Why Logical Defenses to the Problem of Evil Work but to the Problem of Hell Do NOT Work

Hart's Moral Argument for Universalism

In God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo David Bentley Hart observes that “it 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.”

What Hart has parsed above vis a vis the problem of evil is the classical distinction between evidential theodicies and logical defenses.

In _That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation_, Hart advanced a clarifying “game-theory” argument, which describes the necessary “moral modal collapse” of the distinction between divine will and divine permission (or between the divine antecedent and consequent wills) at the eschatological horizon. It speaks to the relative goodness of God’s action in creation and, by inevitable logical extension, of God in himself.

Regarding that eschatological horizon, Hart’s not suggesting we’ll have to wait & see how good is the Lord, he’s demonstrating the incoherence of the infernalist logic, wherein evil would've become a final end, protologically, in the subjective intent of God’s permissively willing a disproportional infinite perdition for finite agents. That denigration of God’s character, then, would remain true even if, eschatologically, all would eventually repent & avoid all objectively evil consequences.

No better analysis of Hart’s moral argument can be found than that gifted us by Tom Belt in God’s Eschatological Salvific Will: Revisiting Hart’s Moral Argument for Universalism. Therein, Tom recently revised and extended his analysis to address why Hart’s moral argument does not otherwise render our other logical defenses to the problem of transient evils impotent. I encourage all with such lingering questions to check it out.

Below are a few thoughts his article evoked for me:

Disproportional infinite remedies to the upside vis a vis transient evils make their risk morally defensible. Presumably, those unintended, unavoidable risks are worth running because of the immense intrinsic value of our theotic growth in intimacy from images to likenesses.

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.

Otherwise, 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 original indefensible subjective intention, which had 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, it necessarily follows that all shall be saved. What keeps them from recognizing this is their artificial extrinsicism. The distinction between omnipresence & indwelling makes sense regarding creation's shadows & vestiges, where the former - not the latter - would apply. For imagoes Dei, though, only distinctions per degrees of indwelling make any sense, e.g. growing in likeness, theosis, epectasy, holiness, intimacy, etc. That's why Thomists, who properly dismiss a character - based beatific contingency, can't coherently introduce, instead, an indwelling - based contingency. Impeccability, then, introduces an intractable universalist problem:

Whether with or without sufficient information, by definition, no one can freely & wholly reject God.

Impeccability is correct, of course.

Ergo, universalism is true.

The Moral Modal Collapse as an Analogate to Proportionate Reasoning: an Analysis of Indirectly vs Directly Evil Acts

I recently came across a “double effect reasoning” analysis of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” To me, something analogous seems in play w/DBH’s allegation of a moral modal collapse at the eschatological horizon.

In neither a logical defense of hell nor of transient evil need we worry whether the act of creating the good of free rational agents is wrong, or whether anything evil has caused that good, or whether God intended anything evil.

There very much does seem to be a concern, though, as to whether any of the bad effects of transient & eternal evils outweigh such good effects as human freedom. In other words, does God have a proportionate reason to tolerate either transient or eternal evils?

Eliding the whole question of just what account of freedom properly obtains (in/compatibilist, libertarian, etc), a significant impasse emerges at this point:

Can one properly invoke theological skepticism regarding God’s character vis a vis transient vs eternal evils?

Universalists claim that God’s character has been sufficiently revealed such that He will clearly provide disproportional remedies & rewards and manifestly eschew disproportional punishments!

It is here, at this juncture in proportionate reasoning, that universalists maintain that running the risks of transient evils is morally licit and that the act of creation involves evil only indirectly.

Running the risks of eternal evils, however, is 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, therefore, directly involve evil. Again, God’s subjective intent, here, could not be exculpated, even by any putative avoidance of the objective evil consequences (should all repent & be saved, for example). One dare not risk such evils!

Continuing the conversation in my response to Tom Belt.

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.

Continuing the conversation in my response to Fr. Rooney:

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 suffering-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.

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.

re: 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.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 is 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