Setting the Infernalist View Ablaze

It's maybe the worst view ever

Infernalism is the notion that some people—potentially many—will endure the rather unfortunate fate of being in agony for all of eternity, in hell, at the hands of a perfectly loving and all-powerful God. Given the obvious falseness of this doctrine, defenders of infernalism are reduced to elaborate mental gymnastics to justify their wicked, depraved, and sadistic doctrine, according to which little old ladies who devote their lives to helping others will burn in the fires of hell for all time. Such people have the gall to declare that this is part of some divine cosmic plan of a perfect being; that a perfect being has set up a world in which my unfailingly generous Jewish grandfather will experience more suffering, over the course of his eternal life, than has been experienced by all people in history.

Watching the infernalists elaborate mental gymnastics is sometimes rather amusing, much like, to quote David Bentley Hart, watching a dolphin tap dance. They’ll repeat slogans like “God doesn’t send you to hell, you send yourself there,” like a mantra, as if repeating it three times makes it true. Of course, whether or not it is technically God who sends you to hell is wholly irrelevant—if one sets a series of events in motion that will result in billions of generally kind and generous people being tortured forever, they have done something deeply wrong. It doesn’t matter whether they directly send the person there or set in place a series of events that lead them to eternal torment—either way, they have done something deeply wrong.

Infernalism is a doctrine that is quite hard to take seriously not least because it seems like infernalists themselves do not take it seriously. They do not act as one would act if they were convinced of the doctrine. If you were genuinely convinced that your child might spend eternity being tormented, you should do everything in your power—and I mean everything—to prevent your child from turning from God. If infernalism is true, finding out that your child is a mass murderer should be much less distressing than finding out that they are an atheist—at least, if one thinks that faith in Jesus is a prerequisite for salvation.

As Andrew Hronich has noted, many parents are helicopter parents, taking extreme actions to prevent their children from getting hurt. But if you adopt the infernalist view, you rationally should be a helicopter parent who guards your children from atheism. If atheism condemns one to eternal hellfire, then your sole mission in life should be to prevent people from apostatizing. If apostasy is really a crime of infinite magnitude, then it should be a crime punished far more harshly than murder—especially if you cause others to apostatize.

Yet one of the most formidable objections to hell is that it implies that sinning and rejecting God is good. Suppose we grant that a person who sins deserves to be in hell forever. Suppose additionally that a particular acceptor of Jesus will be wrongly sentenced to hell. On this account, if they reject Jesus, this would be infinitely fortunate, because it would make all infinity years of their suffering better if not outright good on account of being deserved.

One might object by claiming that rejecting God is a sin of infinite magnitude. Thus, the badness of rejecting God outweighs the infinite extra goodness from hell being deserved relative to being undeserved. One problem with this is it implies that a person rejecting God is in some way infinitely good, even if it is all things considered infinitely bad. A bigger problem is that the claim that rejecting God is infinitely bad is obviously false. To see this, consider the following case:

Serial killing evidence of theism: you’re worried that your child is an atheist. You hire someone to spy on them. Over the course of this spying, you get some evidence that they’re a Christian. However, you also learn that they tortured, killed, and raped 5,000 people a decade ago. They are deeply sad about this and feel guilty about it, such that you know that they are no longer the type of person who would do this.

Should you be relieved? No, of course not. Finding out that your child is the most prolific criminal in American history shouldn’t come as good news. But on this account, finding this out does decrease the odds that they’ll reject God, which is a crime infinitely worse than merely torturing, killing, and raping 5,000 people. So you should be all things considered relieved. But clearly you shouldn’t be. Finding out that your child is the worst criminal in American history (potentially with the exception of Kissinger and his ilk) should come as bad news, even if you get a guarantee that he now accepts Christ.

(My friend Amos has another solid objection to this doctrine in an article that is very good but makes the unfortunate error of denying that infernalists are like lord Voldemort).

This takes us to a more fundamental objection to infernalism. If God is perfectly good and loves us all, he would not allow us to be tortured for all of eternity. If God is all-powerful and has it in his power to stop us from being tortured forever, he would.

But, cry the infernalists, what about free will? God wouldn’t override our free will if he really loves us. He wouldn’t force us to enter a relationship with him any more than a loving parent would force their child to spend time with them once they’re an adult. This argument, however, is flawed, for God wouldn’t need to override our free will to get us to enter a relationship with him, and even if he would, this wouldn’t be wrong.

As for the first point God is, according to infernalists, all-powerful. If a being is all-powerful and has infinite time to get a person to enter a relationship with him, he’d be able to get them to. And this wouldn’t be violating their free will any more than working hard to convince someone to go to rehab would be—if you don’t force a person to do anything but merely orchestrate a situation where they’ll do the right thing, you obviously haven’t violated their free will.

Second, God absolutely would be willing to override our free will. Overriding a person’s free will is perfectly permissible to prevent them from making an infinite mistake. If your child is playing catch next to a torture chamber that will lead to their eternal torture, it is perfectly permissible to violate their free will and force them not to do this. So too is it permissible for God to force a person to not endure an infinite mistake, especially given that in this case, they will thank God later, once they recognize the error of their ways after spending time appreciating God’s boundless glory. It is surely permissible to override one’s free will if this makes them infinitely better off, making their future infinitely good rather than infinitely bad. If you knew, for instance, that your 18-year-old child would be tortured forever unless they went to college, it would obviously be permissible to compel them to go to college.

The infernalists have, of course, many more justifications, each as weak as the ones we’ve examined here. Each either assumes a basic error about the way omnipotence works, a basic error about the way morality works, or most commonly both. Infernalism is not a particularly respectable view, adopted widely only because of the widespread inability to have the slightest shred of empathy for the majority of humanity and adherence to a dogmatic biblical literalism out of accordance with contemporary scholarship or indeed with broader biblical themes, such as God being a God of love. If you’re confused about widespread support for Hitler among Germans, look no further than the gleeful zeal with which a sizeable portion of America declares that those who reject Christ—including, notably, the victims of the holocaust—will be tortured for all of eternity by a perfect being. The fact that this never-ending Treblinka occurs posthumously would be be little comfort to the souls who end up there.