Category: Heaven and Hell

How Could an Impassible God be Offended or Know Any Contingent Fact?

Earlier (here and here) I asked how an all-good God could sentence a human agent to sempiternal punishment, punishment that has a beginning but no end.  If the punishment must fit the crime, and the crimes of finite agents are themselves finite, then it would seem that no one, no matter what his crimes, would deserve sempiternal punishment.  To make this a bit more precise we ought to substitute 'sin' for 'crime.'  They are different concepts.  Sin, but not crime, implies an offense to God.  If there is no God then there cannot, strictly speaking, be any sin.  But there could still be crime relative to an accepted body of positive law.  And if there is no positive law, but there is a God, then there could be sin but no crime.  (Positive law is the law posited by human legislators.) 

So let us say that the punishment must fit the sin.  My claim, then, is that no sin or sins committed by a human agent is such as to merit sempiternal punishment.  To put the point more sharply, a God who would condemn a finite human agent to unending misery is a moral monster, and not God.  (I am assuming that the agent in question has come to admit the error of his ways and is truly sorry for them. I have no problem with the unending misery of a recalcitrant rebel.) 

In response, Leo Mollica said that the offense to God, as an offense to a being of infinite dignity, is itself infinite and so deserves sempiternal punishment.  This prompted me to ask how an impassible God could be offended, which is the topic of this post.

Impassibility.  To say that God is impassible is to say that nothing external to God can affect God.  As Brian Leftow points out in his SEP article, impassibility is not the same as immutability.  He gives two reasons, but all we need is one: a God who induces a change in himself is not immutable but still could be impassible.  Now if God is impassible, then he cannot be offended by the antics of the Israelites as when they fell to worshipping a golden calf, etc.  He cannot be offended by sin.  And if he cannot be offended by sin, then he cannot be 'infinitely' offended by it.  Or so I maintained.

In response Mollica made a clever move.  He pointed out, rightly, that a person could be offended (wronged, slandered, calumniated, etc.) without knowing that he is.  Such a person would be offended without being affected.  I took the suggestion to be that God too could be offended without being affected.  Thus impassibility does not rule out God's being offended.

To this my reply was that God is omniscient.  He knows everything there is to know. So although it is true that a finite person could be offended without knowing it, and so not affected by the injury that was done to him, God could not be offended without knowing it. Good Thomist that he is, Mollica came back at me with the notion that God is not affected by what he knows.  So when the creature sins, God is offended; but his being offended in no way affects him:  he is not affected 'cognitively' by his knowledge that he is being offended, nor is he affected or injured  'morally' by his being offended.

Very interesting, but very problematic, as problematic as the Thomist line on divine knowledge.  If God is God, then he must be a metaphysical absolute and the pressure is on to say that he is both impassible and immutable.  (An immutable being is one that cannot undergo 'real' as opposed to 'mere Cambridge' change.)  After all, a decent absolute is not the sort of thing that could change or be affected by other things. If it underwent change or affection it would be relativized. But how could such an unchanging  God know anything contingent?  If God is unchanging, then his knowledge is unchanging: it cannot vary over time, or from possible world to possible world.  Here is an argument adapted from  Hartshorne.

1.  If p entails q, and q is contingent, then p is contingent.
2. *Tom sins at time t* is contingent.
3. *God knows that Tom sins at t* entails *Tom sins at t*.
Therefore
4. *God knows that Tom sins at t* is contingent.
Therefore
5. The property of knowing that Tom sins at t is an accidental (not essential) property of God.
6. God has no accidental properties: it is no part of his unchangeable essence that he know any contingent fact, any fact that could have been otherwise.
7. (5) and (6) are contradictories.  So one of the premises must be rejected.  (6) is the premise most plausibly rejected; but then impassibility and immutability go by the boards.

The challenge for our resident Thomist is to explain how an impassible and immutable God can know any contingent fact.

From McTaggart to Rome

Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, p. 9:

Soaking myself in McTaggart, I imbibed a desire for Heaven and eternal life, which of course I had not to abandon on becoming Catholic; and meanwhile I was preserved from giving my heart with total devotion to some less worthy end, as I saw many contemporaries doing.  Even as regards the relation of time and eternity I had no need to find McTaggart wholly mistaken.  God's life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, really is the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons; and we have the great and precious promise that, in a way we cannot now begin to understand, we shall transcend all the delusion and misery and wickedness of this life and become sharers in that eternal life.

No Eternal Punishment? Then Why Eternal Reward?

Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below.  Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there.  And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime.  The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes would merit everlasting post-mortem punishment of the perpetrator?  I earlier opined that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment.  Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer.  (It may be otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.)  But I added a qualification  in my earlier post: unless the perpetrator wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor. 

Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God.  He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much.  What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes. 

Discussing my earlier post, Richard Hennessey raises an interesting counter-question:   ". . .  if justice demands an eternal or everlasting punishment for no finite sin or crime or finite set of finite sins or crimes, no matter how heinous, does justice demand an eternal or everlasting reward for no finite good deed or finite set of finite good deeds, no matter how virtuous?"  I think what Hennessey is asking here is better put as follows.  If justice rules out everlasting punishment for finite crimes, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds? 

To sharpen the challenge, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative:  If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either.  If that is the point, then I could respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward  for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along.  It is something like a birthright or an inheritance.  One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward.   But one can lose it.  Similarly with the Beatific Vision.  One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it.  But one can lose it.

"But this is all speculation!"  Indeed, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell?

Jeremy Lott, Osama bin Laden in Hell:

To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.

It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.

1.  The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat.  Of course there may  be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment.  But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all. 

2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice.  There is some justice here below, but not much.  One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world.  Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice.  (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.)  Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways.  Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Life may just be absurd.  But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life.  Suppose you do.  Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished?  Consider this line of thought:

a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd.
b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life.
c.  Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life
d.  This life is not absurd.
Therefore
e.  There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.

This is not a compelling argument by any means.  But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.

3.  A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will.  God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions.  In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man.  So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it.  But this separation is what hell is.  So God must allow hell.

4. Is hell eternal separation from God?  Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right?  Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that.  But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally?   The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment.  How do I know that?  By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God.  See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.

I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out.  Fideism is out. No fundamentalism.  No Bibliolatry.  No  inerrantism.  None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are.  No sola scriptura  or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est.  The latter  is also a Roman Catholic principle.

5.  As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.)  But free will may.  Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly.  Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.

6.  Will I go directly to heaven when I die?  Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.)  Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally  want to be with God.  If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities?   In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust.  If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side.  I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.

7.  Is Osama bin Laden in hell?  Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool.  But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God — unless he wants it.  But it is good that the al-Qaeda head  is dead.