Note: What follows is a transcript of the video.
In this video I want to present a Theodicy Destroying Thought Experiment called “Paradise Hell”, and by Theodicy Destroying I just mean that this thought experiment can provide an undercutting defeater for just about any kind of theodicy or even defense against the Problem of Evil - or at least all the ones that I have heard so far in my years of study on the subject. Before I get into the specifics of the thought experiment, I’d like to give some background first.
The debate between theists and atheists has raged for literally thousands of years with no end in sight and I think it’s important to look at why.
Probably the best tool in the atheists arsenal is the Problem of Evil and even many theistic and Christian philosophers will readily admit that most responses are particularly poor. Still, even those theists will say that there are some successful responses to the problem of evil, so why then do atheists persist in believing god doesn’t exist.
The issue is that all theodicies, or attempted explanations as to why an all good and loving god permits evil and suffering really boil down to what is known as a value question.
A value question is always going to be answered with a subjective opinion because it always comes down to something along the lines of “Is X worth Y amount of cost?”. This can be made more clear with an example:
Imagine we’re in the middle of a particularly hot summer and lets say my air conditioner seems to not be working as well as it should, so I call a repair company and they come back to say that it will cost me $2000 to fix it immediately, or if I can wait a week it will only cost me $1500. At that point I am faced with a value question - is it worth it to me to be comfortable in my house immediately for $500, or is the money I’d save worth more than a week's worth of discomfort?
As you can imagine how you’d answer this can very much depend on a number of factors. Perhaps I or someone else in the house has a medical condition and being in high heat can lead to sickness or even death, or perhaps I’m a billionaire and so the $500 is so insignificant to me that I just pay to have it fixed immediately. On the other hand maybe I don’t make much money at all and I don’t have the spare $500, or perhaps I live alone and don’t mind the heat all that much and would rather have the extra money.
This is ultimately what theodicies come down to and it’s why it is said that Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga is said to have answered the “Logical Problem of Evil” when he offered a “defense” - that is by offering a reason why god permits evil, even if it is an implausible one, would give the theist an “out” from the logical argument disproving the existence of god.
Supposedly, what we are then left with is what’s called the “Evidential Problem of Evil” which I think is really where the theists and atheists have largely been playing for thousands of years. The theist offers a theodicy to explain that some kind of “evil necessitating good” is why a loving god permits evil, which may be convincing to a number of other theists, but the atheists don’t particularly think the “good” is worth all the evil and suffering.
Again, let's make this clear with an example that prompted me to come up with this argument, a point about goods and evils from eminent Christian philosopher and apologist Richard Swinburne:
So to be clear here, Swinburne is making a point about how it is worth it for people to be killed in the nuclear explosion of Hiroshima because it gave opportunity for courage and sympathy, as well as information about the effects of atomic radiation, and it created people who had a strong desire to campaign for nuclear disarmament, etc.
Note Swinburne doesn’t have to say it’s “worth it only the whole”, rather that god lets the nuclear explosions happen so that he can get certain goods, and if he gets rid of the evil, he necessarily gets rid of the goods - and god doesn’t want to get rid of all the good states that would come with having all these bad ones.
Now for me, I think such a trade off is insanely implausible - but theists are well within their rights to disagree.
So are we just left at this millenia long impasse, where atheists think any given theodicy is ridiculously implausible, but the theists say they’re obviously correct and we don’t have a way to truly break between the two views?
This is where I think a new argument can shed some light on whether or not theists really do think that some goods are really worth the evils and suffering that their theodicies claim they are.
Consider a thought experiment where a loving god decrees that after a life much like our own here, non-believers will be sent to Paradise Hell, where they will be in eternal loving communion with god and there will be no suffering or evil for the rest of eternity - but then believers will be sent to another life much like our existence here on earth. In their new life they may have it easy or hard, determined randomly, but will be guaranteed to perform the kinds of goods that can only be accomplished if evil and suffering are permitted. If they perish in that life, then they move on to another afterlife just like it, so on and so on for eternity.
The question for any theist is to ask which afterlife would they prefer to go to?
I think the answer is clear - everyone would want to go to paradise! The problem for theists is that in choosing paradise they reveal that the goods that necessitate evil and suffering really aren’t worth it.
The thing I like the most about this thought experiment is exactly how versatile it is. It can be modified to account for the wide variety of theistic views and apologetics deployed to stave off the problem of evil and still make its point.
Perhaps the theist wants to say that free will is a great good that unfortunately requires that evil be permitted - well we could say that in Paradise Hell, the non-believers are not free, but rather in the beatific vision of being in direct communion with god are so enraptured that they cannot help but love god. Conversely the believers sent to new worlds are well and truly free to choose to love god in the face of suffering. If free will is so incredibly valuable, then why wouldn’t the theist want to choose to avoid Paradise Hell and retain their free will even if it necessitates suffering?
Maybe the theist wants to say that in heaven they retain their free will, but are transformed into beings who will always freely choose the good? Well we can amend Paradise Hell to account for that too! In Paradise Hell the non-believers are transformed to always freely choose the good, but there must be some value to being able to choose evil - otherwise god would have made us all always freely choose to do the good from the get go and start off in a Paradise state from the beginning. So the theist would have to go back into a world of suffering and evil to let those goods continue to obtain.
Or maybe the theist wants to say that soul building is such a great good that it’s worth all the evil and suffering we endure on earth? Well if we take theistic claims about heaven and the end of the world seriously, eventually the universe stops existing and people are sorted out into heaven or hell and so the soul building is necessarily finite. The people in heaven no longer have soul building in the suffering necessitating sense, and the people in hell never get redeemed - so the particular kind of soul building that necessitates suffering and evil is finite. But not so in this kind of thought experiment! After all, all the poor souls condemned to Paradise Hell do not get to engage in any kind of suffering necessitating soul building, they’re just immediately transformed into redeemed finite creatures. Whereas the believers get to engage in the precious soul building that absolutely necessitates evil and suffering - forever! That’s an infinite amount of soul building related goods!
To bring it back to Swinburne’s theodicy, think of how those in Paradise Hell do not get to struggle for nuclear disarmament and merely have a kind of cold detached knowledge of the horrors of suffering nuclear explosions. Conversely the faithful will be able to learn first hand what it is like to go through a nuclear explosion, and after being separated from their loved ones can work tirelessly to ensure nuclear weapons don’t get used again - at least in that particular afterlife-world.
Maybe these examples of popular theodicies are a little too specific and raw that they don’t stand up well when we look at them in this kind of light, but the Paradise Hell argument works just as well against non-specific responses to the problem of evil like Skeptical Theism. Skeptical Theism says that we don’t know what reason god has for permitting evil and suffering, but theists can rest assured that god has such a reason. Well all we have to do is amend the thought experiment to say that the theist would have to choose to avoid Paradise Hell and go back into a world that contains evil and suffering so as to achieve whatever the reason is god permits evil and suffering in the first place. After all, it must be a pretty good reason, maybe even one that finite creatures cannot ever hope to understand - but it must be worth all the evil and suffering. So why would this reason not carry on for eternity?
In each case of theodicy when we combine it with the theistic versions of the afterlife we’re always left with a finite amount of whatever the “evil necessitating good” is, because eventually the world ends and we all get sorted into some kind of afterlife where there is either no redemption at all or there’s no more suffering and evil, so the goods can’t persist. But if the goods are to be considered worth all the evil and suffering, then wouldn’t we want an infinite amount of them? This is in contrast with the goods obtained in a paradise where there is no evil or suffering, those always get to be infinite because we’d just exist in paradise forever.
Perhaps the theist could say that god will continue creating new worlds, with new beings after everyone from “our world” has ascended into the afterlife state. This lets believers go to paradise but god still gets a steady/infinite stream of the evil necessitating goods.
The problem with this response is that it doesn’t show that the goods are actually “worth it” because all the theist is doing is passing the buck along to someone else to pay the bill. They still want to be in paradise, where they no longer produce the goods that require evil and suffering. If those goods were so worth the cost, then why wouldn’t they want to go back into a world where evil and suffering exist so as to demonstrate them?
Remember, the point of the argument is to show that these supposed goods aren’t really worth the price that they supposedly demand and I don’t think theists can avoid that conclusion when confronted with the question posed in the Paradise Hell thought experiment.
It’s Always a Value Question
I want to take a step back and point out how our responses to the question of theism and especially monotheistic religions like Judaisim, Christianity, and Islam - where there’s a tri-omni god and an afterlife with at least a heaven or a heaven and a hell really always boil down to a kind of value question.
The primary problem in the theist vs. atheist debate is that it’s a metaphysical question, and metaphysical questions are the kind that never gets a definitive answer by the very nature of the topic. If we could get definitive answers one way or the other, the question would no longer be metaphysical, it would be logical or scientific.
The issue here is that we don’t approach these questions in a vacuum detached from our wants and desires. I think it’s here that we can find a rare asymmetry between theists and non-theists of all stripes.
Many Christians like to say that atheists only reject Christianity and the arguments of Christian apologists because they “just want to sin”. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is from Christian apologist Frank Turek:
What I find particularly amazing about this reply is the implication that the non-Christian somehow knows that god is real and that Christianity is true - but wants to engage in behavior that is against the Christian religion, and so pretends it’s not true.
But this doesn’t make sense. In such a case the person would just say that all the premarital sex (or whatever kind of supposed sin they want to enjoy) is just worth going to hell for. After all, that’s how it supposedly works on the Christian outlook, right? You can do anything you want so long as you’re willing to pay the price.
Can you imagine the young man, after 14 billion years of burning in hell, thinking to himself “all that sex was so good it was worth this eternity of suffering!”
No! That’s clearly absurd. What’s really going on is that the non-Christian doesn’t actually believe that their actions warrant or at least will result in an eternity of conscious torture. They don’t think any of that is real. So they reject the morality of Christianity because they don’t think Christianity and its consequences are true!
However, consider the opposite situation for the theist.
They’re forced to adopt what appear to be incredibly implausible views on what is “worth it” for all this evil and suffering, but why? What’s the payoff? Because they want theism to be true! They want an afterlife in paradise, to live forever and be reunited with their loved ones and to escape a hard and cruel world. They admit this every time they make an argument about how “if god does not exist then there is no objective meaning or purpose”.
That’s a ridiculous argument because purpose and meaning are literally mind and stance dependent things. All the theist gets is a subjective to god version of meaning and purpose, but they betray the argument when instead of talking about that, they speak of the ‘horrors’ of an atheistic universe that results in a heat death, where everyone ceases to exist after death regardless of how they lived their lives.
It’s a fear of that particular reality that apologists are really trying to stoke when they make an argument for “objective meaning and purpose”. I don’t particularly believe that I will cease to exist when I die because I find it particularly comforting or poetically beautiful.
I believe that because it seems to me that my conscious existence is tied to the continued workings of my very physical body, and that when the body stops, so does my consciousness.
Perhaps the theist may counter that I do very much prefer a world where everyone ceases to exist when they die to the kind of world most theists subscribe to where a hell exists and billions suffer eternal conscious torture. The theists would be right, I do believe that the atheistic outlook is infinitely preferable to a world where hell is real - but that doesn’t force me to say I adopt all sorts of incredibly implausible value judgements about what goods are worth it.
Any atheist is free as they wish to adopt a kind of universalist theism of any given monotheistic religion that they find plausible. There are a variety of interpretations of the major monotheistic religions where there is no hell and everyone goes to heaven.
That is why I like the Paradise Hell Argument so much, because it uses exactly what most theists truly want as a lever to expose that they very likely don’t actually hold the value judgments they say they do.
This is the point I made when I critiqued William Lane Craig saying that he finds the possibility of heaven and a loving god so desirable that he lowers the level of evidence necessary to believe it. I had asked a question, which was relayed through a third party on the Capturing Christianity stream to Dr. Craig about why we wouldn’t lower the level of evidence to believe in universalism.
Dr. Craig’s response was legendary: He asked “but at what cost would universalism need to be true?” We’d have to give up free will being valuable if god were to just save those who rejected him in this life and transform them in heaven. He rejects universalism because if it were true then it would disvalue the theodicy he finds most plausible, i.e. the free will theodicy, to explain why we have evil in the first place! He never stops to ask “but at what cost?” to wonder why a tri-omni god would create a world where not only there was evil and suffering, but an eternal conscious torture chamber called hell - all to get a subset of created beings up into an eternity of heaven! For Dr. Craig, clearly all the evil, suffering, and torture of hell is worth it for that! But having free will not be valuable enough to stop god from letting all creatures be saved in heaven? That’s a cost too high to pay!
That’s what makes the thought experiment of Paradise Hell so valuable, I think particularly if atheists start using it in debates with apologists. I think for any believers who are questioning their faith and aren’t enmeshed in the world of apologetics, it can be a very clarifying question that illuminates what they truly value.
Finally, I’d like to thank both Emerson Green for his posts on Twitter that prompted me to think of this argument, as well as Dr. Steven Law, whose Evil God Argument inspired this thought experiment.
