William Lane Craig Confusedly Argues for the Eternal Torture of Jews, Atheists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists

Craig's depraved morality

My grandfather, now passed away, is probably the kindest person I’ve ever known. He was constantly kind, worked at soup kitchens each week, and seemingly never had anything bad to say about anyone. When my brother and I were children, he would get down on the floor and play with us. In one particularly notable incident, he held up my brother for about an hour as my brother flipped the light switch on and off to my brother’s great amusement — until the light switch broke. He was willing to spent his time helping others with almost no concern for himself. When asked which drink he’d like, he’d often reply “whatever there’s more of.”

My grandfather was Jewish and Judaism meant a lot to him. He took Torah classes at his temple very late in life.

Everyone who knew him well knew what an extraordinarily kind man he was. At his funeral, there was a seemingly endless stream of great things people had to say about him — a seemingly endless barrage of stories of him having engaged in acts of extraordinary beneficence. He was a truly extraordinary grandfather.

William Lane Craig thinks that he’s argued for the conclusion that this great man, this paragon of virtue, should be tormented forever — alongside all the atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and non-Christians. Craig’s a big advocate of the morality of an eternal treblinka for people like my grandfather — those who don’t embrace Jesus in life.

One can scarcely believe so depraved a doctrine. One wonders if Craig has any non-Christian close friends. If so, would he really say that ultimate, true, transcendent justice demands that his friend is tormented for all of eternity, that he endures more suffering as an individual than all of the Jews of the holocaust, all of the victims of slavery, and indeed all of humanity up until this point?

Could Craig really listen to the eulogies for my grandfather before zealously declaring that my grandfather would be tormented forever? It’s very easy as a Christian to affirm the traditional view of hell, without considering that, as you do so, you are holding that loving old men, disliked by no-one, deserve to be infinitely tormented. They deserve a fate worse than Junko Furuta (I’d recommend against reading the link — the details are really quite horrific). Indeed, if Furuta was not a Christian, it would say the only thing her torturers did wrong was failing to wait until the next life. After all, Furuta deserves to be tortured as she was, carrying the torture just isn’t the role of her torturers.

Defenders of the depraved doctrine that favors the infinite torment of most people will no doubt declare my argument an appeal to emotion in the face of rational argument. This misidentifies the argument — the argument appeals to the conscious that we have, that they’ve done their best to erode, in the name of affirming traditional dogma.

William Lane Craig has attempted to defend the pro-infinite torture position, and, in doing so, produced some dreadfully poor arguments. Against the common-sense notion that a finite sin shouldn’t merit infinite punishment, Craig declares that our abandonment of god is not a finite sin — by turning our back on an infinite being, we have committed an infinite sin.

This is dubious in lots of ways. Let’s first examine the claim that this is an infinite sin. It’s very easy to bandy about such claims, but they’re not really accepted — they’re purely repeated rhetorically, to excuse the obvious horror of the doctrine.

It’s worth considering who it’s an infinite sin against. God? Is the creator of the universe himself a victim of an infinitely great crime we’ve perpetrated? This is dubious for a few reasons. For one, presumably God in his infinite perfection is not harmed by individual people. Much like we cannot be harmed by ants, a being infinitely above us cannot be harmed by us. One might claim that turning our back on god is a harm of epic proportions — yet this is a very strange claim. God loves us so much, that when we turn our backs on him, he has no choice but to send us to an eternal Treblinka.

And even if he is harmed, presumably we finite beings can’t produce infinite harm for our creator, just as ants cannot significantly harm us. When we turn our back on god, we have not harmed god more than all historical atrocities have harmed people throughout all of history. The slogan “crimes against an infinite being are infinite” sounds appealing, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

But it’s not even clear Christians really believe this deep down. They profess they believe it, but one must profess all sorts of things to, in good conscience, sign off on my eternal torture at the hands of an allegedly perfect god who loves me supposedly. Much like an abusive husband, god’s perfect love doesn’t prevent him from tormenting those who he supposedly loves.

Christians are often horrified when they hear that their child is an atheist. But if they believed turning one’s back on god were an infinite crime, they would be far more horrified. So horrified would they be that they’d never have kids.

Some decent portion of children turn out to be atheists. If being an atheist is an infinite sin, then Christian parents have kids knowing that there’s a high probability that their child will commit an infinite crime — one far worse than the holocaust. If you knew the odds of your child perpetuating the holocaust were similar to the odds of a child being an atheist, you’d have to be a monster to have children. And yet atheism is allegedly a crime infinitely worse!

And yet, if you did have kids, you’d dedicate your life to making sure your child didn’t carry out the holocaust-level crime. If you thought there was above a 1% chance that your child would commit the holocaust, at a young age you’d teach them the horrors of anti-Semitism. You’d think that far more important than giving them an education, for example. So, Christian parents should enroll their five-year-olds in apologetics classes, to avoid risking an infinite crime.

Additionally, if you thought that turning away from god was an infinite crime, then if you discovered that some missionary action which killed lots of innocent people resulted in a few extra people turning to god, you’d have to support that action. Yet Christians don’t.

This is not what is done, because, through their actions, Christians reveal that they don’t actually believe this deprived doctrine. Not all sins against god are infinite.

It’s also hard to imagine how it’s a sin against God to reject him when he’s remained hidden. If a being remains hidden and I don’t believe in them on poor evidence, then I’m not culpable for the infinite crime of rejecting them. I didn’t reject them any more than a person rejects their father who never made his existence known, who ran off when they were a child and was believed dead.

But let’s grant the Christians crazy claim that turning from god is an infinite sin. Do infinite sins deserve infinite punishment? No!

Let’s consider another infinite sin. Suppose that one day I cause an event that will cause someone else to be infinitely tormented, despite me not knowing that it will cause them to be tortured. Do I deserve infinite torture as punishment? No! There has to be a requisite level of mens rea, which there isn’t in the case of people who don’t believe in god.

Even if someone does some infinitely bad crime, if they’re not going to do it again, they don’t deserve infinite torment. The reason for punishment is three-fold.

1 It incapacitates people — this clearly doesn’t apply here; heaven is just as good a holding place as hell.

2 It rehabilitates people — this doesn’t apply; hell isn’t rehabilitative.

3 It deters crime — this doesn’t apply if the punishment remains hidden.

Maybe you think another purpose is

4 It gives justice to evildoers by punishing bad people.

But if you think that, then the punishment shouldn’t necessarily fit the crime. Rather, it should fit the character. If we could make a Hitler clone, he’d still deserve to suffer because he has a Hitlerian character — this is so even if the clone didn’t commit a crime. But this means that whether people deserve eternal torment depends on whether they’re infinitely vicious.

Can a finite being be infinitely vicious? I think not. I’d especially think not if I believed, like Craig, that you can’t have an actual infinite. If this is so, you can’t have an actual infinite of viciousness.

But even if you think that it’s possible for someone — say Stalin — to have such a depraved character that they deserve to suffer, the Christian position is still wildly implausible. They have to think that, not only do some people have a character of sufficient viciousness to deserve infinite torment, every non-Christian does. At least, that’s what they have to think if they believe that all those who reject Jesus will be tormented forever.

You have to think that my grandfather deserves to suffer eternally for retributive reasons. That he, like every atheist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, and Buddhist, is so wicked that just standards of desert entail him being tormented for all of eternity.

But if they think this, then the Christian has to hold a very implausible axiology. They have to think that suffering is mostly good. After all, most suffering happens to non-Christians who apparently deserve it. Whether a person deserves to suffer doesn’t change when they die. Thus, Christians who really believe that non-Christians deserve to suffer have to think that most suffering is good. Adopting this depraved, wicked doctrine warps your axiology — it flips justice on its head.

So antithetical is this doctrine to the good that, in order to defend it, one must adopt all sorts of other unfathomably malevolent positions. Like a spider trying to fix a hole in their web, the Christian has to manipulate their moral web to accommodate for the deep moral hole at its center.

There is another, better way, for Christians to proceed. They can just accept universalism, which has been defended admirably by people like David Bentley Hart and Andrew Hronich. You can accept Jesus without believing most people will be tormented for all of eternity.

If god is a god of love, he would not be a god of condemning generally good people to eternal hellfire. A good, loving god wouldn’t inflict more suffering on the victims of the Holocaust than Hitler. Those who doubt these claims have a moral compass that is not merely off-track — it points directly south. It leads them to affirm as moral the most depraved doctrine ever proposed.