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Sider Hell and Vagueness
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Sider Hell and Vagueness
Ted Sider has an issue with hell and presents it within a paradox in his paper Hell and Vagueness. The paradox is established upon a set of 5 claims regarding hell which are…
i. Dichotomy: There are exactly two states in the afterlife, heaven and hell.
ii. Badness: People in hell are, very, very much worse off than people in heaven.
iii. Non-universality: Some people go to heaven, and some to hell.
iv. Divine Control: It is up to God who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
v. Proportionality: Justice is proportional, in the sense that it “prohibits very unequal treatment of persons who are very similar in relevant respects.” Treat similar cases similarly.
It follows from Divine control and Non-universality that God decides that some people- whom Sider refers to as Sheep- go to heaven, and that some people- referred to as Goats- go to hell. By Badness, it follows the sheep are far better off than the goats and by Dichotomy that every human is a sheep or a goat.
Proportionality requires, if God is just, for Him to be able to divide the people into sheep and goats in a way that does not place people who are relatively similar into different groups. By Justice, it follows there must be some way of dividing the people that does exactly that.
Sider’s issue is that he believes there is no possible way for that to happen due to the fact that there must exist a cut off that decides who’s a sheep and who’s a goat and there must be people very close to that cut off. If there are people near that cut off then they must be very similar and yet still put into different groups which would violate Proportionality.
There are lots of proposed solutions to this issue that prove unfruitful
One is the belief in a specific concept of Purgatory, whose claims are:
i. Those on the borderline are sent instead to Purgatory
ii. All who arrive in Purgatory are eventually destined for salvation in heaven
This is unhelpful because there still exists a cut off between being brought to Purgatory, which is to be saved, or to be sent to Hell which is just the same issue with an extra step
A solution that seems the most defensible is found in C.S Lewis’s The Great Divorce
It, too, is a sorta concept of Purgatory but one that seems far more likely when evaluating God’s nature
This version of purgatory in the book is illustrated as a gray town that one can leave behind to pursue heaven or continue to inhabit which in turn makes it a living hell
It is like being placed in a bright room with eyes that have not yet adjusted, the light being God’s love
If you are in communion with God your soul is “well-adjusted” and the light will be bliss and welcomed; if you require still to be sanctified it will be a dazzling cleansing adjustment, but there are those who have no intention of allowing their eyes to adjust and instead recoil and respond with bitterness and hatred.
This picture of Purgatory satisfies all the principles offered by Sider the biggest one being its solution to the cut off that violated Proportionality and Justice
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3 Replies
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I don’t see how purgatory solves the problem though. There is a necessary conflict between justice and mercy since mercy necessitates forgoing justice, so allowing for a temporary middle punishment gets you nowhere. Eventually you end up back at the initial dilemma. <div>
Does god choose justice and give you the punishment you deserve? Or does he choose mercy and opt to not enforce the punishment you deserve. It is impossible to do both, and doing one or the other necessarily means that god isn’t perfect in the other.
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That’s a weak treatment of the doctrine of Hell as traditionally understood. God’s Justice in regards to Soteriology is not concerned with state of nature, but mode of willing.
As such, indeed, in terms of nature there would be very similar people, yet despite similarity of nature, their mode of existence is reciprocal to their mode of willing. Thus, the matter of Hell, or Heaven, is arbitrated on the basis of will and how far said will has affected nature.
That is: indeed, you can have a thief, who tries to repent, but always comes back to stealing; and a thief, who never repents and loves stealing. Both at the same age, both of the same ethnicity, both with similar background and place of birth. Yet, one goes to Heaven, given his mode of willing(willing to be with God, to do God’s will, to repent, to cease doing evil, etc.); while the other goes to Hell, given his mode of willing(willing to be on his own, to do his own will, to proceed in stealing, etc.).
Indeed, in the case of the wicked thief from my example, he is such a person, who corrodes his nature and loves diminishing the nature of others. In the case of the struggling thief from my example, he is such a person, who even though falls to his weaknesses, at least knows them and tries to repent of them. As such, even though the two may be similar, their mode of existence in the afterlife is affected by their mode of willing on Earth, despite similarity of nature. Because Heaven and Hell, and the created natures found therein, are reciprocal and reflective of the inhabitants of said places, whereby the place reflects the wickedness, or perfection in virtue, of each inhabitant, thus the state of nature in Heaven is perfection; while in Hell is damnation > because the persons in there are in such mode of willing that each person specifies his will against the proper end of his human nature, thus ends up in internal subjective torment, reflected in external burning flame.
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What I thought was so interesting about this post is the juxtaposition of a complex argument against simplistic scripture. It seems like you and Sider are explaining everything, and then suddenly it’s “the sheep and the goats,” and the “gray town.”
I mean, it’s like an engine that is getting revved up but then it doesn’t really go very far. Who can break out of the mold that Jesus left? And why does the mold hold fascination despite its simplicity and vagueness? Is it only the popularity of Jesus that people crave?
Sider’s argument is really a sharp one. But I’d guess that Jesus meant something very real and possibly dreadful, by the necessity of God to make a sharp division, ignoring proportionality. The churches seem to think so or whoever has been moving the churches.
To speculate about what this reason is, might violate the same restriction Jesus felt, that made Him speak vaguely about it. I suspect it has something to do with the real nature of hell, perhaps as I’ve posted here before, those going there don’t regard it to be a bad fate.
In other words ii above would be true, people in hell are, very, very much worse off than people in heaven. But it is only from the perspective of the heaven-bound that their fate is seen to be bad. Perhaps as Lewis states, they’d hate the divine light, and prefer darkness.
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