or badness of a discrete evil in relation to final purposes we either can or cannot see, but another thing altogether to judge a supposed total narrative that pretends to describe the whole rationality of all its discrete events. The former can never be more than conjectural and inductive; the latter is a matter of logic.
The question of whether even transient evils are worth the risk in light of the (universalist) end appears to come down to asking whether union with God is worth the risk. Or more directly: Is God worth the risk? Paul certainly thought so. He assures his readers (Rom 8.18) that “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Surely this addresses Andy’s question as well. In the end, our beatitude shall be so great that no comparison of that state to our combined sufferings will be possible, however horrendous those sufferings may be. The ineffable will become the incomparable. No finite, transient risk is comparable to the final glory of union with God, but only – so says Hart’s moral argument – if all spiritual creatures share in it.
(This post is an updated and slightly expanded version of my previous David Bentley Hart and the Moral Argument Against Hell.)
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Posting comment per Tom’s request:
This is a good article but there are inexplicable jumps (i.e., assumptions) in it with regards to how he jumps to different ideas logically. For example, he states:
“White fails to consider the moral distinction posed by creatio ex nihilo. He simply assumes that God is innocent of permitting an eternal hell so long as the responsibility for ending up there can be attributed to one’s powers of choice. But there is a crucial moral distinction between permitting transient (and thus redeemable) evils, on the one hand, and unending (irredeemable) evil, on the other.”
Well how does he assume such innocence? And what is the distinction that creatio ex nihilo provide? Secondly, he goes on to cite Hart as for why this would be ridiculous as if God thought like humans thought without explaining why this is the case that this divine thought process must be as such.
I don’t understand the insistence on why these connections must be made other than to see the horror in our inability to comprehend such cruelty. The following paragraph highlights this insistence on this perception. Maybe it is so, but I wouldn’t constrict God by any such thinking just because I couldn’t find a reason/connection that would satisfy me:
“Fr White supposes God’s innocence is secured by a distinction in God between antecedent and consequent wills in which responsibility for the infinite loss can be attributed to the damned. But this distinction vanishes when creatures reach their final end. To be sure, for universalists the distinction between what God positively wills and what he merely permits also disappears in the end. As creation rests in God as its final end, all things transparently express God’s will, and permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end. But in the case of irrevocable loss and suffering, what is freely and knowingly permitted for the sake of what is desired becomes morally equivalent to what is desired, and freely permitting infinite suffering becomes morally equivalent to choosing it as such.”
And I think this is the gist… if “this distinction vanishes when creatures reach their final end,” is truly the reasoning, than I can see why it must be. I just don’t believe that this is satisfactory since I don’t believe to know how it really works on the divine side of reasoning/thinking. I’ll state this again. Even though we were destined for Him, we truly are not God, and hence the mystery remains before us. Before I even try to think that this is the case or try to grasp the wonder of this reality being the case, the only thing that keeps me believing in such a situation would be the hope that faith has given me to believe this may be the case even though I am not able to fully understand mentally how it truly is.
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Welcome to Eclectic Orthodoxy, Arnoldo.
You write: “Well how does he assume such innocence? And what is the distinction that creatio ex nihilo provide?”
Hart’s answer: Creatio ex nihilo presupposes God’s freedom to create or not create. He was under no constraint to create a world that inevitably entails eternal damnation. Even if he did not know that some or many human beings would reject salvific union with him–and how could he not know this?–by creating this world he freely assumed the risk, which is the same as accepting and willing eternal damnation. We must not think about this in temporal terms. God creates the world in the entirety of its history, from beginning to end. This, by the way, is the reason the free will defense of hell fails. The beginning is the end; the end is the beginning. Such is the logic of divine eternity.
Make sense?
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Arnoldo: “Even though we were destined for Him, we truly are not God, and hence the mystery remains before us. Before I even try to think that this is the case or try to grasp the wonder of this reality being the case, the only thing that keeps me believing in such a situation would be the hope that faith has given me to believe this may be the case even though I am not able to fully understand mentally how it truly is.”
I don’t think the appeal to mystery works in this case, as it is equivalent so suggesting that maybe God is not the God he has revealed himself in Christ to be–namely, absolute love. The case for universal salvation is not just a philosophical argument. It is grounded upon divine revelation. So my question for you is: Does the Father of Jesus will the everlasting suffering of his children?
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Theological skepticism works to the upside in a logical defense of transient evil, for no eye has seen …! But it is indefensible to the downside re God’s character, for to have seen Jesus …!
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IMO, the following paragraph from Tom’s article is critical:
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Thanks Arnoldo for posting this here from the FB convo. Appreciate it.
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This is helpful Tom, thank you for unpacking important issues.
I think your assessment is correct – the question is, “Is God worth the risk?” – which I find, once again, to be a question about the moral character of God. What kind of God would be worth believing in, is worth it all? This brings me back to the NT gospel accounts – what kind of God is portrayed, revealed, encountered?
I suppose one can put the question a bit differently: Imagine a world without natural and moral evils whatsoever – would this God still be worth it? Perhaps then there would be no risk, but the question remains about God’s character, for it is one of desire, attraction, affinity. So still, even in such a fictional scenario of world sans evil sans culpability, it remains a question about the moral character of God.
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Robert, does this make sense to you?
When I’ve engaged DBH’s moral modal collapse argument as an analogate to proportionate reasoning, using its different terminology, it just seems to me that –
Universalists maintain that running the risks of transient evils is morally licit, because the act of creation involves evil only indirectly.
OTOH, we view running the risks of eternal evils as not morally licit because, failing a proportionate reason (the good of a finite free will not outweighing the evil of an infinite perdition), the act of creation would thereby directly involve evil.
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Yes that makes sense to me. I would add that, from my view, the permission and risk of transient evil is only licit (and coherent) insofar the risk and consequences are truly and fully “owned” by God in end. As a Christian I can see it no other way – the assumption of culpability of that risk is what constitutes the paschal triumph, the story of creation and redemption.
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That rhymes well with:
“God is co-responsible w/the creature for the occurrence of both natural & moral evil.” ~ Joseph Bracken
Yes, culpable in the “weaker than guilty sense” or per Cambridge dictionary definition: “deserving to be considered responsible for something bad.”
For, being responsible isn’t the same, necessarily, as being culpable in the morally guilty sense. And, even though transformable, evil needn’t have had any divine purpose, instrumentally or noninstrumentally.
Thanks, as always.
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@John Sobert Sylvest,
Well, God is certainly responsible for the world he created, especially since he surely knew what was apt to happen. But God is responsible for the whole of creation and especially for its end, not for every single part of it. If a mosquito bothers me when I am trying to sleep, then on any metaphysics that makes sense that is not God’s responsibility. Nor is this particular mosquito bothering me at this particular time part of God’s grand design. Theologians, naturally, try to think of ways to exalt God, but being a control freak is not a great making property.
But what about the evil of the Holocaust? Or perhaps the even greater evil of today’s worldwide naked exploitation and warmongering? Isn’t God’s responsibility for creating a world in which such horrendous evils are even possible, damning? (Albeit infinitely less damning than the possibility of never-ending conscious torment of even a single creature.)
I think that the problem of horrendous evils (after Marilyn McCord Adams) is one of the strongest versions of the problem of evil. There are other difficult versions, such as from animal suffering. What actually seems to me to be the most difficult version is that from individual injustice, since creation is such that some people seem to be more blessed than others. As it happens I’m in the small minority of theists who believe that the right theodicy has already been found, and that it’s basically John Hick’s soul-making theodicy (based on an ancient idea by Irenaeus) combined with the right metaphysics. So I would be willing to explain why God, precisely because of his perfect goodness, would create a world in which such evils could (and for all practical purposes would) obtain. But not in this thread, of course.
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“there is no risk-free pathway to benevolent union with God.”
The possibility of unintended transient evils is an unavoidable risk, but morally justifiable by the weight of the infinite glories, which no heart’s yet conceived & as will be realized in our epectatic growth in intimacies.
Allowing the possibility (running the risk) of unintended eternal evils as an unavoidable risk isn’t morally justifiable because the weight of an infinite perdition is disproportional, by definition, to any offense committed by finite & fallible persons.
It boils down to God’s character per a double-effect reasoning – like calculus. Even if all repented & were saved, thus avoiding any objective evil consequences, that would not exculpate God’s indefensible subjective intention (having already priced-in the inordinate cost).
To some extent, this is a pseudo-problem that only presents when implicitly stipulating to the terms of libertarian infernalists. Using a proper theo-anthropology & conception of human freedom, a person could not freely & completely reject God, in principle.
As for compatibilist infernalists, they have an insurmountable “universalist problem.” On their own accounts of predestination & impeccability, all shall be saved. What keeps them from recognizing this is their artificial extrinsicism, as I’ve previously pointed out here & elsewhere.
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Maybe eschatological realization will alter the past, of course including the present we are living this moment.
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I have to say that the exercise in deprecation of the article (“I feel especially qualified to demonstrate that the moral argument is not a complicated matter, that it can be grasped by simple folk (comme moi), and to implore reviewers to pick up the argument”) didn’t work. I am, as the result of choices made much earlier in my life, only high school educated, yet this paper is written more for a doctrinal thesis than for me, a high school dolt. I enjoyed it, and it is well written, but some places I had to read a third time s. . .l . . o. . .w. . .l . . .y in order to get the gist of what was being said.
That said . . . nice job!
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Fellow Reluctant Heretic. ;o)
Fair point. I think the first version was simpler. When I was asked to rework it, I’m afraid it got away from me. But the fundamental points of the moral argument, I hope, are still plain.
Tom
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But, eventually, with a little brainwork, I did get it. And I must say that I both enjoyed the article as well as the challenge to go deeper into my intellectual vacuum and fill it up. Read things like this gives me deeper insight and better ammunition for discussions.
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Do you agree these claims are supposed to be as follows?
“Morally speaking, the distinction between what God wants and what God permits with respect to creation disappears once what is permitted becomes a final end….”
Clearly, that looks the controversial claim, and the justification in the above piece remains opaque. For instance, Kimel said above in a comment that “by creating this world he freely assumed the risk, which is the same as accepting and willing…” But God assumes lots of risks. He assumes – according to universalists – the risks of the Holocaust and all other evils that follow from our moral decisions. Clearly, the difference between the risks is supposed to be that one continues indefinitely and the other only for a period. So the question is why God’s intention is mere permission of the risk of the Holocaust and positive intention of indefinitely persisting in a state of mortal sin.
In clarifying/justifying 2, Tom makes this claim that we can distinguish the two because “permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end.”
‘Morally justified role as a means to a final end’ seems to mean that
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Sorry – I accidentally hit ‘enter’ and the post was incomplete. My bad.
“Morally speaking, the distinction between what God wants and what God permits with respect to creation disappears once what is permitted becomes a final end….”
Clearly, that looks the controversial claim, and the justification in the above piece remains opaque. For instance, Kimel said above in a comment that “by creating this world he freely assumed the risk, which is the same as accepting and willing…” God assumes lots of risks. God assumed at creation – I don’t think people here disagree – the risks of the Holocaust and all other evils that follow from our moral decisions. Clearly, the difference between the risks is supposed to be that one continues indefinitely and the other only for a period.
The idea is obviously that if God permits an evil to persist indefinitely, then God does not merely permit it. That much is clear. But the justification for this conditional continues to be unclear.
To put the case less ambiguously, God’s intention is supposed to be ‘mere permission’ of risks of, e.g., the Holocaust but ‘positive intention’ of indefinitely persisting evils, e.g., such as a person persisting in a state of mortal sin. In clarifying/justifying that claim above, Tom proposes that “permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end.” This is supposed to explain that God cannot merely permit indefinitely persisting evils.
‘Morally justified role as a means to a final end’ could plausibly mean that the evil does two things. The evil is an instrumental (?) means to an end, such that the end would be unachievable except by means of that evil [I do not think we should say that God’s permission of evil is a risk-taking calculus, even for evils like the Holocaust that have ceased in the past]. If that alone were the case, it wouldn’t logically support the conclusion that permission of eternal evils is to intend them, because someone could precisely permit the evil to persist indefinitely because a good would not be achievable without it.
Another way to read further into the claim is that Tom might mean that the evil ceases to exist whenever the end is achieved. But what rules out (for example) a scenario where goods are constantly being achieved by means of an evil – such that the good end is achieved in ongoing fashion and never in a given ‘final state’ after which the evil ceases to exist?
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Fr Rooney,
Thanks for dropping in. I hope I can clarify…
It’s not ‘evil’ that is instrumental, but the ‘agency’ by which we must resolve ourselves. That agency is the possibility of both our ‘yes’ and our ‘no’.
Yes, God assumes lots of risks in granting us such precarious agency – some of transient evils and others (per this debate) of irrevocable, permanent evil (i.e., Hell as traditionally held to be). You seem unsure about the moral difference (argued by universalists) between permitting the former (transient evils en route) vs permitting the latter (irrevocable and permanently enduring evil). I find it hard to believe you don’t see the difference.
Obviously, risks by definition expire once they resolve themselves in that end for which they’re undertaken, and the moral character of permitted/allowed risks is revealed in that end. Perhaps an ignorant or incompetent person takes foolish risks though they ‘mean well’ and do so for sincerely loving reasons. Still, where ignorance or compulsion inform the act, the morality or goodness of the act is thus qualified. So far so good. But in God’s case ignorance, incompetency, compulsion, etc. cannot define his act of creation. So in his case, the ‘end’ perfectly reveals the ‘whole moral truth’ of God’s determination. I think this is perfectly clear and uncontroversial. And this brings us to consider the morality of perfectly good an wise and competent God exposing creatures to infinite risk.
Lastly, you ask: What rules out a scenario where goods are achieved by means of some evil ‘in ongoing fashion and never in a final state’?
I’m trying to think it through. How would it not be a ‘final state of ongoing evil’? If it’s irrevocable (permanently enduring or irredeemable) as you must be suggesting, it’s a ‘final state’. It doesn’t have to be an unblinking cosmic stare to be a ‘state’. But it perpetually yields unending goods. Honestly, Fr Rooney, I’ve understood this to be your view of Hell – an enduring state of evil and suffering that yields perpetual good(s). Is it not your view?
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“It’s not ‘evil’ that is instrumental, but the ‘agency’ by which we must resolve ourselves.”
That’s fine. But you claimed above that “permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end.” If we substitute ‘agency’ for ‘evil’, the point is changed significantly: “God’s permission of AGENCY expires because it has served its morally justified role….” Similarly, substitute the same in the following sentence: “what is freely and knowingly permitted by God – AGENCY – for the sake of a greater good becomes morally equivalent to God willing that AGENCY.”
What you seemed to mean (as I saw it) was that some suffering is necessary because, without that suffering, the goods of free agency cannot be achieved. So, it seemed to me that you wanted to say that God permits evil/suffering ‘as a means to a final end’ of the goods of agency, not that He permits agency as a means to an end. Am I wrong about that? Did you mean ‘agency’ and not suffering is a means to an end in the above quotations?
“God assumes lots of risks in granting us such precarious agency”
To be clear, I don’t think God ‘risks’ anything – my point on that score was dialectical, since you seem to think God ‘risks’ something in creation already with regard to the possibility other moral and natural evils.
“You seem unsure about the moral difference (argued by universalists) between permitting the former (transient evils en route) vs permitting the latter (irrevocable and permanently enduring evil). I find it hard to believe you don’t see the difference.”
I am not unclear whether there is a difference between ‘transient’ evils and permanently enduring suffering. What I was asking about above was your justification for the collapse between intention and permission when it concerns permanently enduring suffering. It seems to me that you hold (like Fr. Aidan below) that evils must cease entirely in order for God to permit an evil; if evils persist, those evils cannot ‘resolve themselves in that end for which they’re undertaken…”
When I asked, “what rules out a scenario where goods are constantly being achieved by means of an evil – such that the good end is achieved in ongoing fashion and never in a given ‘final state’ after which the evil ceases to exist?” my intention was to clarify your reasons for holding that permission of an evil in light of achieving a good requires that the evil cease to exist or stop at some point. It looks to me as if you are making that sort of claim, or am I wrong?
Obviously, the suffering of hell would be a ‘final’ state in the sense of persisting forever. I was asking (again) why you think suffering needs to cease *prior* to some final state in order for God to merely permit that evil but that suffering would be ‘directly intended’ if God permits that someone suffer indefinitely.
Here’s a friendly counterexample that shows your principle that suffering must end at a given point in time for God to achieve His purposes does not seem plausible. Rasmussen has spoken before of a possible scenario where God continues to create individuals, and all suffer over time in purgative moral growth, but every person God creates is eventually saved. Nevertheless, God continually creates people over time so that, at any given time, for all the indefinite future, someone is suffering. This scenario would undermine the view that God could not achieve His purposes of salvation, even of universal salvation (!), unless suffering from moral evil were to entirely cease at a given point in time.
You might mean that suffering within each person’s life must end at a given point in time for there to be any good achieved as a result of that suffering. For example, you might think that no end can be achieved without whatever achieves that end ceasing at some point. But I’m not sure why you think this. I suggest your proposition involved blurring of two uses of ‘end’. Usually, ‘end’ is a term about moral intention, not a temporal term to indicate a literal end-state of an activity. So, for example, the truth of the claim that “my end/purpose in playing a sport is having fun” does not require that I must first *stop* playing the sport and *only then* achieve ‘having fun.’ Presumably, the act of playing the sport itself is the process which achieves my end of having fun (achieving the end is immanent to the activity, not a product of it), so whatever is involved in the process continues at all points at which I am achieving the end of having fun.
The notion of achieving an ‘end’ does not require the activity which is the achieving of that end to cease at some time, just as it does not require the means to that end entirely cease to exist when the end is achieved (I presume that even on your account, at the eschaton, e.g., the history of suffering and people’s memories of it will not cease to exist). So, if some given ends are achieved constantly (maybe, e.g., immanent to the activity, as in the case of playing a sport), then it does not seem as if achieving an end requires that the activity involving the evils cease at any given point in time. That was what I was asking: what rules out possible instances of divine permission of evil where God is constantly achieving goods, but which involves constant permission of evils?
Here’s an example you might find congenial: what if purgatorial fire achieves its end continually, so that individuals are always experiencing suffering and moral growth, but the purgatorial fire and consequent moral development achieved by that fire continues for eternity? It looks like the principle that suffering within each person’s life does NOT need to end at a given point in time for there to be any good achieved as a result of that suffering, since the moral growth just continues indefinitely forever (very Gregory of Nyssa!). Would God therefore positively intend the suffering/evil of the purgatorial fire? It looks to me as if He intends the moral growth, not the suffering, even though the suffering goes on indefinitely.
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I’ll reply down below so I can justify the text ‘left’ and not have to squeeze things into so narrow a column.
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Tom, I’ve enjoyed & appreciated your contributions. I may not be as susceptible as others to misinterpreting them if only because of your past patience & generosity in engaging my questions. So, thanks again.
From where I stand:
Fr JD raised the distinction between ‘merely permitting’ vs ‘directly intending’ an evil. That does seem to me to be precisely what’s at stake. And the crux of that matter involves our beliefs about God’s character.
This also relates directly to his articulation of the distinction between any references to ‘end’ in terms of moral intentions, as in unintended vs directly intended, and references to ‘end’ in temporal terms, as in transient vs everlasting durations. Those are also clarifying and to the point of what’s at stake. But, on my reading, you weren’t conflating or eliding any of these distinctions.
Further, Fr JD recognized a distinction between suffering, generally speaking as it would need to eventually end, and suffering in each person’s life as it would need to end at some point (the Rasmussen scenario). That, too, is a distinction I knew you had obviously already grasped.
Specifically, he then referred to the logical possibility of an individual indefinitely experiencing moral growth forever via an everlasting purgatorial fire &, in so doing, invoked the Nyssen.
Here’s my take:
That to me is thoroughly implausible and FAR removed from how I conceive eschatology, especially as informed by Macrina & Gregory.
In my view, purgation burns away the parasitic existence of our vicious secondary natures & opens us to the beatific vision & our ensuing impeccability.
Eternal epektasis, therefore, wouldn’t involve any everlasting peccability or purgation of intractable evil residues. Rather, it refers to our realization of a superabundance beyond a ‘mere’ abundance! The dynamic derives from – not im-perfections moving toward perfection, but – finite relative perfections moving toward Infinite Absolute Perfection. Nothing less than eternal theosis!
Allowing the possibility (running the risk) of unintended eternal evils (e.g. an everlasting peccability) as an unavoidable risk isn’t morally justifiable because the retributive (&/or restorative) weight of such an infinite perdition (e.g. eternal purgatorial fire) would be WAY disproportional, by definition, to any offense that could be committed by finite, fallible persons. That scenario collapses, therefore, per double-effect type principles into ‘directly intending’ – not ‘merely permitting’ – an evil.
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John,
I think you misunderstand what I was saying and asking of Tom. I was asking about Tom’s claim that God cannot ‘merely permit’ an evil that never ceases, in order to clarify the sense in which he thinks such claim is true and what the justification would be for the claim, suitably clarified.
In order to move (logically) from the fact a given state persists forever to the conclusion that it must be positively intended, you’d need a principle like the one Tom and you both seem to accept: in order for God to merely permit suffering, rather than intend it, that all suffering must end, at some definite point, in any individual’s life. And you’d need to give a good reason why anyone should accept this principle.
My discussion of blurring different meanings of ‘end’ was NOT that Tom confused ‘a time when something ends’ with ‘an end as an intention.’ My point was that there is no justification from the mere concept of acting for an end/intentions to infer from the fact that something is a temporally final ‘end state,’ a state that persists forever, to conclude that these states would be positively intended as ends. So facts about ends/intentions alone would not justify the aforementioned principle that if suffering continued forever, the existence of that suffering (even if it constitutes a state that persists as a ‘final state’ forever) would be an ‘end’ positively intended by God. There is nothing about intentions as such that shows us one could not intend something good that accidentally involves an evil, forever.
I gave two cases that are apparent counterexamples to particular ways you might try to formulate a view such as Tom’s, that help us clarify what the commitment is supposed to be. My point was to give counterexamples that show one can ‘merely permit’ evils, even when the evils go on forever.
[I was NOT claiming my second example WAS the view of Gregory Nyssa; whether the case corresponds to his eschatology has nothing to do with the point I was making. The point is that there COULD be goods which are necessarily achieved over time in such a way that those goods cannot be achieved without permitting continual suffering, like purgatorial fire and moral growth. Nor did I claim that this IS the real state of affairs, but only a possible situation that would appear to be a counterexample to the principle in question.]
Your response, however, does not justify or clarify that principle either. You seem to attempt to justify such a principle when you claim that “allowing the possibility (running the risk) of unintended eternal evils (e.g. an everlasting peccability) as an unavoidable risk isn’t morally justifiable because the retributive (&/or restorative) weight of such an infinite perdition (e.g. eternal purgatorial fire) would be WAY disproportional, by definition, to any offense that could be committed by finite, fallible persons. That scenario collapses, therefore, per double-effect type principles into ‘directly intending’ – not ‘merely permitting’ – an evil.”
But, first, classical double effect analyses do not hold that permitting a disproportionate evil effect would be to intend that evil effect. It would seem to be *unreasonable* to perform an act that would produce a good and evil effect, if the evil effect outweighed any goods involved, but not because one thereby intends the evil effect. One just acts unreasonably.
More importantly, second, I simply do not see why you believe the second scenario I offered involves necessarily disproportionate evils to the goods achieved. What you seem to think is that the second scenario presumes that someone has sinned in such a way that it deserves eternal purgation, and that no finite act can deserve eternal purgation. This concern about finite acts and their punishment, however, does not relate to the scenario I proposed. The scenario I proposed was one merely on which ongoing moral growth (or, if you want, theosis) would be achieved by purgatorial fire, forever. Similarly, I never said anything about the degree of suffering or the kinds of goods that come from it. Purgatory is generally conceived as a scenario where suffering might be intense but the goods are so significant that even very high intensity suffering is justified. Nevertheless, imagine that the suffering is low intensity, although eternal. Why is that suffering impermissibly disproportionate to the goods involved in ongoing theosis? What if an individual were willing to accept such suffering voluntarily? It seems to me there are many scenarios in which the suffering does not need to be disproportionate merely because it goes on forever.
If it were true that such sufferings could go on forever and nevertheless be justified, in SOME scenario that is possible, then the claim being made (that suffering must end at some time in order for it to be permitted in light of good ends) would be shown to be false. So we’d need a better justification for the purported principle.
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Fr JD, you wrote: “But, first, classical double effect analyses do not hold that permitting a disproportionate evil effect would be to intend that evil effect. It would seem to be *unreasonable* to perform an act that would produce a good and evil effect, if the evil effect outweighed any goods involved, but not because one thereby intends the evil effect. One just acts unreasonably.”
JSS:
What would seem to me to be most unreasonable would be any stipulation that God could act unreasonably. Even granting that, One would thus act not just unreasonably but unlawfully. But just like our parsings of formal, material, im/mediate, remote, etc, one’s decision to act thusly can be considered tantamount to formal intent.
The higher one sets the bar for putative acts of God to be deemed unjust, the lower one sets the bar for the divine will to be either wholly voluntaristic or vulgarly consequentialistic. Furthermore, theological skepticism regarding God’s character in this regard are not in the least persuasive to those who’ve seen Jesus and, thereby, the Father’s love.
Fr JD, you wrote: “Why is that suffering impermissibly disproportionate to the goods involved in ongoing theosis? What if an individual were willing to accept such suffering voluntarily? It seems to me there are many scenarios in which the suffering does not need to be disproportionate merely because it goes on forever.”
JSS:
My universalism, on its own terms, refers to – not an escape from eternal hellfire, but – affirmations of the universal divine indwelling in all rational creatures, beyond the divine omnipresence in creation. This is just to point out to other interlocutors, that I’m stipulating to many premises, even definitions, as I engage what, per my universalism, is a pseudo-problem. For example, it’s important to me that other persons, who read this exchange in years to come, know that I reject out of hand libertarian accounts of freedom that would, for example, imagine one could, in principle, knowingly, willingly & absolutely ever (much less eternally) reject God. So, neither would I accept that an eternal theosis could ever fail to have transisted from the merely purgative (of eternally peccable, imperfect, vicious natures) to the robustly epektatic (of eternally impeccable, relatively perfect natures).
But, even granting your libertarian account and your sufferring-laden theosis, and as one who does believe there are both certain epistemic distancings that do go on forever as well as hierarchies of beatitude (per degrees of glory in terms of scope not intensity per secondary not primary beatitudes), still, in my view, any degree of an infinite ill being remains a disproportionate punishment of a finite person & unmitigated frustration of one’s end. That infinite evil would not outweigh the finite good of a libertarian human freedom.
We return to the recurring impasse regarding God’s character. I suppose it will inevitably present itself because an analytic analysis must be tethered to a shared evaluative disposition in order to reason our way to a consensus conclusion regarding God’s character.
While I do very much believe in our ability to travel from the descriptive to the prescriptive, given to normative, and ‘is to ought,’ that will always very much depend on our coupling of self-evident prescriptive premises to descriptive premises in order to proceed syllogistically to a valid normative conclusion. Embedded in those prescriptive premises will be the evaluative dispositions of our shared moral intuitions, common sensibilities & aesthetic inclinations, as can be either connatural or deformed to various degrees.
All that said, my disagreements with the eschatological majoritarians are rooted less so in any defects of formal argumentation, rejections of premises & disambiguations of concepts, and much more so in the stances they take, which to me are morally unintelligible & aesthetically repugnant. This whole debate strikes me as what Stump criticizes as ‘doing analytic theology without Franciscan knowledge.’
In very large measure, then, arguments like my own, weakly informed, or even Dr. Hart’s, remarkably informed, rely very much on appeals to others’ common sense & sensibilities. We’re begging mothers & fathers, daughters & sons, to not bracket their moral intuitions or set aside their aesthetic sensibilities when thinking about God’s love & mercy.
So, that’s where our deepest impasse is, Fr JD, not in some justifying principle that distinguishes duration from gravity. I find Calvinism, Libertarian Infernalism & Compatibilist Infernalism to be equally repugnant, aesthetically, and unintelligible, morally. I’m not judging those who hold these positions but am here to admonish them regarding the dangers of their blindness becoming willful.
I thank you for your respectful & substantive engagements but I am not even ‘almost persuaded.’
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Thanks John.
I’m struggling to understand what makes it so difficult for some to see the moral connection that binds ‘means’ to ‘ends’ (in this case, ‘means’ to ‘final end’).
We all meet with ‘unintended ends’. For us, those may be ‘unexpected ends’ because we’re finite knowers, right? But ‘unintended’ ends or outcomes are pretty familiar. We can knowingly permit the possibility of evils we don’t intend, but we do so because permitting those is the price tag of getting the good end we desire. I’m preaching to the choir, I know. You see this.
So if I knowingly and freely permit ‘as a final end’ evil which I (supposedly) do not ‘intend’ (as one might imagine in the case of an eternal hell), then we’re in the position of asking what we ask of all permitted evils: Why is this evil permitted? What end morally justifies its permission? But in the case of evil that becomes ‘end’, what’s ‘permitted’ becomes itself the ‘end’ in light of which we’re to understand its moral justification. That’s how the collapse occurs.
The eternal purgation of souls whose evil never diminishes? I find the though horrific (as an ‘end’ freely permitted by an infinitely good God).
Rasmussen. I mean, it’s definitely better than eternal conscious torment. It’s a kind of endless repetition of universalist timelines. But I agree with you, this pulls the carpet out from underneath the NT vision of a consummated created order, from which death has ceased and in which God is ‘all in all’. Why construe this hope as eternally repeating universalist ‘economies’? Just so we get to say, ‘Evil still exists and people will always be suffering it’?
Tom
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Tom, you wrote: “The eternal purgation of souls whose evil never diminishes? I find the thought horrific (as an ‘end’ freely permitted by an infinitely good God).”
See my response to Fr JD. That’s the rub. I address the indispensable role our evaluative dispositions play as we draw our differing normative conclusions. My universalism was gifted me when I became a Daddy. Becoming a Grandpaw numerous times over purged me of any vestiges of a Baroque (B-roke) Thomism!
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Fr JDR, I just reread the first comment that you made on Tom’s original post (https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/01/24/david-bentley-hart-and-the-moral-argument-against-hell/#comment-34565). At that time you clearly did not grasp the significance of Hart’s argument that at the Eschaton God’s antecedent will collapses into his consequent will. Apparently you still have not grasped it nor have you offered a cogent refutation of it. If God assumes the risk of creating agents who might possibly damn themselves through the commission of mortal sin, then he necessarily confirms and wills that end in its irredeemability. There is no longer room for “permission”: permission of suffering presupposes redeemability. The God of absolute love does not permit suffering that he cannot heal, redeem, and transfigure; and he certainly does not permit interminable torment. All suffering is an evil.
And your claim that God does not foreknow the names of the damned is, at least at least by classical theism standards, is controversial and by no means “orthodox.” Even if even if we erase the “fore-,” God eternally knows the destiny of all in his one eternal act of creation. He doesn’t wait to see the outcome; he knows it. Brian Shanley states the traditional Thomist view:
https://afkimel.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/shanley-on-aquinas-on-gods-causal-knowledge.pdf.
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If he were to let himself understand it, he would have to admit his inability to answer it. He’s never going to get it unless he wants to; and he’ll want to only when he’s understood it. So it is what it is.
The only virtue f the Wahlberg article is that he did try to address the argument. He failed at the last, and his own counterargument just came across as morally obtuse (which was understandable, given the position he was trying to defend). But he made an honest effort.
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“All suffering is an evil.”
Yes, rarely is this truth stated so plainly and unequivocally.
But the hellmonger does not see the suffering of those in hell is an evil. Commenting on another post, Rooney said that the “badness” (his term) of their suffering is transformed by God. Thus, it is not that the damned don’t suffer—their suffering is unfathomable and interminable—it is that their suffering is no longer bad. This endless torture has been cleansed of its “badness” by Christ’s sacrifice. This is perfectly sensible, right?
This is at least part of the problem—we can’t even come to a consensus as to what constitutes evil. For the hellmonger, evil is not always evil.
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Fr. Aidan,
First, my comments on the prior article about ‘libertarian free will’ did not really represent my own position – I was presenting various possible scenarios on which the claims would not follow.
You refer to a place where I proposed to deny that “God foreknows, before He creates a given person, that they will inevitably be damned.” You are not correct that classical theism requires this claim to be true, because you are merely misinterpreting my claims in light of time, when I meant ‘before’ in the order among God’s intentions, logically speaking (viz., I was talking about ‘creation,’ where God’s decision to create are in eternity, not time). Molinists would think it is true God knows that an individual will freely choose to be damned, independent of God’s volition, but Banezians will not. So, I aiming to represent Banezian claims about God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom; for such theories, there would not be a metaphysical basis for God to know what an individual will do independent of God’s decision to create and otherwise cause the existence of the other actions that a person will perform. So, yes, on such theories, I think it is fair to say that God would have no basis to know that an individual will be damned before He chooses to create them.
As for the other claim that I don’t understand the argument, I think that I do, but I will respond directly now to what you said above.
You proposed three salient propositions that look to be part of an argument against God being able to permit hell.
1. If God creates agents who possibly damn themselves, then He intends that such creatures do this.
2. Permission of evil presupposes redeemability.
3. The God of absolute love does not permit suffering that he cannot heal, redeem, and transfigure.
These propositions do not logically support each other or any conclusion to be drawn from them together, without any further premises, and so are not an argument stated in formal terms. [That’s also why I did not include the claim that “he certainly does not permit interminable torment” since that would be a circular argument that includes your own conclusion within the premises that are supposed to support it.]
Would you say this represents your reasoning?
1. Permission of evil presupposes redeemability.
2. An evil cannot be redeemed unless that evil ceases to exist, at some time or another.
3. All suffering is an evil.
4. If an agent continues in suffering forever, that suffering can in no way be redeemed.
5. But God cannot allow or cause to exist a suffering that cannot be redeemed.
6. Therefore, God cannot allow or cause to exist a state of eternal suffering, such as hell.
The salient controversial premise in this reasoning would be 2, which I would deny, but which you also did not state explicitly, so it is my attempt to supply what you need to get from the propositions you did offer to the conclusion. But I will refrain from responding until I hear from you whether 2 (and the whole argument) accurately represents your view.
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Fr J.D.,
I do not recognize my argument (or Hart’s argument) in your six premises. There is no mention of either the Eschaton or of the antecedent/consequent distinction. Please try again.
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You need to add the following premises (or something like them):
1) The Eschaton definitively reveals the nature of God.
2) At the Eschaton, God’s antecedent salvific will collapses into his consequent will.
3) At the Eschaton, God’s permission of suffering becomes his willing of the everlasting suffering of the damned..
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Al,
As for 3, it’s not quite right to say his permission *becomes* his willing, if one means that at that point permission is transformed into willing by the exhaustion of the possibility of salvation for some. Better to say that the eschatological state of all things, with all possible entailments, being positively willed by God, reveals a moral modal collapse that is intrinsic in the very act of creation from the beginning. Not to get too pedantic, but one needs to be clear that we’re talking not about a collapse that eventuates from a certain situation, but rather an intrinsic *moral* indistinction that is only defectively characterized (from a provisional point of view) as a real difference between will and permission in God.
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Yes, quite right, David. I agree. The language of “collapse” cannot be taken literally. I think of it along these lines, namely, that God’s consequent will as revealed at the Eschaton in fact reveals what God’s antecedent will actually is. Hence if there is an everlasting hell, then that qualifies the statement “God desires the salvation of all,” that is to say, God’s love is shown to be conditional upon ___, at which point we are talking about “justice,” not absolute, unconditional love.
Do you disagree? Are we on the same page?
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David, compare my summary of your position on the dual wills of God in this article and tell me if I’ve gotten it wrong. Thanks.
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Fr. Rooney,
Since the dialectic seems to be boiling down to whether or not the evil of damnation/ disunion with God/ infinite suffering is one that can be permitted as a means that conduces to any greater good, I’d like your thoughts on this form of an argument which I believe could be adapted from Hart’s book.
1. Anything contrary to the antecedent will of God is a natural evil
2. Damnation/ disunion with God is a natural evil (1 Tim 2:4) (from 1)
3. The eschaton is a reflection of God’s goodness as the end for which He creates
4. There is damnation/ disunion in the eschaton
5. The good of the eschaton is willed per se as a greater good over its evil willed per accidens
6. A greater good is a relative good insofar as it is relatively more desirable than the good lost in the privation of its conditional evil
7. The eschaton is relatively good (from 5 & 6)
8. God is relatively good (from 3 & 7)
This reasoning, if sound, would seem to forfend any speak of “greater goods” in the eschaton. The only admissible picture of the eschaton would therefore be wholly good and completely absent evil as this is the truly accurate representation of God’s goodness… wholly good… devoid of evil.
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Mike,
The argument is not valid. 3, 5 and 6 are not put in correct logical form and it’s missing premises to move between them. The first two premises do nothing logically so I eliminated them. All of the following are also phrased very obscurely in a way that employs lots of terms we can take various ways (‘relative good’) and so are unhelpful in getting at the logical form.
I think your argument is simpler than you propose. Here’s my attempt to put it correctly:
1. The state of the eschaton is absolutely good (instantiating God’s own goodness?)
2. A state is not absolutely good if it admits of accidental privations or can be compared to another greater good.
2a. If there were damnation in the eschaton, there could be another greater good eschatological future without damnation, and so it would not be absolutely good.
3. If the eschaton involves damnation it would be both absolutely good and not absolutely good. Contradiction!
4. Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, the eschaton cannot admit the possibility of damnation.
However, the first premise is what strikes me as false and should be rejected as generating the absurdity. No created thing, including whatever exists are the eschaton, is perfectly good, since to be LITERALLY perfectly good such as to admit not further perfection is to instantiate the divine essence. I would also deny that there is any unique beat possible world for the same reason – I think it generates a contradiction.
What is meant might be that all which happens at the eschaton must be “for the best” so that nothing exists except in light of the overall good of the whole state. There might be other “best” worlds God could create, but no world is the uniquely best set of goods God could create. Thus, all that happens/exists in each world God could create is for the best of all in that world, but not absolutely the best according to any individual measure at all. (And this is plausible, since even universalists should admit that sin or suffering in our world is not the best possible state for anyone who experiences it; and that it would be possible for God to eliminate or prevent just that suffering/sin, thereby making the world in some respect a better world.) But, if we admit the eschaton is a state in which all is for the best and not a uniquely or absolutely best state, this is compatible with a state where every privation or evil permitted in that eschatological future state is “redeemed” (that is, its being permitted is good for the whole state of the world, and no evil exists which fails to do this).
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Fr. Rooney,
Thank you for the reply. I am aware that the argument I provided is not in valid logical form. I wasn’t intending to do that anyway but rather just listing the conceptual premises so that a proper “syllogism” could be intuited from them. Your reconstruction is interesting but I’m not sure it captures exactly what I had in mind (perhaps my own fault). One problem I would point out is that in your explanation you say that no created thing can be literally perfectly good, which is true, but that does not mean that it is therefore evil, as an evil is a privation of a good that something *should* have. A damned human is an evil because he lacks the beatific vision to which he is called by nature. A human in heaven that is not identical to the divine essence itself is not an evil because it is not in the nature of a human to be the divine essence. Point being, in the “universalist ” eschaton, there is no evil whatsoever, while in the “infernalist” eschaton, there are evils. And if the eschaton is a reflection of God’s will for creation and revelation of his nature, then it ought to be devoid of evil as He is. It’s like if I were to ask a governor whether he wants a city with no drug addicts, or a city with drug addicts who receive just punishments to manifest the goodness of the law. Hopefully a perfectly morally sane governor would only be capable of choosing the former. But your view of the eschaton is more like the latter, no?
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OK, I was representing the argument that you gave above in your first post, not your overall position. Since you did not mention antecedent/consequent will or the eschaton, I did not mention it in the reconstruction above.
But, if you want to propose a different kind of argument, then we can do that. Nevertheless, we need to put the argument formally and I do not see whether you think the claims you suggested are supposed to be added to the prior argument I proposed or in a separate argument. Because the argument I gave allows us to phrase the relevant claims without any reference to the consequent/permissive will of God, and this might be a virtue since these terms are terms of art that need to be cashed out.
So, if we put the argument the way you suggested, it appears to be straightforwardly circular without implicit premises that justify the claims. I will suggest some implicit premises for you to fill the gaps (all lettered premises), but I should note that the premise 1 looks unnecessary or a kind of intermediate conclusion rather than a premise, and premise 2 and 3 look functionally identical – since ‘permissive will’ is another way of referring to what God antecedently wills in regard to His consequent willing. Similarly, it does not make sense to say that God’s permission ‘becomes’ positive intending, since what God wills would not change (as DBH said below).
Nevertheless, trying to preserve best what you are getting at, we can put together from those claims an argument that looks like this:
1a. Whatever persists at the Eschaton is positively willed and not merely permitted.
1b. To positively will or intend is to will something for its own sake.
1. If suffering persists at the Eschaton, then it can be nothing other than what God positively wills for its own sake.
2. Whatever God positively wills (at the Eschaton or otherwise) definitively reveals the nature of God.
2a. To will suffering for its own sake is to act as a bad or evil agent.
3a. If God positively wills suffering forever, he is acting as a bad or evil agent.
3b. Therefore, if suffering persists at the Eschaton, then God is definitively revealed to be a bad or an evil agent.
First, do you think this argument accurately represents your reasoning?
Second, if it does represent your reasoning, the problem with providing this argument is that it has nothing to do with what I have been asking for clarification about. The relevant premise we need an argument for is premise 1a/1, since the argument you offered fails if we deny 1a/1 (which is precisely the premise that I and many other deny) and this is the premise that we need support for. The argument that I gave earlier was supposed to represent reasons that you gave IN SUPPORT OF premise 1a/1, whereas the argument you are offering is an inference FROM 1a/1 to other conclusions. Anyone can admit that, IF 1a were true, THEN your conclusion 3c follows; because the chief controversial premise has always primarily been 1a/1. If the moral argument of Hart’s is – similarly – an inference from rather than in support of the relevant premises, then we need a further argument beyond that argument for the premise in question too, since premise 1a/1 is not self-evident or uncontroversially or obviously true. [In fact, if Hart’s moral argument were to include premise 1a/1 as a premise, his moral argument would be circular, since the conclusion of Hart’s argument looks to be that same premise 1a/1 phrased differently, viz., that God cannot merely permit evil which persists at the eschaton.]
So, I await your argument for the relevant premises 1a/1.
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Fr JDR, I’m unclear what “first” article you are referring to. Are you referring to my initial comment? If so, the first paragraph explicitly refers to the eschatological interpretation of the antecedent-consequent distinction and frames the second paragraph. If you are thinking of some other article, then that is irrelevant to Tom’s present article, which is what this combox discussion is all about.
I will ponder your new proposed premises and get back to you.
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Mike,
The argument is not valid. 3, 5 and 6 are not put in correct logical form and it’s missing premises to move between them. The first two premises do nothing logically so I eliminated them. All of the following are also phrased very obscurely in a way that employs lots of terms we can take various ways (‘relative good’) and so are unhelpful in getting at the logical form.
I think your argument is simpler than you propose. Here’s my attempt to put it correctly:
1. The state of the eschaton is absolutely good (instantiating God’s own goodness?)
2. A state is not absolutely good if it admits of accidental privations or can be compared to another greater good.
2a. If there were damnation in the eschaton, there could be another greater good eschatological future without damnation, and so it would not be absolutely good.
3. If the eschaton involves damnation it would be both absolutely good and not absolutely good. Contradiction!
4. Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, the eschaton cannot admit the possibility of damnation.
However, the first premise is what strikes me as false and should be rejected as generating the absurdity. No created thing, including whatever exists are the eschaton, is perfectly good, since to be LITERALLY perfectly good such as to admit not further perfection is to instantiate the divine essence. I would also deny that there is any unique beat possible world for the same reason – I think it generates a contradiction.
What is meant might be that all which happens at the eschaton must be “for the best” so that nothing exists except in light of the overall good of the whole state. There might be other “best” worlds God could create, but no world is the uniquely best set of goods God could create. Thus, all that happens/exists in each world God could create is for the best of all in that world, but not absolutely the best according to any individual measure at all. (And this is plausible, since even universalists should admit that sin or suffering in our world is not the best possible state for anyone who experiences it; and that it would be possible for God to eliminate or prevent just that suffering/sin, thereby making the world in some respect a better world.) But, if we admit the eschaton is a state in which all is for the best and not a uniquely or absolutely best state, this is compatible with a state where every privation or evil permitted in that eschatological future state is “redeemed” (that is, its being permitted is good for the whole state of the world, and no evil exists which fails to do this).
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Fr R, for better or worse, non of us is a professional logician. I think it may be counter-productive for you to expect us to be guide you through to constructing a syllogism, as fond as we are are of syllogism. ;o)
If Hart wants to lay one out, he can do so. But you should be able to discern the structure of his argument from his Notre Dame piece. If not, then I don’t believe any of us is going to succeed at help you formulate something that does you or us justice.
Why don’t we try this. Just summarize Hart’s moral argument as you understand it. Don’t reformulate in terms that express your own conclusions. Consider that someone who did not know the argument asked you what Hart’s basic case was (not what you thought of it), what would you say? We want the person your explaining it to to not have any idea what your opinion of the argument is when you’re done explaining it. I don’t know that any one achieves quite this level of objective presentation, but hell, let’s try.
Tom
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I literally HATE typos.
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I can sort of see the point about being in the final end state converts permission to deliberately willing, but more simply because God has willed that whatever state things have got to at that point should be the end state, rather than that they should continue until better circumstances should be reached (i.e. “If all is not well in the end, then it is not the end.”)
I don’t think that there is such a qualitative difference between finite and infinite evils as suggested. The joy of heaven in union with God is an infinite good which it is not immediately obviously necessarily immoral to weigh against an infinite evil: I think this point needs to be justified. Likewise, it is possible to argue that not creating at all would itself be an evil, and arguably an infinite one, which one would then have to weigh against the creation of an infinite hell.
It seems to me that what weighs against inflicting the infinite evil of hell on someone (or risking doing so) as opposed to a merely finite evil, is that if you cause or permit a person to suffer temporarily, one can make it up to that person subsequently with some greater good for the person themselves, but if you cause or permit an infinite, final, evil on a person, then any greater good that comes out of it, no matter how good, can only be a greater good for someone else. For hell to be moral, firstly you have to assume hell as being a logical necessity for the existence of creation at all, and secondly you have to be OK with the idea that the damned are sacrificed (or put at risk of being sacrificed) against their will to eternal torment to permit (or enhance) the joy of the saved.
That being said, if it were true that creating at all necessarily hazarded eternal torment, you could argue not creating would be also immoral: since, by not creating, God would be sacrificing the joy of the never-to-exist saved for the benefit of those who would otherwise have been damned, and you are down to debating the lesser of two evils.
If hell were a necessity for creation to exist at all, the moral arguments about hell to my mind strip down to basically a cosmic trolley problem: as God trundles along in his trolley does he stay on track A and condemn everything that might have been to non existence or flip the creation switch and change tracks to save creation, but then run over and condemn to hell the sinners on track B.
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Iain,
It may be just me, and I may have violated this myself, but I don’t like phrasing it in terms of ‘permission simply becoming deliberate willing’. I prefer to say the end makes the two ‘morally equivalent’. I suppose I wanna keep them semantically separate for the sake of clarity. But maybe, logically, they’re morally equivalent because they really do collapse into the same thing, one and the same ‘act’.
I like ‘If all is not well, then it’s not the end’. Tweet that!
I don’t see a moral problem in ‘unactualized possibilities’ per se (not creating, or not having kids you could have), as if not creating would be a violation against those who would be created but now will not. Maybe others would agree. Dunno. You would have to tell parents who could continue to have children one after another – 4, 6, 10, etc., but who stop at 1 or 2 – that they are doing evil against the kids they could have but choose not to have. I don’t think that works.
I’m not sure how to make sense for you of the qualitative difference between finite and infinite evils. Are you really indifferent to, say, suffering unspeakable pain for 5 minutes vs a year, or an entire lifetime, or more relevantly all eternity? Or are you indifferent to the difference between having a beloved child tortured for an hour vs a lifetime or all eternity? These are all qualitatively equivalent states? You explain: “The joy of heaven…is an infinite good which it is not immediately obviously necessarily immoral to weigh against an infinite evil.” I’m not following this last statement. Can you say again what comparison or contrast you’re drawing between the two? I wanna understand this.
Tom
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Tom: “But maybe, logically, they’re morally equivalent because they really do collapse into the same thing, one and the same ‘act’.”
Yes, I think that that it must be the case that God wills the final end that is the Eschaton, and if that end includes the everlasting torment of the damned, then it is willed by God. How could it be otherwise? He is, after all, the one who calls the End into being in one eternal act. At no point is he a mere observer. We aren’t deists.
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True.
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Yeah, not having more kids isn’t a wrong against the extra kids you don’t have, but a collective decision by everyone to let mankind die out just to avoid the hassle of providing for its future would be, I think, and so would God deliberately not creating anything at all, so nothing would ever have existed be loss and a calamity also.
What I mean in my last statement is that the moral justification of eternal suffering still allows the same utilitarian calculations as dealing with finite suffering: is X number of people experiencing eternal joy worth the cost of Y number of people experiencing eternal torment? That’s why I call it a “trolley problem”.
Like the original trolley problem, however, any kind of detailed analysis just highlights the absurdity of the whole thing. The correct “real world” solution to the trolley problem is to change tracks while the trolley is going over the points to derail it, and thus kill no-one on either track. That this is cheating just demonstrates that these kinds of dilemmas are the province of artificially created scenarios that don’t really exist given pretend trappings of reality as if this made them meaningful. The moral argument against hell can be (and is) “refuted” by omnipotent theologians creating unreal dilemmas to trap a helpless God into the best compromise God can manage in the artificial circumstances the theologians create. It can’t stand on its own but needs creation ex nihilo to extract it from these sort of nonsense “what ifs”.
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Iain: Yeah, not having more kids isn’t a wrong against the extra kids you don’t have, but a collective decision by everyone to let mankind die out just to avoid the hassle of providing for its future would be, I think, and so would God deliberately not creating anything at all…
Tom: I don’t see the connection. The choice to ‘let a species die out to avoid a hassle’ is not at all like ‘not creating at all’.
Iain: What I mean in my last statement is that the moral justification of eternal suffering still allows the same utilitarian calculations as dealing with finite suffering…
Tom: I’m all ears. Could you explain for me the goodness and love of either intending or permitting eternal suffering? I need to see the moral justification.
Iain: The moral argument against hell can be (and is) “refuted” by omnipotent theologians creating unreal dilemmas to trap a helpless God into the best compromise God can manage in the artificial circumstances the theologians create. It can’t stand on its own but needs creation ex nihilo to extract it from these sort of nonsense “what ifs”.
Tom: Not following ya. Sorry. If you could unpack that for me I’d appreciate it. What are these ‘unreal dilemmas’? Exactly how does God ‘compromise’? What are the ‘artificial circumstances’ you’re supposing? We’re talking about how ‘intentions’ and ‘permissions’ morally relate to ‘final ends’ freely embraced. I mean, these terms define the life we live every day. And the Xan story does propose a final end and consummation to these same lives. ‘Hell’ figures into that story. These seem like relevant claims about the destiny of real people. I don’t see this debate lost in unreal dilemmas, compromises, and artificial circumstances – but I may just be misunderstanding your point.
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I think the problem here is that you have somehow got the impression I am defending eternal hell – I’m not, I’m a universalist – I just don’t think the moral argument is the clincher on its own. My point is that people can and do justify pretty much anything morally by setting up ridiculous, convoluted premises to give the result they want.
So far my analogies have stunk, so I’ll
try another one. If you decide to build a building, no matter how careful you are there is always the risk of a construction accident in which a worker may be seriously injured or die. Hazarding that death or injury isn’t immoral, however, if the good done in building the building is worth the risk. Indeed, refusing to build anything at all, no matter how it might be needed, because you refuse to accept the hazard might be seen as positively wrong.
The risk to the workers in this scenario is a finite harm, weighed against a finite benefit. I don’t think it makes a difference if it is a risk of an eternal / infinite harm, so long as it is being weighed against an eternal / infinite benefit. You can then construct (and I use the word “construct” advisedly) some kind of scenario where God has to hazard some people going to an eternal hell because it’s the only way to create an eternal paradise, and the good of the eternal paradise is worth the risk of a “construction accident” befalling some of the souls involved in its creation, as long as God is a responsible contractor taking all reasonably practicable steps to minimise the risk.
That is why moral arguments against an eternal hell rely on God being God and not a contractor, and creating ex nihilo by sheer will with nothing to constrain him and no hazards save that he himself creates. The point about unreal scenarios and artificial dilemmas is that theological defences of the eternity of hell work by relying on people forgetting this.
Typically you will get assertions about why the dead can’t change their nature, or how it’s possible for people to become completely fixed in character in life, or what-have-you, so that God is somehow forced to keep them in hell against his will, and for whatever (invented) reason has no way of changing this, and so is still good because he’s just doing the best for them he can in the circumstances he is left with. God, however, is never left in any circumstances he did not himself create, so any supposed dilemma only exists if God wants it to, and the infernalists don’t get to tell God what he is or is not allowed to do.
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Thanks for the clarity. So, universalist, just not a believer in the moral argument.
Iain: If you decide to build a building, no matter how careful you are there is always the risk of a construction accident in which a worker may be seriously injured or die. Hazarding that death or injury isn’t immoral, however, if the good done in building the building is worth the risk.
Tom: This, though, is precisely the structure of the moral argument we’re discussing. Embark upon a project, expose other to risk. The project is worth the risks if…etc etc. That’s the point.
I’m not sure about turning this conclude the immortality of not-creating. You say:
“Indeed, refusing to build anything at all, no matter how it might be needed, because you refuse to accept the hazard might be seen as positively wrong.”
I don’t see how this connects to God’s act of creating. There is no ‘need out there’ for God to provide a creation. And were we to attempt (as carefully as we might) to describe God’s freedom in creating (even his freedom ‘from’ creating) it wouldn’t require us to suppose God is ‘refusing to accept the hazards’ involved.
I don’t know if people (I don’t mean you; I’m just thinking on the sidelines) realize how radical a thing divine plenitude is. There is nothing lacking in it which creation supplies, no moral compulsion that inclines him to create. Indeed, I think as strongly as Fr Rooney defends his libertarian understanding of God’s free act of creation (as fully counterfactually free as imaginable), it is precisely God’s plenitude and freedom which fail to figure into Rooney’s assessment of the moral justification of God’s permitting ‘eternal suffering’. God needs nothing from creating, is not improved upon by the union in him of those who find their way to him, avoids no moral criticism by creating, etc. – and this same plenitude is an infinite act of knowing and loving. How one can construe such infinite knowing and loving as capable of deeming the union in him of so absolutely unnecessary and gratuitous a universe of creatures worth exposing even one of its members to eternal suffering – is beyond me. It’s akin to believing in a flat earth; ‘akin’, not equivalent to or convertible with. Flat earthers could see that the world is round if they wanted to see it. But they manage to construe the math and angles and geometry to fabricate evidence for a flat earth. You just have to wish them well and move on.
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“You just have to wish them well and move on.”
But he keeps coming back. 😉
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Well, I was thinking of flat earthers. I have given up on them. But I still have hope that Fr Rooney can see the light! ;o)
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What I think is that universalism requires *both* that God is good *and* creation ex nihilo: without either the argument falls away. Obviously, if God is a moral monster then God can do what God likes. But similarly, I think also that if (in order to justify the infernalist position) you invent enough artificial, external constraints on what God is or is not able to do then it is possible to contrive a scenario where a helpless and hopelessly compromised God is left with no choice but to reluctantly permit an eternal hell as a “least bad” option. I say “permit” because this is now effectively something God has been forced to do by external circumstances (and, of course, by supposing that there can be such external circumstances, the infernalist is effectively left arguing that God is not God).
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Forgive my typos in the last post, Iain!
I caught this one. “I’m not sure about turning FROM this TO conclude the immortality of not-creating” is what I meant.
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Thanks, Tom.
As for Andy’s question, it is again the very confusion I warn against–in the paper and in the book but also in several explanations of the book since then–of the moral question I pose, which can only refer to the final state of all things a comprised in the creative will, and the general problem of evil. As I have repeatedly said, Meditation One has nothing to do with the problem of evil at all, and any arguments regarding that problem are entirely matters of relative evaluation with regard to a calculus we cannot fully work out. The issue I raise is entirely concerned with the moral logic of will and permission in regard to an elective END. (I would italicize rather than capitalize, but that’s a combox for you.) And it is a binary “game-choice” logic well within our capacity to judge.
Andy’s a good soul and fine scholar, but he’s simply missing the point there.
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I’m going to look silly if this doesn’t work, but…italics with HTML tags?
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In re: to White’s quoted passages, it seems to me that there is never an end of fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of creaturely freedom that DBH and others argue for, that a creature cannot be rationally (fully) free in the absence of an end or purpose toward which it is striving, without which a rational agent couldn’t genuinely rationally act. That is, rational freedom has no sense in the absence of such an end, it would merely be random and insensible chaos. And to the extent that one is ignorant in any way regarding the telos of creaturely striving (Creation itself constituting that telos in one and the same act) it is not fully free. Therefore, there is no such thing–there could be no such thing–as a “final” or “endless” refusal of God’s grace because grace is never being consciously “refused” or “resisted” per se; rather, it is being obscured in various ways, and to “see” rightly is to experience the infusion of grace, to be connected to one’s own divine end (which is God’s creative act), not so much to consciously submit to a particular historical creed or to intentionally will faith in a particular object or idea.
Conversely, to “refuse” grace is not to consciously reject a creed or faith proposition but to simply assent to the idea that what one sees is all there is to see, and all that could be seen (being ignorant of what lies in obscurity, again, for various reasons). Obviously, then, none of us are entirely “free” on this mortal plane since our natural sight lies behind dark glass. Thus, full “rejection” of the divine isn’t even fully possible in our current state, and therefore if one insists on the immutable reality of hell, then the extreme Hyper-Calvinist position of absolute omnipotence being the only true name of God is the only valid and consistent position to take, since you must therefore commit to the idea that God is a tyranny of unreason beyond human comprehension and nothing but that.
Or so it seems to me.
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FrR: “Tom: It’s not ‘evil’ that is instrumental, but the ‘agency’ by which we must resolve ourselves.” …But you claimed above that “permission expires because it has served its morally justified role as a means to a final end.” If we substitute ‘agency’ for ‘evil’, the point is changed significantly: “God’s permission of AGENCY expires because it has served its morally justified role….”
Tom: Yes, the agency “by which we resolve ourselves” expires. Agency, that is, in its unresolved (deliberative) mode with respect to good/evil, is finally resolved. The permission of this particular mode of choosing (given for growth and movement from origin to end) expires. We continue to exercise ‘agency’, sure, but fully habituated in the Good. But this has nothing to do with thinking that some suffering is necessary (or not). It’s just the ‘agency’ I had in view.
FrR: To be clear, I don’t think God ‘risks’ anything – my point on that score was dialectical, since you seem to think God ‘risks’ something in creation already with regard to the possibility other moral and natural evils.
Tom: I don’t mind losing the term ‘risk’. I don’t require it. Obviously God cannot expose himself to risks. But it captures the precarious experience of human being, brought into being without its own consent and set upon a path to resolve itself in such stark existential terms.
FrR: I am not unclear whether there is a difference between ‘transient’ evils and permanently enduring suffering.
Tom: I didn’t say you seemed unclear about the difference between transient evils and permanently enduring suffering. I said you seemed unsure about ‘the moral difference’ between the two, between intending or permitting the former over intending or permitting the latter.
FrR: What I was asking about above was your justification for the collapse between intention and permission when it concerns permanently enduring suffering. It seems to me that you hold (like Fr. Aidan below) that evils must cease entirely in order for God to permit an evil; if evils persist, those evils cannot ‘resolve themselves in that end for which they’re undertaken…”
Tom: Again, “evil” isn’t undertaken. The “possibility” (of transient evils) may be undertaken. And this “possibility” can resolve itself into the final (good) end God intends for it. But ‘persistent evil’ as such ‘resolving itself’ into some good end? I don’t think so.
FrR: …my intention was to clarify your reasons for holding that permission of an evil in light of achieving a good requires that the evil cease to exist or stop at some point. It looks to me as if you are making that sort of claim, or am I wrong?
Tom: Right. Evil comes to an end, expires, vanishes. But I don’t understand why this is a question for you. Why would you doubt what a universalist’s position on this would be? To be a universalist is to make the claim that evil expires. How is it possible you are wondering whether Fr Al or I believe evil will eventually end?
FrR: I was asking (again) why you think suffering needs to cease *prior* to some final state in order for God to merely permit that evil but that suffering would be ‘directly intended’ if God permits that someone suffer indefinitely.
Tom: We should clarify. ‘Indefinite’ allows for a change in status or state. As a universalist, I’d say eschatological suffering is ‘indefinite’ because it’s not set on a timer or a terminus ad quem. But you (I take it) do not believe Hell is of ‘indefinite’ duration. You believe it’s permanent and irrevocable.
But to you question – What reduces ‘permission’ to ‘direct willing’ morally speaking is when what is permitted becomes irrevocable and permanent, a final end or state. What ‘final good’ (all final ends God intends cannot but be ‘good’) would you suggest ‘final evil’ (or final suffering) serves?
Again, I think we have arrived at our basement: Different moral intuitions (or sense, or imagination). Can one morally imagine an infinitely good and loving God not intending himself as the end of all spiritual creatures? I think not. Can one morally imagine God permitting the possibility of transient evils en route to that end? I think that can be made sense of, yes. Can one morally imagine God either intending or permitting final, permanent, irrevocable evil as the resolved, final end of any spiritual creature? I can’t imagine it.
Your Rasmussen example. Really?
FrR: [Re: the Rasmussen scenario…] You might mean that suffering within each person’s life must end at a given point in time for there to be any good achieved as a result of that suffering. For example, you might think that no end can be achieved without whatever achieves that end ceasing at some point. But I’m not sure why you think this.
Tom: Perhaps the Apostolic hope that God shall be ‘all in all’? That creation itself shall have become Christ’s Kingdom which he surrenders to the Father?
FrR: The notion of achieving an ‘end’ does not require the activity which is the achieving of that end to cease at some time…
Tom: Achieving an ‘end’ does not itself require the cessation of activity which is that end. True. For creatures such as us, it’s our nature to always have a future, to move and become. Coming to rest in our ‘end’ doesn’t mean activity and becoming cease.
But this entirely begs the moral question, James. You’re moving pieces around the board – extending, subtracting, trading, exchanging, reconfiguring this or that piece. But none of this addresses the moral question.
Purgatorial cleansing and refinement that continues forever? This turns Epektasis on its head. The finite creature is ‘forever’ purged of evil but never finally cleansed, because its evil is infinite. It never diminishes though it is ‘purged’ forever. Lord have mercy.
I don’t think evil can be a proportional ‘end’. One’s enduring act of being can expand forever in God as end. But to be forever purged of evil as one’s end (or any ‘good’ end) and the evil in us never diminish? This would make ‘evil’ proportionately infinite to God.
If one can contemplate this as a divine, freely chosen, possible (or intended) good end, I honestly don’t know what to say.
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“Evil comes to an end, expires, vanishes. But I don’t understand why this is a question for you. Why would you doubt what a universalist’s position on this would be?”
I am not doubting that your position is that evil ends. I am asking what leads us to believe that this is the only possible principle on which God permits evil: that an evil cannot be permitted in light of achievement of good ends, unless that evil ceases to exist. I’ve given you two counterexamples as to why that principle should be rejected, even for universalists.
You imply that what justifies this principle is “the Apostolic hope that God shall be ‘all in all’” and “that creation itself shall have become Christ’s Kingdom which he surrenders to the Father.” But these claims do not seem to me obviously to rule out either the Rasmussen or other scenario I laid out. And it goes without saying that these passages do not themselves endorse or entail anything like a principle that evils are directly intended unless those evils cease to exist after goods are achieved, let alone the reading (I know you do not accept) on which these claims are true but compatible with persistence of those who will reject God’s grace forever.
“…you (I take it) do not believe Hell is of ‘indefinite’ duration. You believe it’s permanent and irrevocable.”
I do not understand what you take my position to be, contrasting these two claims. I understand the possibility of indefinitely continuing resistance to grace as what constitutes the possibility of hell. I do not think, for instance, that some extrinsic force or agent prevents the damned from changing their minds – as illustrated by my repeated citation of Lewis’ dictum that the gates are locked from the inside. Really, however, my point in the above discussion was to get at the justification for your views, not to defend my own.
“The finite creature is ‘forever’ purged of evil but never finally cleansed, because its evil is infinite. It never diminishes though it is ‘purged’ forever. I don’t think evil can be a proportional ‘end’. One’s enduring act of being can expand forever in God as end. But to be forever purged of evil as one’s end (or any ‘good’ end) and the evil in us never diminish? This
There is nothing about my case that requires that the purgation is because of an infinite evil principle or anything which fails to diminish. What is relevant in the scenario is merely that persisting suffering could continue to achieve good ends.
Just consider that purgatorial fire as assisting in moral growth. Imagine it continues to produce moral growth by the experience of suffering. Cut out any reference to purgation from sin. My point was merely that this suffering going on forever would still seem something that could be permitted, given the great goods of theosis and moral growth, without God or the agent (who I can imagine could voluntarily embrace such suffering) intending the suffering itself. The mere *possibility* of such a case would be a counterexample to the principle that there are no evils that could persist indefinitely without being positively willed. It would be false that someone could not permit an evil to persist forever in light of goods achieved thereby.
Now, it seems to me your claim that the suffering persisting forever “would make ‘evil’ proportionately infinite to God.” But I do not see why something persisting indefinitely counts as making something infinite proportionate to the divine. Presumably, the star and sun and other recreated material objects will persist forever and are not proportionate to God. Maybe you want to say more here, but the main point seems to be what comes next, so I’m not sure your claims about proportion are really doing any independent logical work, and I’ll stop with that.
“I said you seemed unsure about ‘the moral difference’ between the two, between intending or permitting the former over intending or permitting the latter. …But ‘persistent evil’ as such ‘resolving itself’ into some good end? I don’t think so. …Different moral intuitions (or sense, or imagination). Can one morally imagine an infinitely good and loving God not intending himself as the end of all spiritual creatures? I think not. Can one morally imagine God permitting the possibility of transient evils en route to that end? I think that can be made sense of, yes. Can one morally imagine God either intending or permitting final, permanent, irrevocable evil as the resolved, final end of any spiritual creature? I can’t imagine it.””
I am not ‘unsure’ about the moral difference – I myself simply deny that God allowing people to reject His grace indefinitely would count as an instance of Him positively intending that it occur (they are not ‘morally equivalent’), and so I am affirming that it is possible for God ‘merely to permit’ people to reject His grace in that way.
But I wanted to hear your justification for the difference, as the claim about this ‘moral argument’ was that it illustrated that the difference existed; viz., that it was an ARGUMENT that, in one case, God’s will is mere permission and, in the other, that God’s will is positively intending.
From what I can tell, what you take to justify the above difference is solely and fundamentally an intuition you have that God cannot permit evils that continue forever. If so, then this whole discussion of whether we grasp the moral argument of Hart’s or whether anyone rightly construes that argument is beside the point, since it rests solely on an a priori intuition that eternal suffering can never be merely permitted by God – an intuition that seems, from what you have said, groundless.
Maybe that’s where we end. That seems problematic to me, but I’d appreciate then if you can acknowledge that I have not misrepresented your argument as resting on a principle that some evil cannot be merely permitted if it does not (at some point in time) cease to exist, and that you take this principle to be a matter of intuition rather than argument.
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Tom,
I noticed one more claim in the above response to John that might be relevant: “So if I knowingly and freely permit ‘as a final end’ evil which I (supposedly) do not ‘intend’ (as one might imagine in the case of an eternal hell), then we’re in the position of asking what we ask of all permitted evils: Why is this evil permitted? What end morally justifies its permission? But in the case of evil that becomes ‘end’, what’s ‘permitted’ becomes itself the ‘end’ in light of which we’re to understand its moral justification. That’s how the collapse occurs.”
I understand your argument here to be: If an evil is permitted, it must be permitted in light of some end but, if an evil never ceases to exist, it becomes an end, and hence the end of that permission is the mere existence of that evil itself.
This is exactly an instance of the blurring of two senses of ‘end’ which I pointed out earlier. Evil that persists forever does not ipso facto become an end, unless you either assume the principle we discussed earlier, or you confuse temporal ‘end state’ with ‘end’ as referring to an intention or purpose. If a dog dies, for instance, that is its temporal ‘end state.’ But the dog’s end (in the sense of telos or purpose) is not death, and God’s purpose for the dog (in creating the dog) is not therefore death. We therefore have no reason to accept the premise that “if an evil never ceases to exist, it becomes an end.”
On the other hand, the question whether God has any reason for permitting evil is surely not ruled out in the case at hand. God can allow something bad to persist forever, without intending it to occur, while at the same time (and as a result of the permission) achieving other goods which defeat the badness of what He permits. There is no logical impossibility in this possibility, as far as I can see. The case of perpetual moral progress (with accidental suffering) shows one possible scenario on which that would be true.
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No good – including perpetual moral progress – could possibly ‘defeat the badness’ of endless suffering. Endless suffering is – by definition – an infinite evil. And obviously an evil is only defeated if it ceases to be.
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FrR: I am asking what leads us to believe that this is the only possible principle on which God permits evil: that an evil cannot be permitted in light of achievement of good ends, unless that evil ceases to exist. I’ve given you two counterexamples as to why that principle should be rejected, even for universalists. You imply that what justifies this principle is “the Apostolic hope that God shall be ‘all in all’” and “that creation itself shall have become Christ’s Kingdom which he surrenders to the Father.” But these claims do not seem to me obviously to rule out either the Rasmussen or other scenario I laid out.
Tom: God’s being ‘all in all’ seems to me sufficient. If it doesn’t seem so to you, if you have a vision or understand of God being ‘all in all’ that is consistent with perpetual evil and suffering, then I have nothing to offer. I think God’s being ‘all in all’ forecloses upon Rasmussen’s scenario, or any scenario in which death, evil, and the experience of torment from evil continue forever.
You continue to avoid the moral question. What is the moral propriety of God’s freely permitting perpetual evil and suffering? Such suffering and evil are either a final end (in the teleological sense) or they are not. If they are, God cannot (some of us contend) be thought of as the Good as such. If they are not, then they are permitted for some other final good end (teleologically speaking). What good would you suggest?
FrR: There is nothing about my case that requires that the purgation is because of an infinite evil principle or anything which fails to diminish. What is relevant in the scenario is merely that persisting suffering could continue to achieve good ends.
Tom: What good ends? …
FrR: Just consider that purgatorial fire as assisting in moral growth. Imagine it continues to produce moral growth by the experience of suffering. Cut out any reference to purgation from sin.
Tom: How do we posit moral growth as a result of purgation without also positing increasing freedom from evil? These are inseparable. If one is growing morally, one’s is transforming personally and morally, becoming more like that perfect image of love and goodness to which all moral growth aims. That means progressive freedom from sin and evil. But you posit the unending purgation for (it seems) the ‘good’ of unending ‘moral growth’ that does nothing to progressively free one from sin or evil. I have no intuitive or conceptual means by which to understand such growth as ‘good’ (or just, or loving). Such purgation is morally nonsensical.
FrR: I myself simply deny that God allowing people to reject His grace indefinitely would count as an instance of Him positively intending that it occur (they are not ‘morally equivalent’), and so I am affirming that it is possible for God ‘merely to permit’ people to reject His grace in that way.
Tom: I have no categories by which to understand as good or loving or just God’s ‘permitting’ the unending suffering you describe.
FrR: From what I can tell, what you take to justify the above difference is solely and fundamentally an intuition you have that God cannot permit evils that continue forever. If so, then this whole discussion of whether we grasp the moral argument of Hart’s or whether anyone rightly construes that argument is beside the point, since it rests solely on an a priori intuition that eternal suffering can never be merely permitted by God – an intuition that seems, from what you have said, groundless.
Tom: Oh come now. Your own insistence that God’s permitting endless suffering is morally justifiable is no less a ‘moral intuition’.
The moral intuition or imagination (which you dismiss as irrelevant to reaching our conclusions, but not yours) simply IS Hart’s moral argument, as I understand it. I don’t think he ever pretended that argument to succeed through a calculation of 1’s and 0’s or purely objectified propositions utterly severed from, or uninfluenced by, moral intuition or imagination. But so what? Of course there are ‘a priori’ moral intuitions at work. That would apply equally to anyone who objects morally to God’s doing what one takes to be evil or unloving or unjust.
That said (about the overall moral conclusions) however, it remains quite true, logically speaking, that with respect to whatever a perfect knowledge freely ‘permits’ for the sake of some final end/telos, what is permitted is ‘morally equivalent’ to choosing it as such when what is permitted becomes the creature’s final state of being. All you’re saying, Fr Rooney, is that an endless hell of suffering is morally justifiable, worth permitting (even though God ‘intends’ no one to suffer so) for the sake of goods which such suffering will forever secure. God chooses ‘that’ good, but not the irrevocable suffering required to produce it.
Please what ‘good(s)’ you have in mind.
Tom
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Fr R, I was thinking again on why it is that God’s being ‘all in all’ (1Cor 15) makes Rasmussen’s scenario of extending our present world infinitely forward unworkable (for Xans who agree with Paul’s hope in 1Cor 15). Even though all are eventually saved (as you describe it), he suggests children continue to be born, sin, fall into evil, and take the human journey, ad infinitum.
The reason this would fail to realize Paul’s hope that God be ‘all in all’ is the same reason Paul believed this hope was not yet realized in his own day. If we perpetuate Paul’s own circumstances (births, mortality, sin and evil, death, etc.) forever, we simply perpetuate the terms in which Paul sees God is not yet ‘all in all’. So again, I don’t see how Rasmussen’s scenario is a viable theological Christian option.
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John and others – I do not have time to respond to all the other threads now developing around the topic. I will focus on addressing the points below from Tom, who began this discussion.
Tom,
I entered into this conversation in order to clarify the way in which Hart’s moral argument is supposed to be a valid and sound argument. The conclusion of that argument was supposed to be that “in the consummation of all things, the distinction between antecedent and permissive wills disappears. The two modes of willing collapse, morally speaking.” However, it seems to me that you deny that there IS any argument here, and that – formally speaking – the reasoning involved is circular. That is, the reasoning for the conclusion is that it is a bare moral intuition that the conclusion is true, i.e., that God cannot ‘merely permit’ any evil in the eschaton.
I was not in this conversation in order to defend my own positions, but merely to attempt to charitably reconstruct Hart’s argument. If there is nothing further to reconstruct beyond the intuition (which you obviously have) that whatever exists forever is something God must positively intend, then it just turns out – by your own admission – that there is simply no argument to be had about it.
Similarly, if your reason for holding that this claim is true relies merely on a Scriptural reading of the classical universalist text that God will be all-in-all, then it looks not to be an argument at all and more an assertion of a given controversial reading of a biblical text. If you claim that the eschaton must be such that it necessarily contains no evil, then we arrive at a similarly circular reason for your conclusion.
You ask: “What is the moral propriety of God’s freely permitting perpetual evil and suffering? Such suffering and evil are either a final end (in the teleological sense) or they are not. If they are, God cannot (some of us contend) be thought of as the Good as such. If they are not, then they are permitted for some other final good end (teleologically speaking). What good would you suggest?”
It seems to me I do not need to suggest any such candidate goods in order [1] to draw a distinction between God’s positive and permissive wills and [2] to affirm it is possible that God could ‘merely permit’ an evil to persist in the eschaton. And I think we can do both these things.
As far as I can tell, from what you have said, there is no reason to reject the possibility of [2] beyond your intuition that He cannot. Logically speaking, the fact that people persist in rejecting God forever does not ipso facto entail that God intends those people to reject Him as their teleological ‘end’ or His positively intended goal for their lives. That just looks, again, as if one has leapt (without justification) from ‘end’ as final or persisting situation to ‘end’ as teleological purpose or positively desired goal. Thus, it seems to me that you have not shown any reason that the persistence of people who reject God forever would entail that God wants or positively intends that such people reject Him forever.
As to [1], I do not see anyone needs a ‘moral intuition’ about what goods God might achieve in order to hold that it is possible for there to be a distinction between God’s mere permission and God’s positive intention, even in the eschaton. For all other evils, we do not think that we need to know each instance of evil that God permits in order to be able to believe that God merely permits them. We can affirm that God merely permits evils to occur without having a calculus of what evils are justified by what goods. To quote DBH in a comment above this thread: “any arguments regarding that problem are entirely matters of relative evaluation with regard to a calculus we cannot fully work out.”
In the same way, as long as it is possible that God merely permits evils, then – even if those evils persist in the eschaton – God can intend goods which constitute the final good end in light of which He did permit them, even if we do not know what such goods could be. As long as there is no good argument that God cannot merely permit natural evils, there looks to be no greater or lesser reason to think God cannot do this for the moral evils of allowing people to reject His love forever. At least, not that you have presented beyond your moral intuition that God must positively intend people to reject His love forever and cannot merely permit it – as yours is an intuition, not an argument, and it does not convince others who do not already share it.
And: quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur.
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FrR: I entered into this conversation in order to clarify the way in which Hart’s moral argument is supposed to be a valid and sound argument. The conclusion of that argument was supposed to be that “in the consummation of all things, the distinction between antecedent and permissive wills disappears. The two modes of willing collapse, morally speaking.” However, it seems to me that you deny that there IS any argument here, and that – formally speaking – the reasoning involved is circular. That is, the reasoning for the conclusion is that it is a bare moral intuition that the conclusion is true, i.e., that God cannot ‘merely permit’ any evil in the eschaton.
Tom: I don’t at all deny there is any argument. You take the employment of moral reasoning and intuition as ‘not an argument’. I agreed moral intuition is involved (as it is in yours). I don’t agree it amounts to ‘no argument’. This is an example of your continuing inability to restate an opponent’s argument without imposing redefinitions and conclusions of your own; i.e., because you understand moral intuition to be inadmissible ‘as argument’, and I admit to referencing moral intuition, you conclude I agree that I have no argument. I don’t agree the moral argument is not an argument.
I suspect you’ll publish far and wide that the universalist camp (or just I) has admitted that ‘they have no argument’. This would be dishonest of you. I hope you’re not stoop to it.
That said, I’m personally thankful you dropped into engage us and wish you God’s blessings and provision always.
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But do tell everyone I’m the king of typos!
“I hope *you’LL* not stoop to it.”
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Fr JD, thanks. For posterity’s stake, a thank you note, memorialization of our concordance & characterization of our dissonace. It’s best I not distract you or Tom from your ongoing dialogue. No favor of a response is expected.
pax et bonum! https://syncretisticcatholicism.wordpress.com/2023/02/16/an-open-letter-to-rev-james-dominic-rooney-op-regarding-david-bentley-harts-moral-argument-for-universalism/
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Fr JD, you wrote: “I myself simply deny that God allowing people to reject His grace indefinitely would count as an instance of Him positively intending that it occur (they are not ‘morally equivalent’), and so I am affirming that it is possible for God ‘merely to permit’ people to reject His grace in that way.”
As with both double effect & cooperation principles, even if we disclaim intent, if a disproportionality between bad & good effects obtains, it does become tantamount to formal intent & morally equivalent. The impasse cannot be reduced to mere analytics as it presupposes certain evaluative dispositions, which make certain premises axiologically fraught & proportionality contentious.
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John,
“I am not even ‘almost persuaded.’”
I was not aiming to persuade you of anything, but only so far in this conversation to get clear on the justification for the ‘moral argument’ which (it is claimed) has not been properly understood. That’s all I was and am aiming to do.
“What would seem to me to be most unreasonable would be any stipulation that God could act unreasonably.”
I was not affirming that God could act unreasonably, so I’m not sure of the relevance of the rest you wrote. I was merely pointing out that the analogy with double effect reasoning would not show us that God would be intending evil if He were to permit a disproportionate evil effect.
“…granting your libertarian account and your sufferring-laden theosis”
I was not proposing any of my own views in what I wrote. The scenario was just supposed to be a counterexample which described a logically possible situation, not my own view of the afterlife. Incidentally, I would generally deny that my own views of freedom are ‘libertarian.’
“…any degree of an infinite ill being remains a disproportionate punishment of a finite person & unmitigated frustration of one’s end. That infinite evil would not outweigh the finite good of a libertarian human freedom.”
I’m not sure what that means. Presumably, what one might think outweighs the indefinite suffering of the purgation (in the scenario) was the goods of the theosis achieved, not the good of the free choice in accepting the suffering (or something like that). That suffering was, in the scenario, not described as a punishment. Nor does it involve frustrating achieving the end of the human being, since the theosis (which we can grant is the end of the human being) continues dynamically forever.
“I find Calvinism, Libertarian Infernalism & Compatibilist Infernalism to be equally repugnant, aesthetically, and unintelligible, morally.”
Obviously, I disagree, but I was discussing the argument against these. If you believe there is no sound argument against these views, but only a bare intuition that they are false, then it would be helpful to state that.
Nevertheless, I invite you to read the trilogy of articles where I attempt to describe what is wrong with your position and why I do not find the classical teaching of orthodox Christianity on hell to be repugnant or unintelligible, especially the last piece. I will not attempt to defend it here. But I offer arguments whose premises, I think, are accessible to everyone and have independent grounds. Specifically, I think universalism can only be true if there is a mistaken view of the relation between nature and grace, such that it is literally impossible for anyone to reject God’s grace definitively. However, that universalist theory of nature-grace involves an incoherent view of the divine nature and a Pelagian view of salvation (e.g., denying that there was a separation of sin that needed repair by the Cross, affirming that we merit salvation by reason of our nature).
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-incoherencies-of-hard-universalism/
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hell-and-the-coherence-of-christian-hope/
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hard-universalism-grace-and-creaturely-freedom/
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The Pelagian charge is unsubstantiated.
Universalists do not hold that the impossibility of rejecting God’s grace eternally means that we suffer from no real separation from God or that moral perfection will be achieved apart from God’s action. Rather they hold that, although we are genuinely separated from God, the natural will is such that *if* it is continually prompted it will *eventually* reach moral perfection – and that the only sufficient ‘prompting’ could be achieved through the Cross
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Father Rooney, I did take the time to read one of the above articles that you previously cited in another conversation. I wrote a lengthy reply and never received an answer. So…I will post it again in hopes you will have the opportunity to read it. You mentioned – in an earlier conversation – that you are uncertain that you will be saved. My prayer is that through these exchanges you will come to understand the nature of God and be assured that He will not only redeem you, but He will most assuredly reconcile all of His creation.
…… I was pleased to read that you agree that Christ’s mission was not redemption from hell, but from sin. For many, hell is the construct of God as a place of eternal punishment. However, after reading your linked article ( https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/hell-and-the-coherence-of-christian-hope/ )
it seems clear that you believe that hell is self inflicted. You wrote “Hell being a real possibility is not God’s doing but mine.”
We also agree that Jesus saves us from an eternity of spiritual death. So far, so good. However, after reading your church life journal post I am convinced even more, that your arguments against a “hard universalism” are untenable and somewhat contradictory.
You start the article with the spiritual journey of St. Francis de Sales who, in your words…
“does not end up with the knowledge that God must save all people, he does not end up with the knowledge that Francis cannot end up rejecting God or that God cannot do otherwise than save Francis. Instead, Francis’s fear leaves him because, even if Francis cannot imagine what God will do, or how God will do it, Francis comes to trust God. In that trust, he knows that nothing God will ever let happen to him will be ultimately tragic or hopeless.”
Now, here is the key phrase “he knows that nothing God will ever let happen to him will be ultimately tragic or hopeless.” You end the article in a similar vein “When we have hope, we already expect that God’s goodness will shatter even the limits of our imagination, and that, even when things appear to be hopeless, they never are.”
This is the very thesis of universalism. This is really just a repetition of Thomas Talbott’s conviction that an omnipotent God will never let his creation suffer irreparable harm.
And yet, you insist that Francis or you or me or some of us or most of us may possibly reject God’s grace forever, which is to be in a place of spiritual death or an ultimately tragic or hopeless situation.
When you admit that you are not certain that you will be saved, you are leaving open the possibility that your eternity will be ultimately tragic. It is possible that you will experience eternal death. As you wrote, “If it were not possible for us to end up in eternal death, if Christ did not harrow hell, Easter is a sham victory, “our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty” (1 Cor 15:14).”
You insist, like universalists, that God is good. The critical difference is the definition of good. Universalists proclaim that God’s character of goodness and love precludes ultimate tragedy. Your view is that a good God may, in fact, allow evil to reign and men to suffer eternal death. Inexplicably, you argue that allowing His creation to suffer irreparable harm would be an expression of God’s love and mercy – an expression of God’s goodness even if we can’t imagine a reason that God could act in such a way.
You wrote…
“If we were to discover that God made it possible for us to resist his grace forever, then, I would think, we come to know that, if he did so, he did this for a good reason that was an expression of his love and mercy for us. I would be more confident of that than of any argument to the contrary, even if I were unable to imagine any possible reason that God had for doing so, because I think it is good to trust God.”
Frankly, this is not very convincing. (God may be good, as I understand good – but if it turns out that he acts in a way that I can’t perceive as good, let’s all agree that God is good, anyway.) This God of uncertain conduct hardly seems trustworthy.
Then, you seamlessly revert to an argument for hard universalism. You wrote…
“In trust, I know that I might possibly resist God’s grace, but I know that God is also Good and that He cares for me—Christ, then, is my fortress and bulwark against myself.”
Here, you seem to be arguing that despite your sinful nature’s resistance to God’s grace He will deliver you from yourself because God is good. Despite your best efforts to damn yourself, Christ is your salvation. Period. End of story.
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” Ephesians 2:4-5
It’s already done. We can argue about whether God needed to do it or not. It doesn’t matter. He did it. Through the cross Christ made us alive when we were dead in sin. Past tense…done…by grace we have been saved. God’s love is great, He is rich in mercy, His goodness far exceeds anything we can imagine. In the cross, God has saved all. The ending has already been written … and it ends happily ever after.
But then, Fr. Rooney, you contend that Christ may not be a sufficient bulwark against yourself. Persons, you say, may apparently reject God for all eternity.
You wrote…
“We should, therefore, first, reject any claim that we need to know God’s reason to permit anyone to reject him. I do not need to know or be able to prove that everyone is going to heaven in order to trust that God loves me, will not abandon me, or that he will take care of my loved ones. I do not need to know whether hell is empty to know that Christ comes to harrow the hell in my heart, a hell that would be my eternity if I were not to cling to him.”
Your salvation, you seem to be saying, will be determined not by Christ clinging to you, but by you clinging to Christ. What a terrifying thought. My salvation and that of my loved ones is dependent – not on Christ’s death and resurrection – but on our desperate attempts to maintain our faith in Him. God’s plan of salvation hinges not on His love, care or lack of abandonment, but on our decision to accept or reject God – despite our finite, limited and often deluded perception of who He is. Do you really believe that anyone will reject God when they see Him in all His glory?
“So that at the name of Jesus every knee – of beings heavenly and earthly and subterranean – should bend, And every tongue shall gladly confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord, for the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2: 10,11
Study those Philippians verses again. Do you think that God the Father would be glorified by mankind’s continued and eternal rejection of His Son?
Later in your article you insist that if evil persists eternally, then God must have an acceptable rationale. You wrote …
“So, if evil occurs, we can be confident that God has good reasons for permitting it. This point is not very strange or controversial, I think, as it formalizes the “hopeful” reasoning by which Christians respond to evils in their life.”
Here you are mistakenly conflating temporal sin with the eternal co-existence of evil in God’s creation. For more on the difficult issue of temporal suffering, please have a look at these…
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/if-god-is-going-to-deify-everyone-anyway-why-not-deify-everyone-immediately/
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/creation-theodicy-and-the-problem-of-evil-2/
You conclude that universalists misunderstand the essence of Christianity. You wrote…
“Hard universalism, in a profound way, misses the point of Christianity. It misses, as I have already argued, the point of the Cross and what we are saved from. But, if universalist arguments that supposedly give us “knowledge” that God will save everyone were true, this would also make trusting God unnecessary. “For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?” (Rom 8:24). Knowledge that God will save all, on views like “hard universalism,” is just supposed to be knowledge that things could not have been otherwise.”
On the contrary, universalists clearly assert that Christ’s death and resurrection is the means by which all are delivered from sin and death. This hardly makes trusting God unnecessary. Conversely, trusting Christ is the path everyone will take to be reconciled to God. It is not simply knowledge that things could not have been otherwise. It is our full assurance of what things will be – because God is love.
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Fr JD, you wrote: “I was merely pointing out that the analogy with double effect reasoning would not show us that God would be intending evil if He were to permit a disproportionate evil effect.”
If you similarly dismiss that it is tantamount to same, your stance remains unintelligible to me.
Fr JD, you wrote: “Nor does it involve frustrating achieving the end of the human being, since the theosis (which we can grant is the end of the human being) continues dynamically forever.”
That’s not apposite to the distinctions I employed between purgation & epektasis, eternal peccability & impeccability.
Fr JD, you wrote: “If you believe there is no sound argument against these views, but only a bare intuition that they are false, then it would be helpful to state that.”
If you believe that syllogistic reasoning bereft of the fast & frugal heuristics our common sense, moral intuitions & aesthetic sensibilities, arguably all divinely connatural (even when inchoately formed & fallibly accessed), suffices for apologetics, it would be helpful to state that.
Those deeply ingrained evaluative dispositions play an indispensable role in our forced, vital & live options when we leap past nihilism, solipsism, subjective idealism, pantheism, objective materialism, materialist monism, subjective materialism, Calvinism and libertarian & compatibilist infernalisms.
So, no, I don’t believe there’s a syllogistic argument to defeat solipsism or infernalism. Neither are there proofs that demonstrate anything more than that theism is not unreasonable.
I reject all of these alternatives using the oldest knife in the philosopher’s drawer – the reductio ad absurdum.
Influenced by Peirce, I’m something between a weak foundationalist & nonfoundationalist, a semiotic pragmatic realist.
Your arguments strike me as a stark rationalism proceeding from a naive realism bereft of quotidian interpersonal dynamics. If you would plead plausibility using concrete examples of parent-child relationships or images from the Song of Songs, that would illuminate your stance in the light of what Stump calls Franciscan knowledge, which is sadly missing in so many sterile neoScholasticisms & analytic theologies today.
Fr JD, you wrote: “Specifically, I think universalism can only be true if there is a mistaken view of the relation between nature and grace, such that it is literally impossible for anyone to reject God’s grace definitively.”
I did read all 3 of your articles and I’ve shared here & elsewhere my views of why an artificial extrinsicism are wrong.
I invite you & other passers-by to encounter my own vision:
A Universalist, Neo-Chalcedonian, Franciscan Cosmotheandrism
The link is available at the end of this article:
https://theologoumenon.substack.com/p/my-universalist-account
Be well.
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re: 2. An evil cannot be redeemed unless that evil ceases to exist, at some time or another.
I think we have all properly zeroed in on the fact that this premise is not just propositional but also dispositionally loaded.
Those of us who don’t find it contentious believe that most others, who’d turn within to truly consult, introspectively, what we believe to be humankind’s most ubiquitously shared common sense, moral intuitions & aesthetic sensibilities as reside within their hearts, won’t find it controversial.
If, by introducing this informal element, any syllogistic sport get’s disrupted, well, I say, good riddance.
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Father Rooney states:
“The notion of achieving an “end” does not require the activity which is the achieving of that end to cease at some time….”
This statement is somewhat deceptive. If the end which is sought is some kind of activity, then, of course, the activity will not cease. But the reason it does not cease is precisely because it is the end sought. The means to an end, whether the end be static or active, always cease when the end is achieved. Hence, in Father’s example of indefinite purgation, if suffering is the means to purification, then the suffering will diminish as the creature is purified. If the opposite were true, i.e., if the suffering remained in all its intensity even after complete purification, then it would reveal itself as having never been the means of purification in the first place. And since suffering is, in itself, an evil, it cannot be an end. This would mean that the suffering is either purposeless or has some other unknown end. I’m not sure what that would be. The classical answer is that the suffering of the damned manifests the justice of God. But, apart from the evident injustice of infinite suffering for finite crimes, this end would be extrinsic to the activity of suffering and hence could not be the end of those experiencing it.
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“If the end which is sought is some kind of activity, then, of course, the activity will not cease. But the reason it does not cease is precisely because it is the end sought. The means to an end, whether the end be static or active, always cease when the end is achieved.”
I don’t think this claim is deceptive. I was merely pointing out the distinction between goods immanent to certain activities and those which are products. I think you can call playing a sport a ‘means’ to having fun, since these two things are not conceptually identical.
But, if you don’t like ‘means’ language, the point of the counterexample can be got if you think of the case I offered of perpetual moral progress through suffering along the same lines as a game. The moral progress itself is what you want, like the having fun, and they happen together with the suffering (just as having fun happens with the other suffering and pain of playing a highly physical game, like football). One still can conceptually distinguish that the suffering in the game of football, or the purgative progress, is not willed for its own sake, but only in the context of having fun or making moral progress.
My point was simply that suffering can persist forever without being willed for its own sake. If you imagine the person who is playing a game forever, as long as that game necessarily involves pain/suffering, then you get the same image of pain or suffering being something we can accept in light of the goods of playing that game, even as we do not will or desire the pain/suffering for its own sake.
“Hence, in Father’s example of indefinite purgation, if suffering is the means to purification, then the suffering will diminish as the creature is purified.”
I do not see how this follows, even if the suffering were a means. As long as there was more moral progress to be made, there need be no end to the suffering that functions as a means to the progress. Unless you assume that there is a final term to moral progress – after which none further can be had – then there is no reason to believe that the suffering will need to diminish.
“If the opposite were true, i.e., if the suffering remained in all its intensity even after complete purification, then it would reveal itself as having never been the means of purification in the first place.”
As I said before, don’t think of it as purgation of some standing reserve of sin. My scenario was intended to be a case where the purgation effects moral progress through suffering, nothing more. So the fire was not, in my scenario, ‘purging’ any sin or remnant of sin which it will eventually exhaust.
Again, let me conclude by noting that the case was not my own view of what occurs. I was just trying to show that we can imagine a possible situation where the principle that, ‘if an evil persists forever, it must be positively willed for its own sake and cannot be willed in light of goods’ looks false. That principle played a key role, apparently, in Tom’s justification for his position, so I was trying to show it does not seem intuitively obvious or true.
If the purgatorial fire is confusing, just focus on the idea of playing high-octane American football for eternity. Assume nobody WANTS to get injured or tired or suffer. Nevertheless, one could possibly intend to play the game forever, despite those consequences, because you intend having fun. I do not see that this scenario involves the suffering being either purposeless or having some other unknown end which the players are intending. Even if the game goes on for eternity, at no point do you WANT to suffer. They are ‘merely permitting’ or tolerating the suffering in light of the fun they are having. Does it make sense what this scenario is supposed to show?
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In fact, all things will end and be redeemed. That’s the point of the full return. It isn’t merely that evil will end solely, all will be fully wrapped up in a phenomenological turn. The adumbrations that we live in and through will be exposed. Even an overarching Good can “shadow” life in many ways that we lose sight of the immediacy of what is transpiring as we are enveloped in the bliss of the moment. Understanding and sight are found as the shadow subsides. A light that is fully exposed is blinding after all. And, to steal a line from Nyssa as well, Moses only saw God face to face in the utter darkness. Maybe the overarching point isn’t that there is a difference solely between existences and essences, nor agency/will/freedom but rather it is fusing them together where existence and essence are seen as one thing. They are not dialectical or synthetic, but actually one. To fully become what is intended may require actions that trace either side of the divide between good and evil, and it is only in those lasting moments of creation where that unified act is fully announced in a clarity that is achieved in the end. We must walk through the blinding lights and darkness both to realize the transformation that it is grounded within being itself. So the finality we seek, is only every going to wrapped up when Truth as Truth is present and exposed.
If the end purpose is tied to an ontic framework that is Truth etc, it can only ever end up in the same position. Whatever occurs between A-Z is merely phenomena that we give explanation too, but not full existence/essence in se. We merely create the moments that are building us out, the set framework that is “known” is only ever going to be fully consummated when the Knower comes to the full understanding of what can be known/or the Known. Even for Origen, who saw lives as being repeated over and over until you figured it all out, so to speak, had a final consummation. It is not in the rational orientation of God that one finds the answers. And to borrow this idea from the idealists, and I think it is true, is that reason cannot ground itself, but it is the understanding which amplifies it. So one cannot truly even be said “to be” until one understands fully…and it isn’t even just cause and effect but also the tie into the essence of idea to ideatum. Desire to desideratum.
Evil is a phenomenological problem. It isn’t an essential problem. That premise alone is enough to make the universalist claim true. Evil is only a thing that can have an existence but not an essence. Not all that exists has essence, but all that has an essence has also an existence, and to maintain the punishment for evil as a lasting effect of forever would be to concretize evil. That….can’t be possible.
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I think an argument can be made to show that eternal foreclosure of a being’s openness to realizing its highest good in God is impossible, that to ‘be’ at all is to be ‘open’, to have a pathway, to achieving one’s highest wellbeing in God.
It involves beginning with God as the summum bonum (highest good) and then construing the God-given and God-sustained potentialities and capacities of created sentience as irrevocably open to God who wills himself as their highest wellbeing.
I gave it a try here (relevant to this discussion and within the site here):
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/05/25/at-liberty-to-become-free-2/
Still exploring it.
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As to openness and being – William Desmond can be recommended as a very insightful resource.
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Also argued more or less here, back in the day:
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/u-turns-and-transcendentals/
I’m sure GregoryN and Maximus are chock full of such reasoning, and it’s embarrassing to stumble through it myself out in the open, but one way of approaching it might include (in no special order, just thinking out loud):
– To be is to be moved.
– To be moved is to be moved by God.
– God moves all things toward the realization of their highest good (their wellbeing) in him.
– To be is to be moved by God toward the realization of one’s highest wellbeing in God.
– God cannot will the existence of a thing and not will its highest wellbeing in him and be the summum bonum (by summum bonum I simply mean ‘the Good’ as such).
– A being’s potentialities and capacities for becoming are God-given.
– Nothing else is needed to constitute one’s openness to Godward becoming but God’s willing it.
– God’s willing himself as highest wellbeing ‘is’ the possibility of one’s movement toward the fulfillment of its highest wellbeing in God.
– No thing could exist and not be moved by God toward its end in him.
I’m sure they’re disordered, and I’m sure some are more controversial than others. But that’s one line of approach.
Another approach seeks a similar conclusion by thinking along the lines of God’s being the summum bonum:
– Being the summum bonum, all that God wills he wills for his own sake.
– Being the summum bonum, God wills himself as the highest good of all things; indeed, he could will nothing other than himself as the highest good of all things.
– Being the summum bonum, God’s creative act could not but will the capacities and potentialities of things as means toward the realization of their highest good in God.
– To be is to have God as the achievable highest good of one’s being.
– Nothing has the power to foreclose upon itself all possibility of achieving its highest good in God.
– Hell, as the irrevocable foreclosure of the possibility of realizing one’s highest good in God, cannot exist; the summum bonum could not will it as a means of willing himself in all things as the possibility of their highest good and wellbeing.
No special order. Just thinking out loud.
Some very smart universalist having the initials of DBH, with the chops to engage this crapshoot of mine, might tell me if I’m wasting my time or not.
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My take?
I’d rather be a Franciscan!
See, then:
1. Bonaventure on Universal Hylomorphism
2. Scotus on Angel Mutability
3. Can’t think of the citation but I suspect it’s Brendan Case, who said something like “If spiritual immaterialism is true, then angels could not only not repent but they could not have even fallen, in the first place, either.
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I’m reading Marion’s “God without Being” currently, and I think his first chapter commentary on the difference between idol/icon is an interesting one to insert here. Especially in regards to the gaze. I mean, at the end of the day, isn’t that the contention of Rooney and others? That man has the ability to concretize or freeze itself? And yet, isn’t Marion’s point that even the most despicable of idols is still divine within the context of itself? And if an idol/icon can share meaning in any sense, it’s because, as he suggests, humanity is that very thing, but it isn’t what the divine “summons us” to, if we use his language.
And to quote him in full, especially if we tie the teleological horizon to Hart et al, you get exactly what he suggests. The movement from idolatry to icon. From vanity to love. Apokatastasis.
“Let us briefly point out the reversal: here our gaze does not designate by its aim the spectacle of a first visible, since, inversely, in the vision, no visible is discovered, if not our face itself, which, renouncing all grasping (aisthesis) submits to an apocalytpic exposure; it becomes itself visibly laid out in the open. Why? Because as opposed to the idol that is offered an invisible mirror-invisible because dazzled as much as dazzling for and by our aim-here our gaze becomes the optical mirror of that at which it looks only by finding itself more radically looked at: we become a visible mirror of an invisible gaze that subverts us, in the measure of its glory. The invisible summons us, “face to face, person to person” (1 Cor 13:12), through the painted visibility of its incarnation and the factual visibility of our flesh: no longer the visible idol as the invisible mirror of our gaze but our face as the visible mirror of the invisible…..It transforms us in its glory by allowing this glory to shine on our face as its mirror-but a mirror consumed by that very glory, transfigured with invisibility, and by dint of being saturated beyond itself from that glory, becoming, strictly though imperfectly, the icon of it: visibility of the invisible as such.”
(Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, p.22, 2nd Edition)
If we are all to be changed, if all is to be submitted and rectified, then from the beginning the tension of opposites and for that matter the distinction of what I think Berdyaev and Marion both get right, is that freedom/love are the same thing. If those exist prior to being itself, then any creative act would reflect that core of the ground of essence itself. The kernel of what makes us “the image of God” also known as an “icon” would/could never be fully released, the rest is just an excursus on getting us back to the function of the highest of the divine names.
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“…freedom/love are the same thing. If those exist prior to being itself, then any creative act would reflect that core of the ground of essence itself. The kernel of what makes us the image of God also known as an icon would/could never be fully released.”
Exactly. This would logically preclude the possibility of any foreclosure of our openness to God and thus the possibility of moving toward union with him. Hell could not be irrevocable. Irrevocable foreclosure would be teleological foreclosure, which is impossible, given the nature of our relationship to God as immediate ground and giver of the possibilities of being.
Interesting point about Charles Hartshorne (one of America’s great thinkers, a student of Whitehead and pioneer of Process Theology) that I’ve always appreciate. He argued (I think DBH will find this interesting) that ultimately ‘logical and metaphysical possibility converge/collapse’. Were we (like God) to perfectly know all things, we could not imagine purely logical possibilities outside the scope of the metaphysically possible.
Tom
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It seems to me the final question regarding “risk” is really moot. What I think is really being asked is, “Couldn’t God have found a way to achieve his moral end without these ‘transient evils?’”
Given his nature, I guess my faith in him would have to answer, “Apparently not.” He’s created the best possible world and doesn’t shy away from these travails but walks beside us within them, if we have eyes to see.
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Scott, DBH would disagree with you. In his book he lists three traditional Christian beliefs: (1) God is absolutely good and omnibenevolent, (2) God has freely created the cosmos out of nothing, and (3) eternal damnation. He believes we can coherently affirm any two of the three, but we cannot coherently affirm all three together.
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But it is clear that God created a world in which he knew some extremenly horrific evil would occur. What degree of evil, short of eternal damnation, would one not coherently be able to affirm with the first two beliefs? Was God allowing the evil of the Holocaust coherent with the first two traditional beliefs? It is clear that many reasonable and good people, not a few among them Jewish atheists, believe it was not. Is eternal damnation the only evil that cannot be coherently affirmed with those first two beliefs?
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Robert F: “ What degree of evil, short of eternal damnation, would one not coherently be able to affirm with the first two beliefs?”
I’ve wondered this myself, Robert. And not just degree of evil/suffering, but duration. I do agree that limited and everlasting suffering are obviously incomparable, but that leaves much latitude with regards to temporary suffering. One entire human life-span of suffering is apparently acceptable, but what about the durational equivalent of two, ten, or one hundred lifetimes? Even a billion years of suffering is still temporary and is as “far” from eternal damnation as a mere minute of torment.
Where is the line of demarcation, wherein one duration is acceptable and another unacceptable? This is especially problematic if suffering continues beyond physical life in an immaterial state not subject to the same structural/temporal constraints as earthly life. If there are states of suffering that exist beyond earthly life, then it is quite impossible to draw a clear line of demarcation, and any attempt to do so would seem arbitrary.
This is just part of the reason why I personally hold that evil and suffering are native to this particular stage of becoming (earthly life), and this stage only. Evil/suffering are an unfortunate byproduct of this developmental stage and serve no divine purpose, in my opinion. As Fr Kimel said, “All suffering is an evil.”
As evil/suffering have no purpose, I maintain that they are not going to persist beyond the provisional stage with which they are associated and to which they are naturally limited. It is only with the person that presumes evil and suffering to be intrinsically—if mysteriously—instrumental, that the notion of these persisting indefinitely or even endlessly could be entertained. As we have seen, some contend that evil and suffering of hell are good (provide a good) and are thus instrumental, not in spite of never ending but precisely because they never end. That is one of the many perils of ascribing divine purpose to evil/suffering.
So, this is one way in which I differ from the traditional universalist, who maintains a belief in a hell, albeit one of limited duration. There is the more or less conventional universalist belief that suffering in hell is remedial. This imbues the phenomenon of suffering—and instances of individual suffering—with divine purpose, which for me is problematic. Couple this with the fact that anything short of eternal suffering is logically possible in this scheme and the problem is compounded, perhaps insurmountably.
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This is especially problematic if suffering continues beyond physical life in an immaterial state not subject to the same structural/temporal constraints as earthly life.
I don’t believe it is possible for a creature to exist in an immaterial state. If creatures have extension in time and space, then it seems to me that they have materiality of some kind. It may be a very different kind of materiality, similar to the subtle body of Eastern religions, but it is still materiality.
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I should add: I believe creatures must have extension in space/time (that is, they must have boundaries) in order to exist.
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Joe,
What do you make of the passages in the NT where Jesus seems to talk about some kind of state of postmortem suffering? I understand that these passages are not talking about a state of eternal, conscious torment, but they do seem to talk about some kind of temporary suffering after death. I’m curious about how you understand them.
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Here is an interesting theoretical problem for universalists that might be an inverse version of the moral argument. I’m interested in your response.
DB Hart claims that nobody can do anything that merits eternal damnation AND that God can in no way be loveable if He were even to merely permit anyone to be in hell.
If it were true someone like DBH would NEVER be able to love a God who allowed even the possibility of anyone being in hell, not even given infinite time, then it is possible someone can be eternally unhappy even when intimately acquainted with God, if God were not to his liking.
If someone like DBH WERE able to change his mind, and come to love that God who permits hell, then it seems to me that his moral intuition such a God could in no way merely permit anyone to be in hell (in a way compatible with being omnibenevolent and loveable) would be false.
So, I ask the universalists: would you think that, even given infinite time and intimate acquaintance with God in the afterlife, do you think you would eventually, given enough time, come to love a God who (you discovered) permitted anyone to be in hell for eternity?
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[Sorry, the last sentence got spliced from two places. Should read: “would you think that, even given infinite time and intimate acquaintance with God in the afterlife, you could come to love a God who (you discovered) permitted anyone to be in hell for eternity?”]
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Well not only is it pure theory but also utter non-sense. A god who would abandon any one of his creatures to be in hell for eternity would neither be good, nor the good; and furthermore, an infinity of time and acquaintance wouldn’t change that ugly truth about that god, not by a jot, nor a tittle. Why do you continue on with this non-sense?
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It is not logically impossible, is it?
I can conceive of ending up at the pearly gates and realizing I was wrong about God (or, I can have Rowan Atkinson help me so conceive of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9NCyGaxoDY).
But it thereby sounds as if it is so beyond the bounds of conceivability for you that you would be unable, given infinite time, to come to love such a God. In which case, it does not seem as if it would be impossible for you to reject such a God forever, even given infinity of time and acquaintance with God, and even given the possibility of eternal unhappiness as a result. That seems to illustrate the way in which hell is metaphysically possible, since being in hell is supposed to consist essentially in occupying a very similar state.
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If hard universalism is true, it is necessarily true. So your scenario is logically impossible. Take something evil and imagine if someone asked you if you could love God if, per impossibile, He did it.
God, being evil, would not be trustworthy, and so there’d be no reason to even trust Him that He would let me into heaven if I loved Him.
” would you think that, even given infinite time and intimate acquaintance with God in the afterlife, do you think you would eventually, given enough time, come to love a God who (you discovered) permitted anyone to be in hell for eternity?”
It wouldn’t matter, given what I said above. Furthermore, free will is unpredictable, so I’d either have to have foreknowledge or middle knowledge of my own choices. William Lane Craig says it’s impossible to know what know what oneself would do: “The point is that whoever the knower is, he cannot have knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom about his own choices logically prior to his own choices. That’s why you could have middle knowledge only of the free decisions of others. No one could have middle knowledge of his own free decisions but only those of others. […] What is impossible is having middle knowledge of one’s own free choices.” ( William Lane Craig (2011), Q&A #223 Two Questions on Molinism, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/two-questions-on-molinism )
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The very concept of ‘goodness’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ does not by reason of the *concept* or *term* rule out God’s permitting anyone to resist Him forever, or nobody would even be able to state the possibility. What you mean to say is that it is metaphysically, like water is necessarily H2O, and not a logically necessary truth, like 2+2=4. I think we can all conceive of the situation I gave, as well as that of Rowan Atkinson, so it is not logically impossible for a universalist to discover they were wrong, as it might be to even conceive of 2+2=5.
So, my question was not about whether you’d trust God or whether He’d be evil in other ways, or about foreknowledge of your counterfactual choices. (I was just asking whether you think you would change your mind, in the ordinary sense that phrase which does not require having God’s own knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom, obviously), that is, whether you think that you could come to love Him, since He would still be goodness itself, metaphysically speaking (even if that goodness were other than what you thought that involved).
Nevertheless, I take it by your response that this would be such a conceptual impossibility (as with the prior respondent) that you cannot see yourself, even given infinite time, changing your mind on that. So, I think I have my answer already.
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Whatever analytic philosophers say, I think it’s total nonsense that something could be logically possible but not metaphysically possible, or vice versa. (I know I’m not the only one who thinks this.)
Just because we can imagine that God would do something evil, such as allowing eternal torment, doesn’t make it possible. It’s logically (and hence metaphysically) impossible.
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Fr Rooney.
Take the proposition that Jesus Christ murdered a child, or beat up his mother, or married a goat. Could you, given an infinite amount of time, come to love him as ‘the Good itself’? Do you think that is ‘logically possible’ God did those things?
Your question is just as absurd.
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I feel that, even if many of the words and acts attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were not things he exactly said and did — and I do believe that some, and perhaps many, are not — it is still possible for me to continue believing in the Christ proclaimed by the church, the One through whom the church teaches us to see Jesus’ biography, whatever the exact details, from this side of its own witness to his resurrection. I don’t need much historical exactitude regarding his pre-resurrection life to remain Christian: Jesus lived, and his character and acts were those of a good man who had personal and spiritual charisma and authority. BUT, if credible evidence, compelling historical proof were to be discovered that Jesus was a murderer and thief, and the New Testament was a giant cover-up, a whitewash for a real stinker, I could not remain Christian, and I certainly could not call him good. Much the same applies to any concept of God, as far as I’m concerned.
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You are not clear about what this is about, this is about the unchanging defective moral character of this demon god you propose, not about my ability to change. No amount of time is going to change the demon god (this is after all a given in your theoretical problem). Furthermore, you are wrong about yet another point: those in the eternal hell you defend resist not a demon god, but the God who is Love, revealed in Christ, the Good Shepherd, the All in all. Your defense of this infinite hell is a defense of an absurdity. Neither that nor your thought experiment is interesting. It is harmful and blasphemous.
So give it up and come over into the light: “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” 1 John 1:5
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the above comment is addressed to Fr Rooney, not David
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Good Lord, it is clear that Fr. Rooney is now just throwing anything and everything at the wall in the hope that something will stick. It comes off as sad and desperate.
I’m sorry to say but engaging his ideas only reinforces the notion that there is something valid with which to engage.
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I don’t know if FrR is still around, but we did ask him farther up this thread if he would state what he thought the ‘moral argument’ to be – as clearly and simply as possible, without qualifying any of its terms in light of his own disagreements.
That said, I wanna try to briefly post a few claims (with some implications) that I find in FrR’s comments, if only for future reference.
1) I’m unsure about FrR’s belief re: the sufferings of hell. He believes those in hell lock themselves in (as Lewis argued). But I can’t tell if FrR believes it remains possible that those in hell are open to choosing their way to God. Can anyone confirm which is FrR’s own view – Hell as ‘irrevocable self-imprisonment’ or ‘indefinite self-imprisonment’? He used ‘indefinite’ a lot. I commented on what this means but he didn’t respond. I take ‘indefinite’ to mean ‘of unknown duration’ or ‘without express limit’. I’m a universalist and I believe the sufferings of hell are ‘indefinite’, i.e., ‘not irrevocable and thus unending’. I thought FrR believed hell was ‘of definite duration’, i.e., ‘irrevocable and thus unending’). Can anyone confirm?
2) FrR argues that we conflate ‘end’ as telos/purpose with ‘end’ as ‘some irrevocable state of being’ (ill-being in this case). We (falsely) assume that an ‘irrevocable state of suffering’ = a ‘final end’ in the teleological sense. This conflation confuses ‘God’s purpose for creating us’ with ‘whatever finally turns out to be our unending state of being’. FrR wants to distinguish between the two. If God permits us to freely determine themselves into an eternal state of suffering, this doesn’t imply God wills that state as our ‘end/telos’. On the contrary, God wills it as a ‘possible loss of our end/telos’. I’m not sure if FrR believes God remains the end/telos of those who suffer the irrevocable loss of that end. God would continue to sustain the irrevocably damned but not will himself as their teleological end?
I personally don’t conflate these ‘ends’, not blindly anyway. Because I don’t take just any ‘irrevocable and thus unending state of being’ as an ‘end’ in the teleological sense that I find the former an unacceptable end in the latter sense. We do expect that God’s end/telos would be an unending state of well-being, obviously. So a final teleological end would be a final ‘rest’ from the possibilities of lead one away from that end. But when someone posits a different state of being as ‘unending’, then teleological questions about ‘permission’ and ‘intention’ come into view. Would God who creates freely and who loves all unconditionally ‘permit’ a state of unending ill-being, the loss of God as one’s end/telos? If so, what would that imply about God as the Good as such?
3) Following from the preceding (2), what would it imply about the teleological nature of God’s sustaining presence in the irrevocably damned? FrR believes that it’s logically possible that there be ‘some good’ (some good ‘end/telos’) that is achieved in God’s permitting final, unending ill-being – but not as their ‘end/telos’, but as the unending means of some ‘final good’ that is achieved through their unending loss of God as their highest well-being. FrR doesn’t see any problem imagining God to be perfectly good and perfectly free in ‘permitting’ unending suffering, and he doesn’t feel he needs to say what good is achieved through it. He only needs to see that it is ‘logically permissible’.
4) At some point, someone with chops I don’t have will have to sift through what constitutes an ‘argument’ that is ‘logically’ meaningful. I don’t find permitting unending suffering ‘logically possible’. Charles Hartshorne was right when he argued the ‘ultimately’ (from an omniscient point of view) ‘metaphysical possibility and logical possibility’ converge/collapse into each other. He did not find atheism ‘logically possible’ for example. Not all Christian philosophers would go so far. For many theists a proposition is ‘logical’ (or logically meaningful) if its terms and grammar generate not obvious contradiction. Hartshorne granted of course that one has to play by the rules and deal with propositional claims as they’re discussed among those who disagree. But he maintained that once one sees the logical necessity of God’s existence/being, there’s no way to see propositions that contradict that necessity as ‘logically meaningful’.
I feel like our conversations with FrR are a bit like this word game. FrR finds ‘unending suffering’ to be ‘logically possible’ and so, it seems, if logically possible then morally possible, and he argues that if one wishes to demonstrate the moral impossible of God’s permitting unending suffering, one must demonstrate its ‘logical’ impossibility. Really?
For example, I find the proposition ‘God is not the Good as such’ to be ‘logically’ meaningless. By my lights, it does not make a ‘meaningful’ claim. But it seems FrR would take it to be a ‘logically meaningful’ proposition. I’m not sure. But he does take ‘God permits the unending loss of one’s highest well-being’ as ‘logically possible’ since (I’m guessing) the grammar and syntax of the words generate no obvious contradiction. And since FrR finds unending suffering a ‘logically possible’ state of affairs, he insists universalists admit it onto the menu of possibilities God might permit, a way our world may in fact be.
5) I don’t agree with Charles Hartshorne’s Process theology, but I completely agree he successfully argued the aesthetic nature of all value-claims (including moral claim), the aesthetic nature of ‘being’ itself. But FrR dismisses claims that ‘aesthetic’ intuition or appetite should find any place in a ‘moral argument’. (Totally unrelated side note: Fr Thomas Hopko did his PhD dissertation on Charles Hartshorne; I found it free online. Interesting read.)
I don’t think ‘moral’ arguments operate on the purely logical (grammatical, propositional) level as FrR seems to think. ‘Moral’ claims supervene not upon a grammar or semantic structure of nouns, verbs, and predicates under rules of identity and non-contradiction, etc. Not that truth claims don’t have to make grammatical sense of course. But they do make value-claims, and value-claims express aesthetic perceptions. Seeing the ‘goodness’ (or not) of some act is thus more like seeing the ‘beauty’ of some work or art than it is like seeing the truth of 2+2=4, even an obvious moral claim we all agree upon, like, ‘Torturing children is immoral’. There is no purely ‘logical’ proposition, purged of all moral intuitions, that demonstrates the immorality of torturing children, though humanity universally knows such an act to be evil. Moral claims are much more. They can be illusive and controversial, yes, because not everybody ‘sees value’ the same way (even though we all, always, with every intention, are making ‘valuations’ of an aesthetic nature). But I do think the moral argument comes from this place of aesthetic valuation. We are all (irreducibly) aesthetes operating under a kind of aesthetic-magnetic influence pointing us toward the Good as our highest well-being. To suppose the truth of this relation must be demonstrated in terms purged of all aesthetic appetite and valuation is, says Spock, “not logical.”
Tom
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I see FrR is still here. I thought he had take off, hence my opening line.
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A perfect example of what I’m talking about above. FrR:
“The very concept of ‘goodness’ or ‘omnibenevolence’ does not by reason of the *concept* or *term* rule out God’s permitting anyone to resist Him forever, or nobody would even be able to state the possibility. What you mean to say is that it is metaphysically, like water is necessarily H2O, and not a logically necessary truth, like 2+2=4. I think we can all conceive of the situation I gave, as well as that of Rowan Atkinson, so it is not logically impossible for a universalist to discover they were wrong, as it might be to even conceive of 2+2=5.”
No, not everyone can conceive of the situation he describes. (Actually no one can, but only some realize this.) One can no more meaningfully conceive of God’s permitting one to resist him forever than one can meaningfully conceive of atheism’s being true. This is the point re: Hartshorne’s insight about the convergence of logical and metaphysical necessity. Yes, one can place the *concept* with grammatical consistency into a sentence whose *terms* do not create a contradiction of syntax as such. But that is not to make the concept *logically* meaningful.
Where is DBH? Ha!
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Tom,
Not being a philosopher, I don’t blame you, but I’m afraid you don’t understand what I am saying, and I’m not sure how much more can be said beneficially.
First, I was claiming was that the arguments being given are not well-formed and apparently circular. These points I was making is merely logical about the arguments that are being offered, not attacks on anyone’s views, since the point of my engagement here was to clarify these positions and disagreements.
Second, if these arguments DID consist in mere moral intuitions, then they would circular and unconvincing to any not already convinced of their truth. The reason they would be so unconvincing is exactly analogous to arguing about other controversial moral intuitions. If someone affirms that they believe a right to have an abortion is a fundamental human right, it is also obvious that this intuition is not shared by many others. Even if that person thinks it is just so obvious to them that they cannot possibly even conceive of a human being being denied an abortion for any reason whatsoever, under any circumstances, and cannot imagine that they are wrong about this, it would not matter in regard to their burden of proof for others. The fact that they intuit these things, and cannot imagine otherwise, is not evidence that their view is correct. So, if anyone wants to have an argument about abortion with such strong pro-abortion advocates, one would expect that they can provide reasons that do not merely consist in their own controversial moral intuitions.
[One may also note that the abortion advocate would be acting foolishly to claim that their position is *logically* necessary, so that ‘having rights’ just MEANS ‘having a right to abortion under any circumstances.’ The charge would be extreme and foolish because it would imply pro-life advocates are just making a conceptual mistake, as we might if we had a disagreement about whether a bachelor was an unmarried man. But it is obvious to all that ‘having rights’ does not by itself mean or entail ‘having a right to abortion under any circumstances’ in the way that ‘bachelor’ just means ‘unmarried man.’]
So, no, I have never argued “that if one wishes to demonstrate the moral impossible of God’s permitting unending suffering, one must demonstrate its ‘logical’ impossibility.” I proposed that you needed independent reasons, apart from your moral intuition, as to why this belief is true. Those reasons need to be able to constitute non-circular grounds to accept the conclusion that God cannot permit that.
You gave a kind of implicit argument that, if God were to permit people to reject His love forever, then He would not be intending that all have Him as their teleological end. But the only way in which God does not intend all creatures to have God as their teleological end is if God cannot but positively intend their rejecting His love (since God ‘merely permitting’ suffering would be precisely to intend that all have Him as their end, but allow them to fail to achieve it). Thus, the reasoning in this instance too is circular, since the thing we were supposed to be proving is that God cannot ‘merely permit’ that rejection.
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I don’t think I’m misunderstanding you.
Your first point, that our arguments were circular, is exactly how I’ve understood you. I have not complained that you have “attacked” anyone’s views. All my comments were based on understanding your complaints to be about the nature of the argument(s) made.
Your second point, that where moral intuitions are incorporated into the argument, the argument becomes circular and useless in convincing others. There is no correction here for me, since this is precisely what I’ve understood you to be saying.
These are the only two points you make to explain how I’ve misunderstood you, but these are precisely how I’ve understood you. So I can only assume you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’ve said too much about the nature of moral arguments including moral intuition to be misunderstood. We can just part and leave it at that.
Lastly, I spoke of your insisting that what we needed to do was ‘demonstrate the logical impossibility of God’s permitting unending suffering’. You said this is not your view about what needs to be demonstrated. But all my words mean is what you here explain, that a successful argument (in this case) must be purged of appeals to ‘moral intuition’, and that’s precisely what you say and precisely what I’ve been addressing.
This should make future response to Hart’s moral argument much simpler. You can simply say “Hart’s argument relies upon moral intuition or sense, is thus circular, and so not an argument at all. There’s nothing here that can convince a rational person.” It won’t take pages to say. It’s that simple after all.
I beg you to publish it.
Tom
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Of infernalists, a friend writes:
“Their theo-logic is manifestly lacking in the revelatory power of the gospel. The ‘It is finished’ of Christ on the Cross is an announcement of eschatological triumph, the perfection of the cosmos as God intends. Anything less than that impugns Divine Goodness. Precisely what would make God literally incoherent and unbelievable is what the infernalist supposes to be the necessary presupposition for God’s loving gift of freedom. When Hell, not love, is the guarantor of liberty, you’ve committed the sin against the Holy Spirit.”
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