Everything Wrong with the Case for Eternal Hell

¶1Hey, Miles. >> Randall, how are you? >> I'm doing all right. How are you doing? >> I'm doing well.

¶2I'm doing well. Can you hear me? Okay. Is everything looking okay? >> Yeah, >> indeed.

¶3>> How are you? What have you been up to? >> Just uh doing my thing. Workplace investigations and uh taking some time off in the summer, going to a lot of concerts, seeing friends. How about you?

¶4>> Who do you uh who do you go see at concerts? Um, uh, I just saw a Canadian group called 5440 a couple days ago, although a thunderstorm hit, so we had to run for shelter. >> I see. >> And I mean, I see I don't know. I've seen probably 10 concerts in the last couple months.

¶5So, a lot of different stuff. A lot of some classic rock, some newer stuff. Yeah. >> Yeah. I can't relate.

¶6I don't like concerts. I've never liked them. I remember once when I was seven years old, my parents had gotten my sister tickets to a concert and she's like five years older than me and I I was so upset that I hadn't been included. They said, "You need to take me. I want to go." And I hated it.

¶7And [laughter] ever since then, every every time I've gone, I've gone to maybe four concerts. They're just not for me. They're a bit too loud and they last a bit too long. Um I think I don't have the passion for music that you need to like really get into it. like an artist that I love that I would absolutely want to go see.

¶8I just don't have that. >> That's fair. But I mean, my first thought is like I had a I have a I have a friend who hates beer. And the reason is because when his parents had a party when he was like 6 years old, he went around and finished everybody's can of beer when they weren't looking and he got violently ill and that created this impression. And I think you might have just had that first bad impression.

¶9>> Yeah. >> And you maybe have to do some therapy, work through it and then you could enjoy concerts. I legit remember being seven. I was an old man even at seven. Like just wanting to sleep and I was like, why does everyone keep standing?

¶10Yeah, I was. So, you know what? Maybe maybe I should do some work on that. Before we dive in, one thing I was curious about was in your own efforts at making a YouTube channel. You put out a video almost once a day as you you have said.

¶11I'm curious like how do you pick what topics to do? I would imagine part of it is just kind of vibes, the news of the day in the apologetics world and you go, "Oh, I could respond to that, but like how do you how do you fetter through the possibilities and pick what to do a video on?" >> Uh, I mean, I think you kind of just got it there. It's like, >> okay, >> what comes across my plate? The thing is, I'm not doing a lot of in-depth research right now. I'm I'm not doing scholarship anymore.

¶12So for me it's more being a little bit of a dilotant and something that just kind of piques my interest and so then I I do a reply to it. So it's pretty much ad hoc. I've kind of scaled it back a little bit so probably five times a week rather than like seven. I mean I just find that the posting in the weekend there's such a precipitous drop off that I usually don't do as much that that time. Just don't get a lot back.

¶13>> Yeah. No, fair enough. Fair enough. Uh, so with respect to the Ethan Muse interview, that's what we're talking about. And I thought it went well in a sense.

¶14I thought it was quite interesting. But we're going to be discussing the Ethan Muse's case for an Eternal Hell specifically that happened near the end end of the interview. Before we dive into the details and the specifics, you had a chance to watch it. General impressions, general takeaways, any comments on the exchange as a whole. >> Is this for video or just for pre-recording?

¶15Just >> Oh, no. So, this is this is part of it. I I forget to mention I really do like more of this informal. We just start talking. Any part you want cut out from this, let me know.

¶16Oh, yeah. No, that's >> we just kind of go [clears throat] >> Yeah. just to understand how much uh or how to frame it. So, I mean, I thought it was fine. I I wouldn't say I was impressed.

¶17I don't >> Yeah. >> Just um >> but I also thought that um he he had so when he talks about things as being emotional difficulties, you came back and reframed it as an intellectual difficulty with respect to our moral intuitions and the vertical force of our moral intuitions. And I thought the way that he framed things as an emotional difficulty, sort of implying it subjective and of course having this almost hyper skepticism about emotional as he framed it, objections that would diverge from his understanding of Catholic doctrine, I just found to be completely uncompelling. and the way that he approached it as well, there was almost a sort of flat emotional affect about it that I just didn't resonate with me. I mean, there's a famous quote, actually, I pulled it up here from John Sto.

¶18So John Sto was a Anglican theologian and conservative but in 1988 he co-wrote a book in which he came out as in favor of the annihilationist view rather than eternal conscious torment view. And in that he had this quote. He said, "Emotionally I find the concept that is of eternal conscious torment intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain and I I mean that's resonates with me. So when you talk about people being tortured forever, you know, suffering maximally in body and mind and let alone that like children who like say they died in childhood and they committed some small sin but it's a sin against an infinitely majestic god and thereby offended that god's honor. The thought that that child is being tortured forever is just insane to me.

¶19So when he says cauterizing their feelings, I actually think there's a couple things here that could be going on. One is yeah that people they kind of try to live with a co cognitive dissonance by cauterizing their feelings by sort of well to borrow actually a line from Jay Butchevsky. He was he's a Catholic natural law philosopher and he talked about when he was a neolist he says I'm I'm paraphrasing here but he says that he made himself stupid. He sort of convinced himself life was meaningless when it wasn't meaningless. Now that framing I think I would put to the person who cauterizes their feelings to accept eternal conscious torment.

¶20they're almost making themselves stupid like they're trying to persuade themselves they don't know something that they do know in terms of this is just wrong. The other possibility is not that a person is cauterizing their feelings but rather that they lack some moral perceptual faculty that I have. So in that case, for example, if you took somebody to a like they were happy eating their hamburg and I'm I'm a omnivore here, but I I do morally struggle with with uh meat eating. And so if if if you showed me if you took me into a slaughter house um and showed me what happens to cows, that would deeply emotionally affect me. And maybe if I had a little more moral consistency, I might really follow through some of the implications of that and alter my diet.

¶21But if somebody went into the slaughterhouse and they just shrugged and didn't have any emotional response to it, I wouldn't be compelled to think I was emotionally being moved for no reason. I would have a reason to think that they were lacking something that I had in terms of my moral perceptual revulsion at the suffering of these creatures. And that's the other way that I would think about people who are not emotionally moved by the doctrine. It's not that they cauterize their feelings, but maybe they're just lacking something perceptually in terms of their basic grasp of moral facts that I I have, an ability I have that they lack. And Nate um so Ethan when when he described his response at the end of the interview, he sort of said, "Well, he used to think like you, but he doesn't anymore.

¶22So maybe maybe he cauterized his feelings. I don't know. I I don't want to engage into too much armchair psychologizing, but I also I'm just trying to understand what I think is going on in him and in his response. And that's kind of my first thoughts. >> Yeah.

¶23So, I think it's worth talking a bit more about this distinction between an emotional and an intellectual problem because in fairness to Ethan, it seemed like you're implying he doesn't have an emotional problem with the doctrine. Now, that depends on what you mean by that, but I think what his words were at the beginning of that section is that there is a big emotional problem for affirming this doctrine, but there isn't a comparatively difficult intellectual problem. Now, then maybe you'd say, well, from the interview, it seemed like he didn't even have an emotional problem with it. But it it seems like what he said anyway was, "No, there's an emotional problem here, but there isn't an intellectual one." So, what what I want to get at is like what's the difference between those two things? Should we draw the line of distinction that way?

¶24I mean, I kind I kind of get it if you just have a gut emotional response to something that's not necessarily indicative of truth or falsity. But it seems like when we start talking about moral experience, the experience of something as wrong or right or good or evil, then that kind of blurs the initially clear lines of distinction. So like what do we mean by emotional versus intellectual problem anyway? Uh so one distinction that may be relevant here is the distinction between properly basic versus non-basic beliefs. >> So whereas a properly basic belief is something you hold intuitively or without without a discursive or reasoning process.

¶25You just find yourself with that belief. you encounter some fact or state of affairs and you immediately form belief upon the experience of encountering that thing. So when you for example you encounter the prospect of people being tortured forever you just have an immediate emotional revulsion to it. But I think you could frame that as a properly basic intuition which indeed is the starting point of reason. We we start to reason from intuitive starting points.

¶26Uh but I think that could be what's going on is like a person is distinguishing between the intuitions and the discursive reasoning process that [clears throat] follows out from the intuitions. But to think that the intuitions themselves are not sort of rational starting points of uh for for debate and argument I think is just misses the point. I do think you have a challenge when people don't share your intuitions whether they are moral intuitions or aesthetic intuitions or rational intuitions. You do often have a challenge. Well, how can I build a bridge to this person and try to persuade them that I have the correct intuitions and they don't?

¶27But that doesn't mean the intuitions themselves aren't rational or intellectual, quote unquote. >> Yeah. I I think that is the point I was getting at is that to say that we experience some action hypothetical or real or scenario as wrong is not to say that we have an emotional problem with it. On a view of ethics where there are moral facts, then in moral experience, however dimly, we perceive the moral facts just by thinking about them. In the same way that we perceive that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that's an intellectual perception, not necessarily a sensory one.

¶28But you wouldn't characterize that as an emotional response. And so by the same token, I don't see why when we're contemplating the idea of infinite torture of a person and the the claim that they deserve this and that all human beings deserve this, that strikes me as if as anything does as incorrect, as morally wrong. And that's not an emotional response. Now I guess it gets a little difficult or a little fuzzy because there is an emotional aspect to it but I would reject the reduction of the issue here as just one of an emotional disgust. Rather there is also that just sheer fact that we perceive this as obviously incorrect.

¶29If we know anything about morality from our moral experience from thinking about these things this impresses itself upon us as as wrong. the idea of subjecting someone to infinite torture based on the ordinary goings on of a human life. So is that is that right? There is an emotional component but you can't reduce the problem of eternal hell to just emotions. So I maybe I say two things.

¶30First of all, absolutely correct. I think u so one of the features of moral reasoning is that for most people moral reasoning includes an emotional effectual element of [snorts] of attraction and revulsion. So say if you think if you have these two different claims one claim is uh nothing can be red and green all over. I don't have any emotional revulsion to that. It's just like no it seems to me that that can't be the case.

¶31Now, if you also say torturing torturing babies for fun is morally good, [snorts] I also believe that can't be the case. But I also have a revulsion to the claim. And that's just part of the feature of moral intuitions and the moral reasoning that flows from them is part of the guide. Our moral compass, which is admittedly fallible, as is all our reasoning, but nonetheless, it's an important starting point. And so it is to have attraction and revulsion to particular truth claims that have a moral element.

¶32And you're talking about torture. Yeah. I have a revulsion to that. It is correct if we look throughout history to talk about the fallibility element. The idea of torture was very widely accepted in western juristprudence for centuries.

¶33uh and that helped create the space for people to think of eternal conscious torment as a potentially credible way of thinking about postumous judgment. But once we come to the point of thinking, no, those people were wrong to think that torture could be okay, then that is just going to have implications for all sorts of other things, including these constructions of the afterlife. Now, Ethan, of course, could say, "Well, how do you know that you're right?" and centuries of people who justified torturing other human beings were wrong. And to to some degree, I'll be happy to say here I stand, I can do no other. As Martin Luther famously said, these are my intuitions.

¶34This is the way it seems to me. But I do think that when I think very deeply and in a way that I attempt to be humane and to love my neighbor as Jesus called me to love them. It seems to me that torturing human beings is just wrong. And I'm okay with that. Even if I can't necessarily have a way to show that Ethan's intuition that no torture can be okay, I I can't show him that he's wrong.

¶35But I I think that's not uncommon in in debate as we often come down to each one of us saying, "Well, this is the way it seems to me." >> Yes. And I think we'll get into some of the points he raises trying to defeat this specific intuition because I think on any reasonable epistemology we don't want to say that our intuitions are infallible or indefeasible that they can never be undermined. And so he'll want to raise some considerations that you know in this specific case even if you have this intuition even if it seems to you very powerfully that no morally perfect being could ever could ever do this. Nevertheless, there are specific reasons to that undercut that that seeming that initial warrant. And so I want to talk about those things.

¶36But at the outset, I think it's important to distinguish between like the arguments he gives in favor of the coherence of the doctrine and then the main objection that I raised and then his counter replies to that objection. So it's not always clear what the structure of the dialectic is. This was an informal conversation, but the way I see it, uh, he raised basically two arguments in favor of this doctrine that were not themselves responses to my objection that it just seems so morally abhorent. The first that he raises is this kind of very just general appeal to the authority of the Catholic Church. In a nutshell, he says that we have all of this astounding miracle evidence that he has written very lengthy Substack posts about that that establish the veracity of various saints in the Catholic Church and they they serve to underscore the authority of the Catholic Church to speak on theological matters so on and so forth.

¶37[snorts] It's the same like basic logic of the kind of general appeal that you might make to a case for the resurrection of Jesus. If you can show historically that Jesus rose from the dead, that gives you very strong grounds for trusting what Jesus said about God, the afterlife and so on. So the basic idea is we have all this miracle evidence that the Catholic Church is the authority for speaking on these matters and the Catholic Church teaches eternal conscious torment. Now he supplements that too by saying Jesus taught this. The apostle Paul taught this.

¶38And so the I suppose the less difficult to defend version of this argument is just to give a conditional. If you accept these sources of authority, then you have a very good reason to accept the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. And then of course there's the the stronger version of the argument which is not just conditional. It's saying here's all this miracle evidence to show that we should accept these authorities. So, I just want to get your comment first on that really general appeal to authority regardless of what our intuitions say.

¶39Here's a very strong argument that this doctrine is in fact true. >> So, um let me preface this by saying my only experience with Ethan is watching this video, but I know that he's done other videos talking about miracle claims and so on and saints. Well, actually I interviewed a friend of mine uh Travis Dumsdale who's uh Eastern Orthodox and he has a similar he's he's done um Eastern Orthodox miracles as well. So I guess right there we have well the Eastern Orthodox have all their saints and miracle claims and the Catholics have theirs and each one is saying well but ours are better so you better listen to our guys when they talk about X Y and Zed. And I think well you can also find that with Protestants and you can find that with other religious traditions and no religious tradition at all.

¶40You can find very wonderful people who did incredible things. Now I'm going to set aside the miracle claims specifically. But just to talk about people who appear to have some kind of moral authority. You can find people with moral authority across all different belief communities. Um and and if you think such people don't exist in communities outside of your own, you need to get out more.

¶41I'm just going to have to say that. So at the end of the day, um it's like, well then whose saints are better? I it's like it's just to me not a very compelling way to reason. But but another thing just to keep in mind here, an important element I think is just because a person lived a godly life or would be a wonderful neighbor doesn't mean they're right about everything. it doesn't mean they're morally infallible.

¶42Um, and to borrow a line from Thomas Moore, u I can't pin my conscience to another man's back. So, he was asked to to approve of the marriage of King Henry VIII and or his attempt to to anolull his marriage with Catherine and to to shack up with Anne Bolin and he he refused to do that even though that would mean his life. He said, 'I can't pin my conscience to another man's back. And I think that's a wonderful line for every one of us to say, I can't pin my conscience to the back of this person just because they did many wonderful things to say, well, because they ascended to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church teaches eternal conscious torment, that's not enough for me to to give up my moral intuition. So, I just find that uncompelling.

¶43I I would say as well that the while the Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, the Catholic Church is also open to the possibility in their teaching that in fact nobody will be in hell. Uh and so Hans Hans Balth Bothar wrote a book dare we hope that all men be saved? He's one of the leading Catholic theologians of the 20th century and he points out that a hopeful universalism is perfectly compatible with Catholic doctrine. So um you may believe that were people to be damned they would face eternal conscious torment but in fact no one will be damned. You could be a Catholic and believe that.

¶44Now I don't think that solves all your issues by any means because if eternal conscious torment is an immoral doctrine then the hypothetical of it is still immoral, right? Like if I say to my kids, if any of you are out if if you if you break curfew tonight, I will torture you. And none of them end up breaking curfew, it doesn't mean that the threat wasn't itself immoral. So I don't think that solves all of the issues. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that you could be a Catholic and have a deep hope maybe bordering on something close to conviction that in fact all will be saved.

¶45Well, I think that's a really important point that evidently there isn't a straight line from the Catholic Church is authoritative all in all that it teaches and the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is true. Now, I'm not familiar with Catholic theology, so I could challenge him on that score, but are there not like uh ecclesiastical or or council statements throughout the 2,000-year history of Christianity that that affirm eternal conscious torment, at least like within the Catholic tradition? or has this been left open somewhat? >> Well, let me speak broadly that that within Christian teaching more generally back to the Petristic era, there have always been three different broad views. The annihilationist view where there's a resurrection to judgment that results in the ceation of existence.

¶46uh the universalist view that there is a resurrection to judgment that results in a period of postumous suffering that ultimately restores the individual so that all will be saved and then the eternal conscious torment view that Ethan would hold. And while the eternal conscious torment view has been the predominant view throughout Christian history, it has never been the only view. And in fact there were periods like in the Petristic era in the eastern church where the universalist position was really more the dominant position back to people like origin and Gregory of Nessa and Clement of Alexandria and others. So there's actually a lot of diversity within the Christian tradition. And I think it's really a mistake to take a doctrine that has so much moral baggage to it and to place that as a burden on the shoulders of Christians or would be Christians to say you're really expected to believe this.

¶47Now one one maybe just to come back briefly to the one thing about saints getting things sometimes getting things wrong. I I think it's also just worth emphasizing that point that sometimes people can be moral authorities in one area and yet have a huge gaping blind spot. Now I think we all know that in our daily lives is that there are people who could be wonderful in one area and yet in another area they just can't see their own blind spot, their own bias. For example, you could have a person who hires their child in their company and they're generally a very fair employer. Um, but whenever it involves their child, they just have a nepotistic bias to support their child no matter what their child does.

¶48Now, they may be generally reliable in making business decisions except when it comes to their child. And you have like that throughout church history. So somebody that maybe many Protestants love is Jonathan Edwards, a very influential theologian from the 18th century. Yet he was a slave owner. So and of course this is true is that many Christians for centuries believed that owning slaves, owning human beings was perfectly compatible with their Christian disciplehip.

¶49So if somebody now wants to say, well they were very scently and they wrote big theological books and maybe they even had some miracles attributed to them. So we should thereby accept their acceptance of slavery. I'm going to say by no means. Uh and I would say the same thing when it comes to views of torture, civil torture or postumous torture of the damned in the afterlife. >> Yes.

¶50So I want to talk more about that specifically the appeal to the the holiness of Catholic saints. But I see that more as um a so-called undercutting defeater of the objection that I raised for the coherence of the doctrine in so far as right now we're just at the level of like what considerations did Ethan raise wholly apart from the perceived unintuitiveness of the doctrine that I discussed. What considerations did Ethan appeal to to show that this is actually a coherent doctrine that a loving God would do this? And the other point that he raises, well, one of the other points he raises is kind of this general appeal to like a Catholic anthropology, to a doctrine of sin, that if if you grant what the Catholic Church and maybe the Bible more generally says about human nature, this doctrine will seem a lot less appalling to you. It may not go all the way to showing that it's perfectly coherent and what you would expect.

¶51But once you grant that human beings are rotten to the core, wicked at every level, well then it might not seem so unintuitive that we would deserve eternal damnation. Now I I think that's a really bad argument because and my basic point and maybe you'll say this is that and I didn't say this in the dialogue, but it occurred to me later that however wicked we actually are compared to what we take ourselves to be, it will always ever be finite. Unless you're proposing that we are actually infinitely wicked, then even if we are horrendously mistaken about how bad we truly are, as long as the Catholic do doctrine itself affirms that our wickedness, however great, is finite in extent, then it won't go one inch in justifying infinite punishment for that sinful wicked nature. So I think that's the fundamental fallacy of the argument wholly apart from whether or not that empirical claim about human nature is true. It's kind of like even if you grant it, it doesn't go one inch in establishing the the justice or the proportionality of an infinite punishment for a merely finite wicked set of actions or nature.

¶52What do you think? No, I I think that that's a very credible reply just like I mean another argument he made was appealing to this Austinian notion that you know an offense against an infinite God requires an infinite punishment. And I think in each one of these cases, it's just to try to to defend this idea of torturing a person eternally, it just to me, it just the wheels fall off the wagon. It's just so uncompelling. Now, one related thing here is we can't forget well I I also want to come back to this pessimistic anthropology itself because I think that's a big problem here.

¶53But but first of all, we can't forget that it is God who creates these human beings that have these flaws in the first place. Um I to think of an analogy. Think about a child who in uterro their parent drank alcohol and as a result they are born with fetal alcohol syndrome and as a result of that they have a complete lack of control over their actions and they're sort of faded in their lives to end up in the criminal justice system because they were ultimately born fallen quote unquote in the sense that I'm using an analogy here of course I'm not suggesting this is a moral moral taint on the individual, but it does impact their ability to reason and think morally and so on and as a result they can't engage in a healthy pro-social manner with other human beings and they end up in prison. Well, would you think well yeah but they're fallen they deserve to be in prison or do you think there's a dimension there? By the way, whenever I use that word that means I'm just setting up the other person, right?

¶54>> Right. >> It makes my argument stronger if I use funny voices for the It does. >> Yeah, that's the way to win arguments. >> But but I mean I think what we would say is there is the bigger issue here is to look at the whole matter therapeutically is that there is something about this person that is broken that um yeah if they commit crimes you have to to deal with that. But the bigger issue here in a perfect justice system would be to find a way to bring healing to them through therapeutic means because they had been damaged from the very outset from the womb in utero with this impact of alcohol.

¶55And this is analogous to human beings being impacted by this taint of original sin. We are born with the exact same dysfunctions analogously to this child with fetal alcohol syndrome. And so we're all going to end up, you know, in eternal prison on this account. And if you just leave it there and say there's no responsibility on the person who birthed these children with this fallen nature, I think you're just missing a very important piece of that whole puzzle. Now the other thing again we we should come back to maybe is just that kind of that that the very negative view of human nature because I also just want to say that can verge it's it can I I like to say it's often can become pseudo piety which is in fact missanthropic in nature.

¶56It's like you you want to present yourselves as as very devout to God and holy. And so you emphasize the sinfulness, debasiveness, wretchedness of human beings in such a way that it really distorts human nature itself. And you can't see as much good as there in fact is in human beings. >> Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I I just think that the really fundamental point is that even if you grant this to say that human beings are even 10 to the 100 times worse than we typically take ourselves to be capable of incomprehensible evils is not it falls infinitely short quite literally of showing that we deserve infinite punishment for who we are and for what we've done.

¶57And then you're absolutely right. These other difficulties just layer themselves on. Is this even true? What about God who creates us with this fundamentally wicked nature? And so I I completely agree with you.

¶58Since we're on the topic of this infinite proportionality argument, >> [snorts] >> um you're right. There was intimations of the argument within Augustine. uh there are Anselm gave a similar argument and I think Thomas Aquinus gave it gave it its most succinct formulation in the suma theologia that sins ultimately are even even the most trivial sin like stealing gum from the gas station is against an infinite being. It offends against the dignity of an inf infinite being God and therefore it is an infinitely severe moral atrocity. every single sin is and therefore by committing any sin we deserve infinite punishment.

¶59Now just looking at it philosophically putting our thinking caps on and assessing the soundness of this argument. What do you make of it? I I agree with you the conclusion is false but it's not totally obvious to me which premise or which assumption of each premise that that we should reject. Is it the idea that the severity of a sin scales with the dignity of the person to whom it is against? Is it the premise that these sins really are against God in the first place?

¶60Where does it break down? >> Well, I would I would say probably where it most fundamentally breaks down is in the focus on the the action and the one to whom the action is ostensibly directed that is God rather than to focus on the individual as the moral agent who's acting. If if if you miss the the fact, for example, that this is a 5-year-old child who who took a pack of gun from the gas station. If you missed that, well, how it's something so obvious which we apply in every other area of life that we scale moral culpability and among other things legal penalties or civil penalties or whatever to the moral agency and awareness of the individual. Now, where this is very obvious is in this distinction between being a legal minor and an adult.

¶61And so [snorts] we don't apply to legal minors the same kind of judgments and punishments that we would to adults because we recognize they don't have the same kind of culpability. And among other things, even until you're in your early 20s, your brain is not sufficiently developed to anticipate consequences and to control impulses. And for those are some of the reasons why we don't think that a 15year-old should be punished in the same way that a 25-year-old is, let alone a 5-year-old. But on this account, there there's no nuance there. There's no recognition that a 5-year-old stealing a pack of gum does not have the same culpability as a 15-year-old, let alone a 25-year-old.

¶62And then the other thing which he referenced is to say that every sin is ultimately a sin against God. Now often that is proof texted with an appeal to uh the psalm of of lament from and [snorts] repentance from uh King David attributed to King David after he uh sexually assaulted Ba Sheeba and then had Uriah killed. And he says to God against you only have I sinned. And so this idea being that every sin is ultimately a sin against God, I I just don't it doesn't I don't know even really what that means to be honest. Say what does it mean to say that a 5-year-old who took a pack of gum was sinning against God?

¶63I mean I doubt a 5-year-old can even grasp what God means, the concept of God. So I would need to hear a lot more about what that actually meant. Now, let's give an analogy perhaps. So, let's say that an adult took their child to visit the head of state. I was going to say the president, but Donald Trump is such a loathome figure um that I think we would do better.

¶64>> Quite appeal to people's intuitions in the same way. >> Yeah. So, let let's uh I'll since I'm Canadian, I'll go with Mark Carney. Now, he's a prime minister of Canada. He's not a perfect individual either, but we're just talking about the um the role of of now he's he's not the u the governor general in Canada represents the king and so he's actually the head of state, but uh or the representative of the head of state, but Mark Carney is the head of the government anyway.

¶65So, if if a child was brought by their parent to an event and they met Mark Carney, but and they're like a 5-year-old kid and then Mark Carney held out his hand to shake their hand and they swatted his hand away. You could say, "Well, the child sinned against Mark Carney." But of course, we would recognize that just because he's the office holder of prime minister doesn't mean that the child should somehow be face some sort of serious penalty that might be appropriate for an adult who smacked Mark Carney's hand away. And the child didn't even know who Mark Carney is. The child doesn't understand what the office of prime minister is. And I just think, what are we even talking about when we say a 5-year-old has sinned against God and therefore should be tortured forever?

¶66>> Yeah. Doesn't there need to be in any plausible ethical theory the condition that a person is culpable for an act at least in part in so far as the dignity of the person defended against is relevant to the severity of the act. The person committing the action needs to be aware of that fact. They need to be aware of the connection between their action, their moral wrongdoing and the dignity of the person that it's directed against or is somehow implicated. So if even adults steal packs of gum, generally in those moments, they're not aware, if this really is the case, that that action is an offense against an infinite God.

¶67And shouldn't that factor into the the severity of their action? If they have no conception of God, if they don't believe in God, or if they do believe in God, but they're not aware of the requisite metaphysical connections here between the action and the the infinity of God's person, why would they be infinitely culpable for these actions if they weren't even aware of this in the first place? Like, we all recognize that ignorance of the law is a mitigating factor, but this seems to this argument seems to skip over that entirely. I feel like that's reasonable. >> Yeah, I would think so.

¶68I I I can certainly well more than think so. I mean I agree with you but I I could see like a person appealing to like Romans 1 for example and say well in Romans 1 Paul says the law is written on the hearts and so people are judged by that law written on the heart because they intuitively know God exists and they are willing at some level to offend against God. But I mean, I wrote a book talking about those issues and and that that way of thinking about Romans 1, and I just think a 5-year-old doesn't have a conception of the divine, certainly anything like we would recognize it, and doesn't have the intentionality behind the action. So, I just don't think that's credible. Um, yeah.

¶69So, it's it's just like it's kind of like the plausibility framework is already there and people assume that we're going to accept their plausibility framework. Ethan was coming back to you at points in the conversation saying, "Well, he doesn't share your moral intuitions." Uh, yeah, fair enough. But, uh, sure as heck, we don't share his moral intuitions on these things either. So, I think we're all just going to have to articulate as best as we can what our intuitions on the matter are and then let other people think who has presented a more compelling case. I agree with you.

¶70I mean, another implication of this argument seemingly is that every single action, every sin, every moral wrongdoing is equally severe because they're all just sins against an infinite God. They're all infinitely severe and they can't be ranked against one another. But surely that's false. murdering somebody is worse than stealing a pack of gum. And if your ethical framework implies that that is not the case, that's very good grounds to reject that framework.

¶71Do you think the argument has that implication? I mean, it seems to me that it does. >> It can. Now, there are other ways of thinking about it and justifying or trying to rationalize eternal conscious torment or torture. Yes.

¶72>> Which don't necessarily do that. So one other way is to think that a person isn't necessarily condemned like the sin is not necessarily infinite in its impact or the punishment is not necessarily required to be infinite in duration. However, once a person goes to hell, they continue to sin. >> Sure. >> And continue to acrewue further sins that will forever ensure that they are never going to be released.

¶73And if we just gave an analogy for that, like a person, let's say that they committed a murder or something and so they are given 30 years in prison for that murder. But their first year in prison, they kill somebody in prison, they're given another 30 years. And if they keep doing that, they'll obviously never be released. And so that's analogous. And there is some biblical warrant for that cuz um Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, he uses this language of weeping and nashing of teeth and or sorry, the gospel of Matthew uses this language of there will be weeping and nashing of teeth.

¶74And so the reference to nashing of teeth there in this state of posumous judgment can be the the Greek bruo suggests sort of anger like a dog nashing their teeth while it's straining on its leash to try to get at you. And so if that's the picture of judgment that people are nashing their teeth, they're expressing rage and hatred against God, then you could say, okay, so people are continuing to rebel in hell and continuing to acrue more and more sins and that warrants them uh remaining there forever. All sorts of other problems with that, but >> yeah, so I agree with you that that is a vastly superior argument for the coherence of eternal conscious torment, but it's not one that Ethan gave. That's what I was so shocked about is that there are other more plausible ways to defend this doctrine that I don't think ultimately succeed, but that are far more plausible than this very blanket and bold argument that every sin is deserving of infinite punishment. That's the one he chose to give.

¶75And that is what I found so bizarre to be quite honest with you because you're right. There there are other more subtle defenses you might give that the every sin is finite but if you commit an infinite number of sins the sum total punishment you'll receive is is infinite and we can talk about that >> but that's >> well there is there's a just to say quickly one benefit of his view over that >> you know eternally sinning view is you have passages that like in Philippians 2:1 talking about every knee bowing every tongue confessing Jesus as Lord to the glory of God the Father. That that sort of implies there will be some future point at which there will no longer be active rebellion. Now, that can be that can be viewed as an argument for universal restoration. It could also be arguably for Ethan's view, which is that there will be a point where people will no longer be actively sinning, but they will now be judged for those finite but infinite in impact sins they committed in this life.

¶76Yeah. >> Whereas the view I just presented sort of requires you to think those people are in ongoing sinful rebellion even as they are bowing the knee and confessing Jesus as Lord. And that seems to be a tough fit. >> Yeah. So I agree with you.

¶77There might be some like greater theological coherence to Ethan's defense as opposed to this like infinite number of sins defense. But I do think the latter is still more philosophically coherent the the idea. So, in any case, um, one related consideration, it's related to this Aquinusesque argument. It's not one that Ethan gives. It's one that William Lane Craig gives, but I think it's more plausible.

¶78It's more subtle. And it's the it's the claim not that all of our mundane sins of everyday life are infinitely severe, but that we can grant that those are finite. But nevertheless, for all of those who end up in hell, they do commit one sin, which is infinite in gravity and therefore meriting an infinite punishment. And that's the rejection of God himself. The rejection of the forgiveness of our sins by Christ's death on the cross.

¶79That that is a sin. By rejecting God explicitly like that, you thereby commit an action that is infinitely severe. You are rejecting the infinite God and therefore plausibly merit infinite punishment. Now I think that's more philosophically defensible than this idea that every single sin is infinitely severe. So the idea is you're not in hell.

¶80Not primarily anyway because of stealing a pack of gum or even committing an act of murder, but because you've rejected God's offer of forgiveness for those sins and thereby commit an act of infinite infinite severity. What do you make of that more subtle defense? >> It's better uh meaning it's less bad, but uh less bad doesn't mean good. So, one of the big problems with that kind of response is to think, well, let's let's think about do we punish people who are engaging in fundamentally irrational and self-destructive actions or rather do we seek to deal with them uh therapeutically and with compassion? And I give this example that I knew a person in high school uh they would engage in self harm.

¶81And we were I remember we were at a a party once in high school and this person started cutting themselves. And so the first thing everybody did was restrain them and take away the knife that they were cutting themselves with. And nobody said, "Well, you've chosen this for yourself." Um, so we recognized they were acting irrationally and in a self-destructive way. And so then we overrode their ability to do that action. Um, now on Craig's view, this supposed view, the person when they reject God, what they are doing is they are rejecting the one source of love, goodness, justice, happiness, mercy, etc.

¶82Just go on down the list of all the superlatives. Those are the things they are repudiating and rejecting. There could be no more fundamentally destructive, self-destructive, and irrational action than that. And what Craig wants to suggest then is when a person is engaging in the most unimaginably self-destructive irrational way, God then consigns them to a self-imposed torture forever to experience the just deserts of what they have chosen rather than to respond to them in some kind of merciful way by recognizing and therapeutic way by recognizing they are acting in a fundamentally irrational way and say when a person's acting that way you don't punish them or allow them to punish punish themselves by stepping back and allowing them to do that. Rather, you intervene with the same mercy and compassion that we did at that party.

¶83In fact, infinitely more mercy and compassion than we would ever have as stupid teenagers at a party. And yet, we want to suggest God doesn't have that mercy and compassion and that he allows fundamentally irrational, delusional, self-destructed people to continue that cycle of self-destruction and self-imposed agony forever. It just makes no sense. I agree with you. Now, before we move on to Ethan's objections to my key argument against the the doctrine, he does def in addition to eternal conscious torment, if you can believe it.

¶84He defends a view, which I think is even more abhorrent than just that claim. He tacks on to that already horrifying vision of reality, the claim that the majority of people who've ever lived will probably end up in hell. That is not a by itself a claim that you're required to believe or that is entailed by the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. You could think that free people actually end up in hell, most people go to heaven. But to claim that not only do some people face this mind-numbingly horrific fate, but that most people who've ever lived face it is just a higher order terrifying and extremely objectionable doctrine.

¶85The the idea that a loving God would consign not just anybody but most people to infinite torture. So I I guess I just want to flag that precisification that Ethan makes of this already horrifying doctrine and get your comment on it. How can how can anybody affirm just on its face that God would create a scenario a loving God would create a scenario like that where most people are consigned to hell. Is this a traditional doctrine? Have has has Christianity throughout most of its history affirmed this this very abysmal view of how many people make it to heaven and how many people make it to hell.

¶86Uh there have there have been speculations on what the ratio of saved to lost is for example I think it's Anselm argued that God had to replace the fallen angels and so he elected a number of human beings to be the number to replace the fallen angels which is is kind of I think a little crazy speculation there but uh for the most part no that's not a to my knowledge a widely held doctrine. Um, the reason I think people sometimes hold that I think there's a couple things. I'm going to have a little bit of fun here for a moment and then I'll get a little more serious. But the but I think so I' I sometimes see these videos online for people like eating the hottest hot sauce or ghost peppers or something and they're like sweating and stuff and suffering agony. And there's kind of this toughness about being able to take in more hot sauce or a higher spice level than others can.

¶87And I I almost think there's something going on like that sometimes where I encounter people who have doctrines like that. It's like it's almost like a sign of their theological strength that they can take in a doctrine so abhorent as that. Now again, I'm not saying that in terms of the it's a little bit of my again my armchair psychologizing, but uh but I just find that yes, repulsive and I'm not impressed by it. I think sometimes people will appeal to Matthew 7 where Jesus says, "Enter through the narrow gate for wide is and broad is the gate that leads to destruction, but small and narrow is the gate that leads to life and only a few find it." And but I think that completely misses the point of what he's doing there. What he's doing there, I think, is not giving a prophecy about the ultimate ratio of saved to damned or lost in eternity.

¶88Rather, he's using hordy or motivational preacher language to get people to repent. And he's using a very visual illustration to get them to do that. And so he wants to motivate people to repent and seek restoration, not to be pessimistic about the ultimate ratio of saved to lost. And you can look to many other passages in the Bible that have a very optimistic view of the numbers of saved to lost. So for example, in Revelation 7, u so the revelator talks about these 12 tribes 12 * 12 * 10 144,000.

¶89Sorry, whatever. 10 x 10 x 10. So 144,000 people. Now, dispensationalists or fundamentalists sometimes interpret that as a literal 144,000 people. But in fact, I think what that is 12 * 12 * 10 * 10 * 10 is the the full number of God's people.

¶90It's it's meant to be a number of abundance. And in Revelation 7:9, the revelator then turns around and says, "I turned around before me there was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne and the lamb." That is not language of a pessimism about the number that will be ultimately be restored, but optimism. So I think if you do have that kind of pessimistic vision, I think that is again you're going to either it's going to have a distorting impact on your nature of human beings or andor of God because I think bad doctrine is often malformative. And if you think the way to rationalize something like that is to think well just how disgusting human beings are, right? And how loathsome we are that we all just need to be damned.

¶91and you end up with this misanthropic view and or goddess is this terrible stern unknowable judge and I think that's just going to really distort your theology if you really try to live with this kind of pessimistic view. I think that there is an argument to be made which has some primmaaccia plausibility that if it's really true that the majority of human beings who've ever lived end up in hell then our world is not one worth creating what it raises the question of why God created anything at all if the majority of conscious creatures end up in a fate worse than death. it it becomes like reality is a net negative. So just from this really basic mathematical perspective, how could a morally perfect being ever create it? Wholly apart from the questions of whether a morally perfect being could allow anyone to end up in hell if the majority of self-aware conscious agents that God creates end up in this infinitely terrible agony, it seems to me that the net moral value of all of creation is now negative.

¶92And so this this could never be a justified creation. I suppose you you could add some nuance where God didn't know that this would happen, but then you're adjusting your doctrine of omniscience. But I think that it creates a new difficulty when you combine eternal conscious torment with most people end up in hell. It looks like then in that case, God's creation was a failed project. What do you make of that kind of argument?

¶93Uh well, let's think of a couple things. So, first of all, um since we're just in the realm here of uh speculating about hypothetical possibilities, I mean, one possibility is that human beings are only uh one intelligent life form that God is concerned to restore and reconcile in the universe. Maybe there are many others. And maybe for some reason the disproportionate damnation of human beings is required to bring about the maximal salvation of all of these other intelligent life forms that God wants to restore and reconcile. >> Sure.

¶94>> So we have this noble role of uh being coal thrown into the into the um I don't know steam engine of God's selfic efforts for the rest of the universe. That's possible. >> Okay. Another another thing though to think about and this is more maybe into the realm of Calvinist theology but I think it would be consistent with Catholic speculations and that is to talk about the fact that God acts to maximize God's glory and that the greatest result of any creation is going to be that it maximizes God's glory or reflects the perfections of God and it could be that this relative ratio of a higher number of damned and saved somehow maximizes God's glory for the totality of creation in a greater way than the higher number of saved would have. For example, Calvinists have speculated or argued with varying degrees of conviction that God damned some to hell so that those who are saved can have a deeper understanding of God's love and mercy for them by seeing the contrasting justice and wrath of God for others.

¶95Almost like a psychology of a contrast effect where the home your home feels warmer and cozier because you were just out in the storm. And so if you can look out and you can see people in the storms of God's wrath, then your home of God's mercy is even warmer and cozier. And that just maybe that there has to be more people out in the storm than in the house in order for the overall cumulative appreciation of God's glory to be maximized in creation. >> I don't I don't find that compelling at all, but who knows? >> Sure.

¶96Right. I was gonna say so those would those would show that you can't give a logical demonstration of the incompatibility here, right? those are those are logically possible. But I I'll leave it for another day to assess whether they're plausible, that the things work out this way or that those defenses are plausibly true. But the last consideration I I wanted to touch on from from this part of the dialectic uh was Ethan's claim that Jesus Christ teaches the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

¶97And essentially, I mean, he basically said this. He's like, "Who are you to disagree with Jesus?" Now, I kind of like that maneuver in a debate context. If you can bring Jesus onto your side and then force the other person to tell us why they think they're better than Jesus, you're you're in a tough spot there. So, but what I didn't want to do was get into nuanced debates about how to interpret the Gospels and Jesus's remarks about eternal punishment and so on because I'm just not wellversed in those issues. But uh if you could give just a short answer to that, do do you think you're positioning yourself against Jesus by denying eternal conscious torment?

¶98Yeah, I think that completely begs the question because the the whole issue here is how we interpret the language Jesus uses when he talks about weeping and nashing of teeth or when he talks about um outer darkness or a furnace or so on. And one way to interpret a lot of that language, for example, is it's talking about God's coming judgment in the midst of history, not about someostumous event in the afterlife. And then there are also, so let's just take one example. So Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. And then he warns about um eternal punishment in Matthew 25:41-46.

¶99Well, the language there actually Ionios is uh is not doesn't have to be interpreted as uh never ending or eternal. It was famously done so by Augustine who argued that because the life is an eternal state, Ionius for punishment must also be eternal. They must be parallel states. And so Jesus teaches that. And I guess Ethan would probably think that.

¶100But annihilationists say well there is as much here a contrast intended as there is a comparison. So each can be understood to be absolute in their finality but you don't have to think each is infinite in their duration. So when he says eternal punishment or Ionio kasin what it could be is um simply a final absolute punishment. And then lastly, there's a universalist interpretation of the words of Jesus. There is that he's not actually so that Ionio there need not be interpreted as eternal but is simply the punishment pertaining to an age because Ionios we get the word eon in English from it.

¶101So it's a indefinite long period. It could be that Jesus is just saying there will be a period of judgment after death and that's all he's saying there. But he's not saying that punishment is final or that it never ends, just that there will be a period of punishment, which is consistent with a universalist perspective. So everybody's interpreting Jesus in accord with their views. And I think just saying, "Yeah, but Jesus really does agree with me," is not going to be a response that compels anybody who doesn't already agree with that person.

¶102But doesn't the universalist reading as opposed to the annihilationist one really put strain on that passage given the parallelism that's drawn between resurrection to eternal life and resurrection to eternal punishment. We normally look at that as guaranteeing eternal life. And so if we want to see there a promise of unending eternal bliss in the presence of God, then the parallel structure lends itself to seeing the fate of the the damned also as eternal. Uh one could argue that. However, one could also say a few things here.

¶103So first of all is there's a danger there of overreading the passage if you already have a prior theology and just reading that theology into the passage. It could just be that Jesus is saying, "Look, there's going to be a time after death when uh there will be a period of punishment and a period of life. Uh the one goes into life immediately, the other's a punishment." And that's just all he's saying there. And he's just not even addressing this is a penultimate period, right? He's not addressing the ultimate period there at all.

¶104Now, a couple other things here. One is to say that any one of these views, whether it's eternal conscious, torment, annihilation, or um universal restoration, any one of these views, there are some passages in the Bible that appear on their face, I think, to support each one of these views, which is why they exist and have existed for the pretty much 2,000 years. And what every person does as they are theologizing is they now have to look at the other passages in light of the passages that they are treating as the control texts. So for example, the universalist might treat I' I'd mention, you know, Philippians 2:11 or Colossians 1:20 or various other passages as the control texts that talk about a universal restoration. And then when they come to Matthew 25, they will find it plausible to read Matthew 25 in light of that um universalist hermeneutic and the the eternal conscious torment infernalist or the annihilationist might begin with another passage and then read the universalist passage in light of those.

¶105So, uh, I think on its face you could say, yeah, it does seem to support univers sorry, annihilationism or eternal conscious torment more readily, but you always have to remember we're doing theology within the totality of scripture. The last thing I would just say is big picture here. Let's keep in mind that Matthew 25 31-46 is ultimately about how we treat people now, right? It's how the sheep to identify a sheep was how do you treat people who are on the margins? That's the main point of what Jesus is saying and we have to be careful about missing that cuz that's the big picture here.

¶106And the same thing when he talks about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Um the point there is is not to get a road map of the afterlife as people have sometimes tried to do. The point is that God remembered Lazarus but not the rich man in the afterlife. The point being in God's kingdom the poor are elevated and the rich are and the powerful are the ones marginalized and we kind of are always in danger of missing what the main point is because we're looking to get our find our theology in the minutia. >> Yes.

¶107Right. Good. So, I think that we've done justice to Ethan's case for the coherence of this this doctrine. But what I want to talk about now is the the argument I sketched, which I think is just the main one against the plausibility of thinking that a loving God could ever send somebody to an infinite torture chamber, which is just that this seems morally abhorent. If we know anything from moral experience, if we know anything from our own cognitive faculties about the various moral facts that obtain about what is good and evil, right and wrong, I think we can see that no human being deserves infinite torture.

¶108For no human being would it be just or right or good to send them to an eternal torture chamber. I I if anything is self-evident to us in our moral reflection, that one is. And if we're wrong about that, then I think our moral faculties are utterly and completely unreliable. We should be complete and total moral skeptics. So that that's how I phrase the argument.

¶109And I think that ultimately that just is the argument against ect. I don't I you could give biblical arguments. You could say that the Bible actually teaches something else. But at least on the philosophical level where we're not assuming divine revelation, that's probably the only argument against it. But that's fine because I find it utterly compelling.

¶110Now, Ethan didn't agree, but do you think I've cashed out the key consideration against ECT correctly here? Yeah, I I think if if I I do I think if we had the uh we took some time, we could identify multiple intuitions that I think are pretty foundational such as that torture is wrong or that uh neverending punishment has to or that punishment has to have some warrant. So for like just to go into this a little bit of depth, why do we why why do we imprison people? Why do we subject them to suffering of of the things the kind that comes with like imprisonment? Well, we do so to protect others from them.

¶111We do so to serve as a deterrent. Those are some reasons. Um those reasons I think don't satisfy why we would do it in this case, right? We don't need to deter people. We don't need to protect others from these individuals by imprisoning them in this chamber of torture.

¶112So ultimately it comes down to some sort of penal view that they've done something wrong which requires this punishment. And again our intuitions don't support that that would justify torture at all. I think let alone an eternal torture. And then there's this we talked about this idea of people having an awareness of the action that they're doing which is important. So if the person didn't know they were doing the action how can you hold them accountable?

¶113On and on and on. We can we've touched on a I think a lot of intuitions that are really counter to eternal conscious torment. So if you accept it, what this what it follows is I think it creates a deep skepticism about our moral ability to reason morally at all. Because if it turns out that we are wrong about all these fundamental convictions like the wrongness of torture, like the wrongness of never- ending punishment except for, you know, some appropriate reason that it's wrong to to punish people for their actions that they committed unknowingly against others or actions that they committed as a result of some something like fetal alcohol syndrome. If we're wrong about all of these things, then can we really trust ourselves about any moral reasoning at all?

¶114And I actually think that that this does, if you think it through, it has some deep skeptical implications for our ability to think morally at all. And um so I would not want to adopt that kind of moral skepticism. >> Yes, I agree with you. And that's what I said that these these kinds of considerations have carried through to their logical conclusion which has land us in total moral skepticism and that's that's unlivable and we have a high degree of warrant to think that that's not the situation that we're in one. So here Ethan then appeals to several different considerations meant to kind of undercut our seemingly strong intuition that this would be immoral of God to do.

¶115The first is the appeal to the knowetic effects of sin. A phrase you will not find in the Bible but arises from I think fairly sophisticated and high level theological reflection and philosophical reflection. The idea that our sinful nature also corrupts our intellectual capacities, our cognitive faculties. And I gather what he's saying is given that our cognitive faculties have been implicated by sin and are therefore not functioning properly. That serves to as an undercutting defeater of whatever those faculties might tell us.

¶116And in this case, our moral faculties tell us this is horrific. If anything is, oh well, but it's it's uh damaged. The faculties are damaged by sin. And so we can't really trust what they have to say. Now, in so far as that's the argument Ethan is making, and maybe it was more subtle, I think that that again would just give us total moral skepticism, but you do hear in the theological debates this knowetic effects of sin.

¶117I'm not much impressed by that, but it's common enough that I think it deserves deserves some some comment if you if you have any thoughts. I I think first of all again just to come back to our general condition as being fallible in our reasoning and in our intuitions including our moral intuitions. I think that much is okay. We can we can recognize that. But of course that impuges everyone.

¶118It impuges me or it's it's a caveat for my reasoning against eternal conscious torment. But it's equally a caveat for anybody who would be compelled to accept or drawn to accept eternal conscious torment. If for each one of us our fallen and perfect infallible moral intuitions may be leading us astray about moral reality. I mean, so for example, like if you think somebody they are on board not only with eternal conscious torment but with the majority of human beings being damned, maybe that maybe their openness to that as a doctrine comes out of their own deep misanthropic views, their own hatred of humanity, >> their own highly pessimistic view about the prospects of human beings. uh and maybe it is their own moral corruption that leads them to accept eternal conscious torment.

¶119So I think every one of us we have to recognize that we are fallible and Ethan is not exempt from that. The Catholic Church is not exempt from that whatever I think Ethan might want to say otherwise. Um every every human institution can make errors just like individuals can. And so ultimately we all just have to reason about these things as best we can and then again say here I stand I can do no other. It just seems to me that this and I'm just not compelled if somebody's going to say, "Yeah, but your reasoning is fallen.

¶120Mine mine's okay, but yours is fallen." >> I was going to say, the more I think about it, the more I think that this will just be self undermining because the noetic effects of sin, if such there be, are not restricted just to moral reflection. It's to all of our cognitive faculties, including the ones that brought us to the conclusion or the conviction that the Catholic Church is authoritative and true and that God exists and so on and so forth. And so if if the damaging effects of sin are so deep that we can't trust any of our basic moral reflections or the the fruits thereof, we can't trust any of our basic perceptions of the world's whether those be sensory or intellectual. And in which case, why do we think that the Catholic Church is true or that the the teachings of the Catholic Church are true? It's not like God implanted that belief directly in our brain.

¶121We we've followed a a chain of discursive reasoning to get there. As I think Ethan would say, like in his miracle cases, these are really nuanced, sophisticated histo attempted historical demonstrations of the veracity of these various claims to have performed miracles in the 20th century. But the noetic effects of sin, they undercut. So I I think that this is not a line that you really want to pursue to its fullest extent. It's just going to undercut everything and therefore undercut nothing.

¶122Yeah, you end up sawing off the branch you're sitting on as the as it would go. It's interesting that that he I mean I think to me I associate noetic effects of sin with Alfen Planaga's work. >> So I automatically think as well then of Planaga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. And I think you'd have a similar kind of argument here for general moral skepticism about all human reasoning if you really followed this kind of level of skepticism through consistently. >> Yep, that is right to me.

¶123So the second point which we have touched on is something that really floored me and admittedly I didn't really know how to respond to it because I wasn't expecting it was this very brass appeal to the authority of you know the holy saints within the Catholic tradition and then specifically within the 20th century which I didn't realize as he rattled off names of these various figures which I thought were from deep history but no no they were from the 20th century and he said that the it seems like reflecting on the history of Christianity or the 20th century history of the Catholic Church specifically, the holier a person gets, the more they think that they deserve hell as punishment. They they see themselves as increasingly wicked and therefore of meriting an eternal hell. I I take it to be the the argument. And at a certain level, there's some plausibility here that we ought to trust people we take to be exceptionally moral and ethical and virtuous in what they tell us about various moral truths. They have a better vantage point with which to gauge them.

¶124Sure, you know, we want to we want to safeguard appeal to authority, appeal to experts in other domains like science or history or even philosophy. So why not ethics? Okay. But then the question will be whether or not appealing to these select Catholic saints is the right kind of appeal to authority. So let's let's now talk about it explicitly.

¶125We've mentioned some points and we can we can repeat and then summarize a bit. But uh what what do you make of this? I was really floored. I just thought the this is not something you read in the literature among like professional philosophers for example. is this just really blanket appeal to I've got the holy people on my side.

¶126What do what do you make of this? >> Uh to some degree I already I think I addressed this by saying well you can find holy people that think things or people that you view as holy or righteous or good that think all sorts of things and and disagree on things. And I pointed out that even those people can have blind spots. Um and so you shouldn't just uncritically accept everything that they say. But maybe I'll just say a third thing here and that is I I I think that he's misreading the data.

¶127This is my sense. I think that the the holier or more righteous or sanctified to use Christian language that a person gets the more that they have a sense yes of their unworthiness and of their need for grace and mercy. I don't think it follows that they realize more and more that they should be tortured forever. So I think that's the important distinction there is I do think like Donald Trump famously or infamously to just give one more one example from him. He was interviewed once I think it was on Jimmy Fallon and um somehow the idea of God and forgiveness came up and he said he didn't think he'd ever had he ever had to ask God for forgiveness of anything.

¶128And I thought, this idea that you don't need to be forgiven of anything, that you've never done anything significantly wrong, that might require forgiveness or an apology or that might require you to be in the debt of grace of somebody else. I think that is indicative of a deeply malformed individual. Whereas a person who is becoming more properly formed realizes how much they do need forgiveness from others and they need to receive grace from others. And I think that's what he's actually tracking there in these people. And I think then he's then projecting onto them his theory of posumous judgment and thinking well that's what's really motivating them when in fact it isn't.

¶129>> Excellent point. Excellent point. What do you think though hypothetically if it really were the case that all of these Catholic saints and figures who we can grant were quite holy did say explicitly I now see that I deserve eternal conscious torment. Would that serve to undercut our intuition to the contrary? You know, if all of these seemingly holy people disagreed with us, maybe that gives us pause and we'd say, "Well, maybe I'm wrong." Just like if if several scientists came together and told us that our basic perceptions of, you know, the stars above us were entirely mistaken.

¶130Yeah, we would be kind of shocked. Like, how could I be wrong about this? I'm looking right at them. But it would it would it would weaken, I suppose, our our warrant for these belief, our beliefs about celestial objects. Similar thing kind of going on here.

¶131Hypothetically, >> I think it's possible that that if if every holy Catholic said clearly, the more I've become aligned with God's will, the more that I realize I should be tortured forever, then that would be some kind of evidence. I don't know how strong it would be, but it'd be some kind of evidence. You know what would make it stronger, though? Is if that was an intuition that was more widely held. So for example, non-Christians, even non-theists and non-religious people, if the more that people generally just became nicer, better, more affable, just and good people, then if everybody just began to have this intuition more and more that they should be tortured forever, then that would be uh that would be even better evidence.

¶132So the the fact that it would just be within the Catholic tradition would not be as strong as if it were a more widely held intuition because of course all these other intuitions are more widely held. This idea that it's wrong to torture, that it's wrong to lie, right? That you should honor your parents. These are commonly held moral intuitions. CS Lewis at the end of his book, The Abolition of Man famously drew up a table of some of these basic moral intuitions that one finds across religious traditions.

¶133And that gives them in terms of what we call general revelation a greater credence or strength because you can find them universally held by human beings. So if you could find good people or people that were more uh righteous and more admirable all widely held this view that we should be tortured forever then that would be more compelling evidence. I just don't think you do find that. >> Yeah. One consideration that I'll have to think of the precise way to to formulate is like there's there's this self- selection effect, this screening effect of only appealing to the authority of like specifically Catholic holy figures which you may have touched on that these are the people who've been inculcated in the Catholic tradition.

¶134So if anyone is going to be both holy generally and espousing this traditional Catholic doctrine, it's going to be people that have been formed within that intellectual tradition. And so the the undercutting effect is far less significant. If as you say you could go across religious traditions across non-religious worldviews as well and show a correlation between otherwise increasing holiness and then an increased capacity to affirm this this doctrine then I think you'd have a real real problem for those who appeal to the intuition that this is wrong. But merely from the fact that like people who were already Catholic, who who had given allegiance to this doctrine, who grew up within that world, come to espouse this doctrine, I think it's far less impressive. Do you kind of see what I mean about like the screening off effect where you just zero in on people who've been grown up in the tradition in the first place?

¶135In that case, it's really not that surprising that they would espouse this doctrine wholly apart from whether it's true or obvious or reasonable. >> Yeah. Uh I agree. I mean I I mentioned Jonathan Edwards owning slaves earlier. So like let's say that that you were saying is slavery moral?

¶136Well, it's interesting to note that you know virtually all the Presbyterian Calvinists in the deep south in the 1850s supported slavery. Well, okay, but that's just you're just sort of selecting a particular group. Of course, all those people are going to be inclined to accept slavery because of the time and place in which they live. And of course, Catholics are going to be more inclined to accept conscious torment because they're part of this tradition and they've grown into this tradition in which they've been taught that. So you can give endless examples from different doxastic communities about what people within those communities will think.

¶137But it doesn't have the same strength as people universally holding those same beliefs. >> A related consideration which if you grant it I think is more plausible is this analogy to a thermometer. If you have a thermometer and someone next to you has a thermometer and they from the outside look identical and theirs has an entirely different reading than yours does, that very fact gives you some reason to doubt that your thermometer is functioning. If you can't really tell the difference between the two, but they so fundamentally disagree, then it must not be that this thermometer is is functioning properly. Or I guess a better analogy would be you use this thermometer, get one reading, someone else's uses that same thermometer, gets a different reading.

¶138we now have a reason to doubt your particular readings from it. Similarly, if people across the world have distinct intuitions about the moral coherence of eternal hell, that should give you reason for pause before going full send into what your moral intuitions are telling you. Like if you can show that the very faculty of moral intuition is pretty unreliable because so many people disagree. Okay, maybe there's an argument for not trusting it as much as maybe I am implying that we should. And then he says that there are plenty of Muslims and Christians in the world who apparently have no problem affirming this doctrine.

¶139So that the sheer fact of disagreement about this intuition serves to undermine it at least to some extent. What should we say there? I mean, you can find you can find communities where people think sexual relations are permissible or appropriate between children and adults. So, the fact that you could find those communities, is that going to move anybody who's not a part of those communities? I don't think so.

¶140I think you're going to say, "No, I think that's fundamentally wrong." if if there's some group of pedophiles who wants to justify this within their belief community and normalize this kind of behavior, that's not going to impact me at all. So, I think so much of it's going to depend upon the nature of the community, the nature of the belief, how strong your intuitions are against the belief. But I do think that when it comes to something, I mean, honestly, like I think a lot of ways people have just not reflected on the full gravity of what they're proposing. that they just don't like for example we've used the term torture and I think a lot of people when they are raised within this tradition they take offense at the use of that term they think it's not torture it's torment they they've been taught this language of eternal conscious torment what they're missing is that torture by definition is the infliction of intense physical and or mental suffering as a form of punishment by definition the infliction of maximal physical and mental suffering for as punishment forever is the most clearest example of torture imaginable. So it's important to use that language to challenge the way that people have framed it to again kind of deal with the cognitive dissonance and cauterize their feelings by thinking it's not as horrific as it seems.

¶141No, it is. It's in fact it's more horrific than you can imagine because it is torture forever. And I think honestly if people recognize that I think you'd have a lot more people within these belief communities beginning to question it. >> One last consideration Ethan appeals to to ameliorate the moral offensiveness of this doctrine is to say well not everybody in hell suffers in the exact same sort of way or to the same degree. It will depend upon the kind of life that they lived.

¶142And so I think what he what he would say is like Hitler for example suffers to a much higher degree than someone who just lived an otherwise halfway decent life but died without asking for forgiveness. On the surface that makes the doctrine more palatable to our moral sensibilities. Not nearly enough I think to make it on the whole plausible. I also am not sure that that's actually intelligible that there's actually a co coherence to saying that a finite life justifies a infinitely severe but less severe kind of like anyway what about this attempt to make the doctrine a little bit more plausible to our ordinary moral sensibilities by saying well but people suffer to different degrees. Uh well first of all there's there still the suffering itself is never ending and I remember you know the famous words written over Dante's inferno the gates of the inferno is abandon all hope ye who enter here and if you imagine so so that this one person they're they're uh being skinned alive forever and having molten lava poured over them.

¶143The other person is just being endlessly punched in the left arm. Yeah, I'll take endlessly being punched in the left arm over having molten lava poured over you. But if if you're going to be endlessly punched in your left arm forever knowing it's never going to stop and there's just never any release to it, I still can't imagine what that would be like. So, um the the loss of hope, the loss of any future to come out of it. I mean, I I I just I don't think we can really grasp what that would even be.

¶144Now, the other thing at the end of the day for my mindset is there's something about this whole retributive approach to punishment. Well, we got to torture this person more because they did more things or they they need to have a higher self-imposed torture because they did more things. Um, there was a there was a documentary I I reviewed some years ago called At the Death House Door and it it looked at the practice of capital punishment at the Walls Prison in Texas and one of the and in particular looked at the impact of the chap on the chaplain for years. He had been the chaplain in the prison for people who were about to be executed. And then he became very strongly opposed to the death penalty because he saw this whole approach to justice through uh retributive violence, it was just dysfunctional and malformative.

¶145And there's one moment in the film where a woman so um her her uh father's murderer had just been killed um executed in the prison. And then so then the the person asked her, "How do you feel about that?" And she said, "My dad's dead. He's dead. That's just two dead people." And what spoke to me there was this indictment of retributive violence and punishment as a way to deal with evil and suffering and social ills is we're just going to kill them. Well, eternal conscious torment is that times infinity, right?

¶146It's like the way that we're going to deal with these problems is we're going to make these people suffer forever. And I would say look, this guy did terrible things in life. Maybe he killed a person. Well, that just means her dad's dead and now he's suffering forever. How has that added anything?

¶147How's that improved anything? I think it's just so wrongheaded. So, I think it's fitting to end on a more pastoral note because it is something pertinent to me, something that will help me respond to people. So, so for instance, I received an email from somebody after watching this particular interview with Ethan who I've corresponded with before in a more pastoral way who said, "I have these doubts. How would you go about resolving them?

¶148How do you deal with the existential side of doubting?" And so on and so forth. And one of the things that he said was, you know, after watching this, there's kind of this renewed fear of your own eternal damnation. I think all of us can resonate with the idea that none of us want to end up in an eternal torture chamber. Can't think of anything worse quite literally. And if you have even a small credence going to that hypothesis that you're going to end up there, that will rightly I think give you extraordinary pause.

¶149You you want the probability of that outcome to be as small as possible. And I think that that can make us do irrational things out of out of fear of this worst possible outcome. Maybe even committing to the Catholic Church when we don't think it's true because they have this doctrine. And if you are a believing practicing Catholic, you know that you're not going to get end up there. And so it can really it can really skew your rational framing when one of the risks of being wrong is eternal torture.

¶150So from from a pastoral angle, how do you deal with the fear that you might be wrong about certain theological matters, say those beliefs of the Catholic Church, and thereby you're risking your eternal fate. You're risking ending up in an eternal torture chamber. I mean there's a reason I think throughout Christian history that belief has been so powerful to uh enforce coherence cohesion among you know the believing masses because nobody wants to end up in a state like that. How do you deal with that fear in a rational way and even even if you've done your due diligence to really think through these things objectively and you just can't bring yourself to believe these doctrines say of the Catholic Church that you have to believe to be saved. you just don't think they're true and you've really thought about it as hard as you can.

¶151Even then, if you're someone like me, you're still going to sit there and go, "Maybe I should just believe it anyway. Maybe I should just give myself to this religious community because at least I can then guarantee that I won't end up in this torture chamber." I think there's a real serious set of issues here that aren't exactly or primarily intellectual. This really is an emotional pastoral issue. Um, and I haven't replied to that fellow yet because it's it's not clear to me how to address it myself, much less to to offer advice to somebody else. So, I wonder if you have any pastoral words here.

¶152>> Uh, I I think of Mark Harris. He's a he's a therapist with a theological background and he he wrote a book called The Diabolical Trinity, Healing Religious Trauma from a Wrathful God, Tormenting Hell in a Sinful Self. So he talks in that book about growing up in a sort of a fundamentalist community where it was defined by the fear of the wrath of God and hell and self-loathing for one's sin and how that created this trauma a religious trauma that it then took him years to I think work through and then he's a therapist now helping people in similar issues and I think people like that can can be helpful. I mean some of this is just beyond my pay grade really in terms of the pastoral dimension or the therapeutic dimensions. U but I think it is important to recognize that people do experience religious trauma from these kinds of doctrines fear u self-loathing etc.

¶153And uh beyond that I I would just say that ultimately like who is God? And if God is truly a maxim like like that being than which none none greater can be conceived a maximally good loving being. I have to rest in that. I have to rest that God is not going to be the kind of God that imposes a eternal torture chamber, let alone for the majority of humanity. That that just can't be right.

¶154It just seems to me in in the same way that no loving parent, no loving human parent would treat their creatures, their children like that. Why would God be infinitely more horrifying than that loving parent? I think on the opposite is true that God is going to be infinitely more loving, merciful and just. So I think uh ultimately you want to respond to a person like that. Yes, pastorally with and the resources of someone like Mark Carris get help with that, but I think also through better theology and allowing them new ways and finding maybe a healthy community to be able to think through these issues.

¶155>> Randall Rouseer, thank you for coming back on the podcast to discuss these issues. I think this has been my favorite conversation with you I've had so far. It's been fascinating and it's helping me think through these things. I I don't I've never plowed the depths of the philosophical literature on the problem of hell. But I'll end with one point I made to Ethan when he said there's no intellectual problem.

¶156It's just emotions. I said, well, sure surely you can't see the deep and rich literature in philosophy of religion pertaining to like quote unquote the problem of hell and think that there's no intellectual problem. All those books and articles and debates had that's just dumb motion. That can't be right. And the very fact that we can have this rich intellectual conversation about hell shows that there are intellectual issues here.

¶157Even if you come down on the side of thinking that actually, you know what, on balance, we have more reason to affirm this doctrine than not. I think you have to admit that there is an intellectual problem and conversation to be had here. So, thank you, Randall, for engaging in that conversation with me. >> It's been a pleasure as always, Miles. Thanks.

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