How can a loving God send anyone to Hell?

Hell. Literally the bogeyman of Christianity. A place of torment, darkness and eternal damnation, far away from the paradise which is Heaven. A realm of the unfaithful, those who did not think the evidences provided were sufficient grounds to base their lives on one of millions of religions. Traditional Christianity believes that Hell, in all its horror, is real, yet claims the being who they worship is all loving. But how can this be so? Surely any being worthy of the title omnibenevolent would spare his creation the suffering of Hell? This controversial subject is swept under the carpet by many Christian institutions, with congregations never taught the true nature of Hell and thus leading  many of them to flounder in the face of questions by non-believers. Whilst I cannot offer a definitive point of view on such a vast topic, what I hope to do in this article is dis-spell prevalent myths about what Hell is in Christianity, and that both Hell and an all loving God are compatible.

The first thing to point out is that even if the sceptic demonstrates that the doctrine of Hell is incompatible with an all loving God, then it would show that the classical view of Hell is mistaken, not that of an all loving being existing. For example, eminent theologians such as Karl Barth, Marilyn Adams and Rob Bell have all claimed that in one way or another that God sends nobody to Hell, for they see it as somehow defying the all loving nature of God. So this is not an argument for non-belief, but rather an argument about whether traditional interpretations of Hell are consistent with Christian beliefs, which would still be secure if the doctrine of Hell is found inadequate.

Before examining whether Hell is incompatible with the Christian God, we need to define what it is. Since the middle ages, Hell has been portrayed as a fiery inferno, where after one dies, if you have been unfaithful to God you will be tortured for an eternity. Here's an illustration:

Not a nice place at all. I can't imagine one minute being nice, never mind all of time! And yet, God apparently sends people to this place of nightmares.

However, as many modern scholars have discovered, the English word Hell is a poor translation for the Hebrew word Sheol, the Aramaic Gehenna and the Greek Hades. Each are all different from the modern word Hell, and yet our the words used by the New Testament authors. Thus, an exposition of each will be helpful.

Sheol is a Hebrew term for the lower parts of the Earth or underworld where the departed are consigned (Proverbs 9:18) There they continue in a gloomy insubstantiality (Ecclesiastes 17:27-8) due to the human form being weakened by the separation of body and soul. Here they wait until judgement day, where the soul is reunited with a resurrection body.

Gehenna was a valley outside Jerusalem through which the road to Bethlehem runs. Children were once sacrificed there to the god Molech (Jeremiah 7:13) and later there was a continuous burning dump. Hence, it became to be an image for a place where the wicked would be condemned.

Hades is the Greek translation for the word Sheol, but has added connotations. It too was seen as a resting place for the dead in a shadowy existence (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Hades is not a place of torment in the Old Testament, except for its eternal boredom (Psalm 88:12) but in the New Testament, due to Hellenistic conceptions of Hades infiltrating Jewish thought, physical pain seems to be envisaged post-death for some (Luke 16:23) and for unrepentant sinners (Mark 9:48). However, when the purpose of God is fully achieved, both Death, the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26,54) and Hades, where the already dead repose, will surrender their populations, with the establishment of the eternal reign of God.

So how does this all fit in with our subject area? Well, most people believe that on a Christian world view you die and then go to either Heaven or Hell. However, it is apparent that Christian doctrine does not agree. First, you go to Sheol, a place of weariness and forgetfulness, not of punishment of retribution. Rather, it is only after the judgement day, when souls are reunited with resurrection bodies that people will enter the realms of paradise of damnation. So a person still has time in the afterlife, and indeed, on judgement day, to affirm servitude to God. Thus, modern interpretations of Hell do not do justice to biblical thoughts on this issue, confusing Sheol, Gehenna and Hades  as one and the same.

But even if the doctrine of Hell is misunderstood and confused with Sheol, that still doesn't avoid the problem that on judgement day, even if many people convert to Christianity after seeing God's glory revealed, some will still reject him, and subsequently be placed in eternal damnation, suffering and torture. How can God, who is apparently all loving, allow this to happen?

Whether God is all loving or not, He is king of all creation. As a divine being, God is altogether unique compared to other objects and entities: He alone has omnipotence and omniscience, and is the source and sustainer of all things. Without Him, we would not exist at all. Thus, He has the divine right to will what He pleases and commands obedience from us. In virtue of the amount we owe Him, we should serve this being, regardless of what our thoughts and feelings are about His ethical practices. Just as the peasant repays the nobleman for letting him land through service, so too should we to the almighty force which sustains are very being. Creation is His domain, and we are privy to his wishes.

However, nobody, not even the most righteous of men and women, truly serve the divine authority. We all disobey His commands and laws, rebelling against his kingship by asserting our will over His. We act in a way which we want to, not in accordance with Him or any of His desires. Since we rebel against God, we have no right to the liberties, benefits and gifts he offers us through His kingdom, for to challenge his Kingship is to attack the domain which God rules. And as we have no right to God's Heaven, we deserve to abide in Hell, outside the kingdom of the divine.

An illustration is as follows: when William Wallace rebelled against Edward I of England, he forfeited the liberties Edward's kingdom offered him, seeking to replace it with his own. Therefore, Wallace forfeited his rights to the pleasures the English rule gave him by opposing it through rebellion. As such, he was denied those rights, in the case of medieval England, the right to life. In the same way, we have rebelled against God, seeking to destroy His authority and replace it with our own desires. This means that no human has a right to enter God's kingdom, Heaven, for we have rejected it: thus, we should be stripped of its riches and condemned to Hell, a fate we chose for ourselves by rebelling against the King of creation. Heaven is God's kingdom, and as rebels, there is no reason why we deserve to be let in, when we have rejected its very king. By rights, we should all be in Hell right now.


However, the Christian faith argues God has not abandoned us to this bleak and dismal fate. He, in an ultimate sacrifice, has given us a gift of grace which spares us this punishment. In effect, this is the crucifiction of Jesus: God's only Son sent to die for our sins. All we must do is affirm that God is king, and we will have accepted the offering of salvation and the gift of Jesus taking our deserved punishment and exile from God's kingdom for us. And this requires us to do no actions, no things of our own power, but just accept Jesus' sacrifice for us. The point is, whilst we all deserve to be in Hell, God has offered to take our punishment for us if we recant on our past claims to authority and respect his kingship over creation, and thus once more be allowed to reap the joys of Heaven. Repentance, trust in Christ and following God's moral commands are all acceptances of His rule over us, that we were wrong to flaunt his authority for our own. The death of Jesus was the greatest gift God has given us, for it is the chance to rejoin the kingdom and exist in Heaven, despite our open rebellion to the divine.

In conclusion, Hell is where we deserve to go, for rejecting God's authority over us. Through our sin, we have deliberately chosen to separate ourselves from Heaven and all its wealth and wonder. However, des[ite the fact God owes us nothing at all, He was willing to sacrifice Himself in the person of Jesus to allow the millions and billions of damned people throughout history a chance to reenter God's kingdom. He openly takes our punishment, if we are but happy to accept that He is King. And what's more, not only are there a multitude of convincing evidences for God's divine rule over humanity, but even in Sheol and at the judgement, when the evidence will clearly point towards God existing (for if judgement day happens, clearly atheism is false) men and women will still have the opportunity to repent of their rebellion and choose God as their king. As such, the only people who will reject God will do so for non-evidential reasons. Thus, the view that an all loving being cannot coexist with Hell is false, for God has shown himself to be all loving by being prepared to take on our punishments and exile from His kingdom in the person of Jesus, offer us Heaven and all we must do is accept this gift. Salvation could not be simpler or easier to attain, despite our sin. Therefore, there is no contradiction between the Christian God and the Doctrine of Hell, for rather than sending people there, God saves them from such a place.

All definitions are from the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible.
This blog is not arguing Christianity is true, but rather seeks to demonstrate that the Christian beliefs of God being all loving and Hell existing as coherent.

Faith: belief without evidence?

Faith. A five letter word which is treated with disdain in 21st Century Britain. Having faith is often compared to having a delusion. People who have faith are those that believe in God, fairies, trolls, hobgoblins, and other mythical creatures. Its a belief which has no evidence for it. Or at least, that is how it is commonly characterised. However, I intend to argue that faith is by its very definition reliant on reason, and thus belief in God is unlike mythical creatures in principle due to this clarification of faith and thus distinction.

Firstly, I will outline how many atheists and secularists have tried to characterise faith. Here is just a few definitions given:

Mark Twain defined faith as “believing what you know ain’t true.”

Sam Harris: "Faith is the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail."

In the documentary Religulous, Bill Maher said “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”

Richard Dawkins: “The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices.”

For more, go to http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/faith-and-reason-are-mutually-exclusive.html

Essentially, the claim is that faith is the absence of evidence. It is a belief which does not have rational grounds as opposed to other ones, usually said to be 'based on science'. W. K. Clifford once argued that 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.' (The Ethics of Belief (1879)). Thus, the position those like Dawkins, Harris and other New Atheists take, is that based on this princple, faith is an irrational belief, for it does not have any evidence whatsoever.

Whilst this view is popular amongst the youth of today, when one digs beneath the surface, it is apparent that as a thesis it is highly flawed. I want to look specifically at what Martin Luther, the great protestant reformer, thought faith was, and this is the foundation of much Protestant and Christian thought, interacted with by many key theologians such as John Calvin and Birmingham's very own Cardinal John Henry Newman. Luther's thoughts on faith as trust will be the focus of this next part.

The root of the word faith is the Latin 'fiducia', which means trust. Trust is defined as  'Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.' Luther describes the relationship of trust and belief in God in the following passage:

'The person who does not have faith is like someone who has to cross the sea, but is so frightened that he does not trust the ship. And so he stays where he is, and is never saved, because he will not get on board and cross over.' Faith is not merely believeing something is true, it is being prepared to act on that belief. To use Luther's analogy, faith is not simply about believing that a ship exists; it is about stepping into it and entrusting ourselves to it.

Now this has implications for the New Atheist's definition of faith. Whereas faith for them is based on a lack of evidence, a Lutheran interpretation would be grounded in reason. Why is this? Well, when you trust someone, it is not because there is an absence of evidence of arguments for doing so, but because you have good inductive reasons for believing in them. You trust your friends not because you have no evidence for it, but because past experience indicates they are trustworthy, other people testify to their reliability and they don't appear to be treating you badly in their overall actions. Of course, you may be wrong, and the person you trust could be stabbing you in the back without any of the evidence indicating it: however, if the evidence points in the other direction, then it is rational to trust that person.

And so it is with faith. Proffessor John Lennox of Mathematics at Oxford once asked Richard Dawkins 'Do you have faith in your wife', which he replied 'Of course I do.' 'Is there any evidence for that', 'Yes, there is plenty of evidence'. Faith is a commitment based upon evidence, or rather, what is percieved by the believer as good reasons for trusting another.

Now lets apply this to belief in God. Understanding that faith is trust means entails that faith in God is based upon very good evidence. It is a commitment made on the fact that there are very good reasons to believe in God. It is not, like belief in fairies, something where there is very limited arguments. Faith in God, for the believer, is founded upon good reasons for trust in God.

Thus, faith is not a belief which has no evidence, or is irrational. Rather, faith is rational, based upon arguments and evidence. The job of the sceptic is to demonstrate that belief in God is not faith, that it is on a lack of evidence, that the reasons a person such as myself gives, they are not sufficient to show the rationality of belief in God, whether that is trust in God or the existence of God. The way the New Atheists characterise faith should actually be called 'anti-faith', for that would be trust in God without evidence. So I think faith is intertwined quite heavily with reason.

Now I don't pretend that most theists have good reasons for their faith. However, when interacting with an ideology hostile to your own, one should always assess a view on its strongest position, which I try to do (not always succeeding!) This would then be demonstrating the reasons provided by natural theology for belief in God, such as the Ontological argument, Argument from Meaning, the Infinity of God and Pascal's Wager, are all insufficient evidence for trust in God's existence to be rational. If that is achieved, then religion is based on anti-faith, not faith. As it happens, I don't think anyone has done that yet, and thus, faith in God is one of the most rational of things.

I want to stress that this article does not attempt to show God does exist. Rather, it is clarifying whether faith is based on reason, or are they in conflict. By definition it is not, but the burden of proof is to show belief in God is not faith.

Slags, Lads and Sex

Slags. We all know one. If you don't, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but you are probably one yourself. People dismiss them as needy, cheap, promiscuous women who will just sleep with anyone and anything. They are the butt of our jokes, the centre of gossip and a target of hate which people can rally against. But is this fair? Should we critisise people for embracing their liberties, throwing off the shackles placed upon us by the backward societies of the past? Are we just jealous of their sexual success? Can we really judge a woman who, according to the Urban Dictionary, just has the morals of a man? The following article will almost certainly get my blog banned from Facebook again, but nonetheless, let us proceed with the dirty business of evaluating the moral justifications for being a slag.

To begin, I want to tell a short story, which will be the focus of our inquiry. One night, person X, who is decent looking, went out, wearing skimpily clad clothes, revealing their physical features, with the intention of getting laid and having a good time. X went to all the best clubs, partying with strangers and pulling quite a few in the toilets of each respective place. X did this weekly, getting quite a reputation for it. A lot of the discussions at school were about X and their antics.

Now I want you to suppose that person X is a girl. What's your initial impression? Is she a bit cheap, leaving nothing to the imagination? I would hazard a guess that a lot of people will judge her as living a low form of life, allowing any guy she can find to have sex with her, devaluing the very act of it, and pursuing a way of living which focuses only on the physical. We would call her derogatory terms like slut, whore, slag and many more negative terms.

In fact, it turns out person X is actually a man. What do you think now? Is he a player, just fulfilling his desires, being the ideal of every man out there? Among men, there is a prevailing culture to be a 'lad', getting laid every night, living the high life and generally absorbing a materialistic culture. We would call this guy a pimp, player, lad and other positive names.

The point is, the man who lives as person X does will be treated far better than the woman who acts like X. And this to me seems grossly unfair. Either we should see both as great or both as bad. So which are they?

I think a large part of this is the fact that both lads and slags are embracing their carnal desires. It is within us most people the urge to have sex (though not all, as my friend Rob pointed out). Most of us suppress this, due to an expected standard society and religion has placed upon us not to be sexually immoral. When we see others acting upon these lusts, the animal inside of us cries out for the same thing, urging us on to complete similar acts. As such, we have an instinctual jealousy of them. Thus, we live in a paradox where we want to live a similar lifestyle yet despise the people living it due to this envy we also have of them. Unfortunately, the woman bares the negative aspect of this, whilst the man does not. So in some respects, my sympathies lie with these people, having to bare with everyone else's jealousy, especially women.

But whilst the justification for sexual promiscuity maybe to satisfy one's animal nature, I myself find this a very weak ethical system. For while I accept that being partly animal is a property of being human, I also think it is the quest for meaning which differentiates us as a species from all other life on Earth. Searching for meaning in all we do is definitive of who we are, it is the driving force of all the great achievements ever made. In the sciences, in the humanities, in the arts, all things have been done in an attempt to discover a hidden meaning in our experience. The dog, he experiences the world, but he does not ask what the meaning is of anything, whereas the human asks why something is the case, or how things work, or what needs to happen for so and so. Applying and yearning for meaning equates to being human.

And it is this which leads me to feel a great sense of sorrow for the life the sexually forward lead. For whilst they find a short lived joy in their revealing clothes and raunchy nights, they in the process abandon the meaning of sex. Sex is primarily a celebration of the love two people have for each other. This is why it is so precious, it is for a private, enclosed affair. For a human being, it is special. But the forwardness of the man or woman who lives like person X is taking an zoomorphic system of morals. They are ruining their own humanity, which is such a shame, because every human is an important person who we, as a community, should care about. It seems like they are destroying the very thing which identifies them. What makes it worse, is that the joy of discovering a meaningful thing like love is longer lasting and transcending anything like the short lived fun that a physical act can offer. So whilst life as a lad or a slag is quite appealing on an animal level, as a human, it denies the very thing which defines us; our sense of meaning in situations.

I don't want to come across like I judge these people as somehow worse than myself. It is a basic principle of mine, and of the Christian faith that we should try to divide the individual from their actions, as without doing this, forgiveness can never occur, and communities can never grow in love and fellowship. I am not attacking the people who live this way, for they are entitled to that if they wish, and many of them are genuinely nice. Rather, I am suggesting the way of life they want to uphold is wrong, as it is based on a primal system, which as humans we cannot accept if we want to maintain our identity as meaning seeking creatures. In saying that, I think it is clear the gossiping, derision and outright hostility to such a life is unjustified. Yes, some girls may wear skirts which look like belts, and yes they may get off with more blokes than a person has fingers, but we should not be mean or nasty to them through malevolent jealousy and hatred. Rather, help that person to see that they are beautiful without the need to reveal large amounts of flesh, that they can enjoy a more joyful life through not falling to the basic desires we all share, and that they should embrace a meaningful existence.

Pascal's Wager: Why you should bet on God

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) was a brilliant man. He made significant contributions in Mathematics (Pascal's Triangle), in the Sciences (maintaining that there are Vacuums) and was an inventor (the hydraulic press and the syringe). However, it his contribution to the debate about whether one should believe in God is what shall be examined in this article. His idea is called 'Pascal's Wager', and it has been accepted, rejected, reborn many times over. It is something which just never goes away, for it so simple to understand. I hope to illustrate its main components, then offer some objections, and then I will deal with them.

Some preliminary comments are needed before we delve into the argument itself. The Wager is not designed to prove God's existence, or give any reason why God might exist. Rather, it tries to show why we should believe in the existence of God. Whilst it is a subtle distinction, it is of great significance to understanding the argument. It is trying to give us a reason why it is 'utility maximising' (improving our chances of attaining the best possible circumstances for our persons) to believe in God.

Pascal's argument centres around a wager over whether it is better to believe in God or not. It follows the principle of 'I have nothing to lose and everything to gain from such and such', which if it is successful, is a very powerful argument. Pascal argues the following:

(1) It is possible that the Christian God exists and it is possible that the Christian God does not exist.

(2) If one believes in the Christian God then if he exists then one receives an infinitely great reward and if he does not exist then one loses little or nothing.

(3) If one does not believe in the Christian God then if he exists then one receives an infinitely great punishment and if he does not exist then one gains little or nothing.

(4) It is better to either receive an infinitely great reward or lose little or nothing than it is to either receive an infinitely great punishment or gain little or nothing.

Therefore:

(5) It is better to believe in the Christian God than it is not to believe in the Christian God.

(6) If one course of action is better than another then it is rational to follow that course of action and 

irrational to follow the other.

Therefore:

(7) It is rational to believe in the Christian God and irrational not to believe in the Christian God.

We can illustrate this succinctly in the following diagram.

This at first glance looks quite convincing. You don't seem to lose anything from believing in God and being wrong, but you can gain everything if you are right, whilst if you don't believe, you gain nothing and can go to hell! This would be a powerful reason to believe if it is sound reasoning. However, many sceptics have offered reasons why we should not trust the wager.

Firstly, the wager seems to devalue and outright contradict religious sentiments. The essence of religion is perceived as the conviction that all profane, self-seeking ambitions are incompatible with the quest for piety and total commitment to love of God. Self-indulgent shams, which are attempts to fool God and are selfish are morally repugnant, and tears down the whole religious, and specifically Christian life. Noble ends are undermined by ignoble means after all.

Furthermore, just believing in God doesn't seem like it will get you into heaven. True religion is not just an assent to a set of propositions, but a full commitment of devotion, having one's heart and soul virtually consumed by a deep reverence and love of God. The wager seems to provide us only with a shallow, thin version of religious belief, which is not really worth considering.

Whilst these criticisms have no logical force, they have considerable psychological weight. But they seem to have misunderstood Pascal's intention. Firstly, the view that altruistic actions should have no motives which are beneficial to the self is simply not biblical, but actually a secular invention. Professor Barclay of Theology at Durham University has argued that St Paul (the foremost thinker in Christianity behind Jesus) believed that doing good actions and assenting to certain beliefs is not to be condoned due to self-reward. If someone can benefit by giving you help, that is not a bad thing, but good, for the diffusion of good from any situation increases, which is always something to aim for. In the same way, Pascal is arguing that belief in God is good, because not only do you benefit in the knowledge and love of God, but you avoid hell and gain heaven. It is almost an early form of utilitarianism, where the greatest good should be performed for the greatest number of people. It is only after the enlightenment does this belief arise that for it to be pious the action at hand should have no gains for the self. So to argue because it is selfish it is not worth following is to adopt a set of principles which are not within the Christian religion.

Moreover, Pascal's argument helps one to start the process of loving God. Hillel recognised that desirable behaviour is assumed to generate eventually desirable feelings. Being commanded to love a neighbour or God is too difficult by itself. I cannot choose to make myself love a man I hate. However, by practising the behaviour associated with a sentiment, it helps one develop that emotion too. This is the foundation of 'behaviour modification', a type of therapy which aims to induce feelings through repetition of actions. The relevance of this is that the wager demands a commitment to God through action: if I wager God exists, I must act in a way which God finds is good. So only acting in a way which I would like to be treated, will over time help me to love my fellow human. In the same way, dedicating your actions to respecting God and his commands will develop a love for him too. So the wager is the first step for salvation, and one must go past it to fulfill the wager, and develop true belief and trust in God.

Another, more powerful objection, is the idea that Pascal assumes a Christian worldview, and there is no reason to suppose that we shouldn't bet on Allah, Vishnu, Osiris, Thor, Zeus, Ra, Baal etc. In short, there are so many God's we could wager on, and as we don't know which one to wager on, it seems unreasonable to wager on any of them. The 'many-gods' argument maybe extended further in saying that there may even be a god who rewards those who deny his existence and punishes those who do believe in him, reversing the wager completely.

But does this objection work? Well the first thing to point out is that it has conceded that Pascal is right to assert the view that we should wager on some supernatural power. It accepts the general reasoning of the argument, it just wants a reason why it should wager on the Christian God, not some other one. We can do this by showing the plausibility of each God is not equal.

To start with, the theistic God is more plausible than other gods because we can use Ockham's Razor to discard them. Whereas the theistic God can be described by one predicate (perfect), whereas a God like Zeus is infinitely more complex to describe. For example, Zeus sometimes slept, but we have no idea how long he needed to sleep and how it effected him. He ate and drank, but whether he overate or how long he could go without food is another question we do not know the answer too. In short, the lesser gods are limited and complex to explain, the theistic God is unlimited and a simple hypothesis, it follows that theistic God's are more plausible to wager on than non-theistic God's.

Having narrowed it down to just theistic God's, we must now assess the specific evidence for each description of God's nature (Allah, Triune, Yahweh etc.) and assess the evidence for this. I am convinced that the Christian one is the most plausible given the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. For a detailed argument of this, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHofTmolbi0 Furthermore, even if you find this uncompelling, the other theistic religions seem to boast even less evidence than Christianity (I don't have room to comment here, but if you want to raise anything please feel free), and as such a the Christian God is the most plausible. Thus, we have reasons why Pascal specifically tells us to wager on the Christian God rather than another one; the evidence suggests that it is the most plausible God to exist.

With these two major stumbling blocks dealt with, I think it is at least rational to think Pascal's Wager is a good reason to believe in God. Whilst there are other objections, they are not as powerful or well known. However, if you would like to raise them, please feel free, I just don't have enough time to analyse them all.

Thus, whilst the public perception of the wager is very negative, if you dig beneath the surface level objections, you find a highly sophisticated reason for devoting your life to God. Misunderstanding the argument is common, but I believe that if you understand the view Pascal tries to convey of this being a stepping stone, and take into account the relevant plausibility of certain concepts of God, it is clear that this is a persuasive construct, and betting on God in light of this argument is a good move. With the soundness of the argument clarified, I hope you wager on belief in God: you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain!

I want to thank you all for showing your continued support in reading my blog, especially those not from the UK. If people would like me to comment on any particular topics, please leave a comment as to what the subject matter is, and I will try to post an article on it.