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Providence, Freedom, and Human Destiny

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Thomas Talbott
Thomas Talbott
Affiliation:
Willamette University, Salem, Oregon
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Extract

According to some theists, God will never completely destroy moral evil or banish it from his creation entirely; instead, he will eventually confine moral evil to a specific region of his creation, a region known as hell, and those condemned to hell, having no hope of escape from it, will live out eternity in a state of estrangement from God as well as from each other. Let us call that the traditional doctrine of hell. Elsewhere I have argued that any form of theism which includes such a doctrine, even one that tries to preserve consistency by denying the universal love of God, is in fact logically inconsistent. But moderately conservative theists, as I have called them, have an argument for the traditional doctrine that some have found convincing, one that emphasizes libertarian free will. The argument is this. Because God is perfectly loving, he wills the good for every created person and wills the redemption of all who have fallen into evil; but because he has also given his loved ones the gift of freedom and some of them in fact exercise their freedom to reject him forever, it is simply not within his power, even as an omnipotent being, to redeem all of those who fall into evil. According to moderately conservative theists, therefore, the following hypothesis, which I shall call the Rejection Hypothesis (RH), is at least possibly true:

(RH) Some persons will, despite God's best efforts to save them, freely and irrevocably reject God and thus separate themselves from God forever.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 227 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 See ‘The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment’, forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.

2 See Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1944), chapter VIII;Google ScholarSwinburne, Richard, ‘A Theodicy of Heaven and Hell,’ in Alfred J. Freddoso, The Existence of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983);Google Scholar and Stump, Eleonore, ‘Dante's Hell, Aquinas' Moral Theory, and the love of God’, Canadian journal of Philosophy, June, 1989, pp. 194–195.Google Scholar

3 Op. cit.

4 See, for example, Adams, Robert, ‘Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil,’ American Philosophical Quarterly (04, 1977), pp. 109–17;Google Scholar and Hasker, William, ‘A Refutation of Middle Knowledge,’ Nous (12, 1986), pp. 545–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 I have set forth my own reasons for thinking that divine foreknowledge and human freedom are compatible in ‘Divine Foreknowledge and Bringing About the Past’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March, 1986), pp. 455–69.Google Scholar

6 Of course there is a use of ‘want’, not my use here, according to which it is analytic that we always do what we want. But it is also quite natural in many contexts to distinguish between what we think we want and what we really want. In any event, the important point is this: I cannot be fully informed about the end I have chosen to pursue unless I can know how I would evaluate it if perchance I should achieve it.

7 For Plantinga's distinction between the strong and weak sense of bringing it about that some state of affairs obtains, see Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 169–74.Google Scholar

8 See Plantinga, , op. cit. p. 186.Google Scholar Plantinga's own definition is more complicated than this, in part because his aim is to prove what I take for granted: that if a person S suffers from transworld depravity, then God is indeed powerless to make actual a world in which S always freely chooses rightly.

9 I am also using the term ‘essence’ in Plantinga's sense. See Plantinga, , op. cit. p. 188.Google Scholar

10 Craig, William Lane, ‘No Other Name’: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation through Christ', Faith and Philosophy VI, 2 (1989), 183.Google Scholar

11 Ibid. p. 184.

12 I examine some of these concepts in my paper, ‘On Free Agency and the Concept of Power,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, LXIX (09, 1988).Google Scholar See also ‘The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment’.

13 According to Geach, Peter, ‘someone confronted with the damned would find it impossible to wish that things so evil should be happy – particularly when the misery is seen as the direct and natural consequence of the guilt’ [Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 139].Google Scholar But that misses the point altogether. From the premise that I could not wish to see my daughter both morally corrupt and happy, it simply does not follow that I would not wish to see her happy. Indeed, if my own daughter should become as corrupt and miserable as Geach describes, that would only increase the sense of loss and the yearning for what might have been, the desire to see her both redeemed and happy.

14 I borrow the term ‘supremely worthwhile happiness’ from Swinburne, Richard, op. cit. p. 39Google Scholar. According to Swinburne the most worthwhile forms of happiness do not rest upon false beliefs and do not arise from bad actions or a bad character. See op. cit., p. 40.Google Scholar

15 Craig, , op. cit. p. 184.Google Scholar

16 Romans 9:3

17 A similar inference seems to underlie Plantinga's Free Will Defence. If it is possible that some creaturely essences suffer from transworld depravity, then it is possible that all of them suffer from it.