Daylight Atheism > Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost

< Previous: Daylight Atheism St. Louis Meetup

Next: The Humanist Symposium Approaches >

Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost

In question #86 of his Reasonable Faith column, William Lane Craig addresses a question from a Christian who's troubled by one of the most wicked doctrines of that theology, the dogma of Hell. Craig's correspondent wonders whether the saved will feel compassion for the damned, but also worries that it would be a violation of free will for God to erase their memories of their lost loved ones.

I would never forget that I had a child and wish to be with them in the afterlife unless God specifically altered my mind... I am just having trouble imagining myself so happy that I just don't think about my child who is burning in eternal damnation.

Craig's response begins:

You object... that God would violate the free will of redeemed persons were He to take such action. I don't see that this implication follows. God's respecting human free will has to do with moral decision-making. God will not cause you to take one morally significant choice rather than another. He leaves it up to you. But obviously God limits our freedom in many morally neutral ways... if God removes from the redeemed knowledge of the damned, including knowledge of loved ones that are damned, He does not violate the moral integrity or free will of the persons involved, any more than if He had removed their knowledge of calculus.

This is just obviously wrong. Stealing people's memories of the suffering of others is a morally neutral limitation on their freedom? By what bizarre reasoning could anyone possibly arrive at that conclusion? Taking away that knowledge stops us from acting in ways that we would otherwise want to, which is the essence of making a moral choice.

It would be as if I had a relative who was dying from cancer, and I went to see a therapist who could hypnotize me into forgetting their existence, so I wouldn't have any desire to visit them in the hospital and comfort them. By Craig's reckoning, this is a "morally neutral" choice. By any rational system of morality, however, this would be an act of supreme callousness and depraved indifference to the suffering of others.

But not to worry, Craig has a fallback answer:

This alternative suggests that the experience of being in Christ's immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell.

Craig compares this to a wounded soldier having a limb amputated without anesthetic, suffering from pain so intense it drives all other thoughts out of his mind - except, he says, we should substitute happiness for pain to get some idea of what it feels like to be in Heaven. (Great analogy!)

What this comes down to is saying that the saved will be like drug addicts on a permanent high, so wrapped up in their own euphoria that they care nothing for the world outside their own head. Heaven will be like the Land of the Lotus-Eaters from Greek mythology, its inhabitants forever smothered in a blissful haze that leaves them unable to think of or contemplate anything else, for all eternity. Am I the only one who finds this image disturbing rather than appealing?

Craig isn't the first one to suggest this; other Christians have said very similar things. But whenever they try to describe in any detail what people in this state would look or act like, they always wind up painting a picture of Kafkaesque automatons that I call bright machines. Far from being the fullest and most perfect realization of human potential, the imaginary inhabitants of Heaven are less than human. They're lacking in all the emotional depth, all the richness and color that makes our lives real and meaningful.

We do have a glimpse of this vision here on Earth. Certain kinds of brain damage can rob a person of all emotional affect, so that all they ever feel is a constant, all-enveloping bliss - very like Craig's vision of Christians overwhelmed by the beatific vision. But the result isn't an appealing picture:

"He looks like our son and has the same voice as our son, but he is not the same person we knew and loved.... He's not the same person he was before he had this stroke. Our son was a warm, caring, and sensitive person. All that is gone. He now sounds like a robot."

This, then, is the Christian conception of the afterlife - blissed-out robots in Heaven, billions of the damned eternally suffering in Hell. If that's what William Lane Craig and others want to believe, that's their right. But I would hardly call this reassuring or comforting to the worried questioner - much less a "reasonable faith".

Other posts in this series:

Rebutting Reasonable Faith

32 Comments

See how easy it is to make up just about any excuse for Gods actions! And Christians tell me that if God didn't empower each of us with free will, we would all be mindless robots. How ironic, that when we arrive at the very place promised by the all-loving God, we are, apparently, exactly robots.

Comment #1 by: Jetson | December 30, 2009, 8:02 am

Excellent post. And this conception of heaven makes simply being dead seem quite acceptable. Decent, reasonable nonexistence beats eternity as an smiling imbecile.

Comment #2 by: valdemar | December 30, 2009, 8:19 am

Yet more evidence that Craig is practicing sophistry, not philosophy.

Comment #3 by: Reginald Selkirk | December 30, 2009, 8:48 am

It rarely fails to amaze me that:

1. Christianity has so many key internal inconsistancies that border on the absurd. Why would God command Love Thy Neighbor only to have you ignore their eternal suffering after death?

2. Theologians take it upon themselves to speak for God, in both his motiviation and plan. AFAIK, there isn't much in the way of description of heavenly life in the Bible. Maybe everyone is kept in cages like parrots.

Comment #4 by: cello | December 30, 2009, 9:10 am

There's another solution to this conundrum, that of Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, and others. It is that people in Heaven will enjoy the sufferings of people in Hell, and that they will learn in Heaven how well-deserved those sufferings are.

A theologian like that would say in response to question #86 that the questioner will learn how much that child deserved to be tormented in Hell, and will end up enjoying the sight of that child's sufferings.

Comment #5 by: lpetrich | December 30, 2009, 10:18 am

Ipetrich,

I had always though that that was the usual Xtian take on the sufferings of loved ones (and everyone else) in hell.

There is an absolutely fantastic medieval mural in the cathedral in Albi, France, which depicts, quite vividly and graphically, the demonic torments of hell, with the saved looking down from heaven (alongside a beatific God), snickering, pointing and guffawing while the damned are having their heads torn off and their entrails feasted upon by demons.

Comment #6 by: Sarah Braasch | December 30, 2009, 10:47 am

Craig needn't have gone to the effort to concoct his two unsupportable, contradictory theories. I wonder if he has ever taken a basic CPR class? If so, he knows enough to assure the woman that within just a few minutes of the cessation of her blood circulation, her brain will be irreversibly damaged, and all the memories of her child, and everything else that she might think of as a "self" or an "identity", will be gone for good.

He could then go on to encourage the woman to feel and show her love for her children right here and now, and to do all she can to make the world a happier and safer place for them.

But then, he would be talking like an atheist.

Comment #7 by: Peter N | December 30, 2009, 10:59 am

Craig's vision of humanity in heaven gives a thinking person so much to look forward to in the afterlife. {/snark} Yet, Christians insist that their religion makes them more fully human.

Comment #8 by: the chaplain | December 30, 2009, 11:53 am

Am I the only one who felt a shiver of horror reading the original poster talk so coldly about her loved ones, her own children even, burning in Hell?

And didn't Craig sound like a pantomime villain producing reasons why this is all reasonable? I would expect at the very least some patronising hand-patting and bland reassurances that her children were in Heaven.

Where is the comfort in 'Don't worry, as soon as you get to Heaven you'll be so blissed out you won't care if they're in Hell'? He sounds like a satirical parody of a Christian theologian.

On the other hand I can't think what answer he could possibly have given which sounded any more reasonable given the fact that he'll cling to the Bible being true.

Comment #9 by: Ritchie | December 30, 2009, 12:45 pm

I suspect that many Christians would argue that they couldn't have any loved ones in Hell, because if someone they knew was sent to Hell that would mean there was a darkness and evil inside that person that they hadn't been aware of in life. They would be thankful that the person's true nature had been revealed to them and their love for that person would be instantly extinguished. After all, who are they to argue with God about a person's hidden character?

The most compassionate and humble person who had ever lived could end up in Hell (very easily, according to God's rules) and it would simply be evidence to them that this person wasn't as pious as he or she seemed.

Comment #10 by: pendens proditor | December 30, 2009, 12:46 pm

For my fundamentalist relatives, the great tragedy of their lives was that all of their children and grandchildren became nonbelievers. They were very sad in their old age because their belief in heaven was little comfort to them: "how can it be heaven when our families aren't there?" It broke my heart but of course nothing I said or did made any difference to them. I doubt Craig's answer would have helped either, though -- yikes.

Last night the movie "Pump Up the Volume" was on TV, and the Christian Slater character has a great rant against suicide. "Assuming there's a heaven, who'd wanna go there?? It would be so boring!" That was one of my first big realizations when I was becoming a nonbeliever. The thought of my consciousness being permanently snuffed out is awful, but no religion has ever described an afterlife that I had any desire to experience. As Hitchens says, heaven sounds like North Korea to me. No thanks.

Comment #11 by: Nurse Ingrid | December 30, 2009, 1:09 pm

"Blessed are those who mourn, for their memories will be wiped clean of whatever it is that they were mourning about. The eternal sunshine of the evangelical mind." - Fred Clark

Comment #12 by: Jeffrey | December 30, 2009, 1:56 pm

The alternative to hell, death, i.e. non-existence won't work either. Afterall if the consequence of a lifetime of sin and debauchery is oblivion the obvious question is, why repent? Christians need a hell to drive people into heaven.

Comment #13 by: Mark.V. | December 30, 2009, 2:35 pm

I suspect that many Christians would argue that they couldn't have any loved ones in Hell, because if someone they knew was sent to Hell that would mean there was a darkness and evil inside that person that they hadn't been aware of in life. They would be thankful that the person's true nature had been revealed to them and their love for that person would be instantly extinguished. After all, who are they to argue with God about a person's hidden character?

Generally, modern Christianity, especially the Hellfire branches, holds to the idea that everyone is loathsome, horrible, and evil. Being a Christian isn't about being good, it's just about being saved. Most Christians will cheerfully say that otherwise nice, good (inasmuch as anything as vile as a human can be good), and kind people will burn (Jack Chick has some tracts that illustrate this principle quite nicely).

The alternative to hell, death, i.e. non-existence won't work either. Afterall if the consequence of a lifetime of sin and debauchery is oblivion the obvious question is, why repent? Christians need a hell to drive people into heaven.

Not really. The Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Mormons get along fine without a Hell (Mormons have the Outer Darkness, but you have to be really evil to go there).

Comment #14 by: Leum | December 30, 2009, 2:50 pm

Yeah, the JWs say that there is no hell (the unsaved simply cease to exist), BUT that's why they bring hell to earth in the herenow. You don't have to wait for demonic torment. You can get it now.

According to the JWs -- demons are real; Satan is real. And, they roam the earth, and they can harm you in any way they might wish. They can kill you. They can rape you. They can hurt you. They can also just torture you psychologically.

They go after bad people. But, they also go after good people. So, being a really good JW and calling upon Jehovah might help, but, then again, it might not. Jehovah does have his mysterious reasons after all. Sometimes demons go after the best JWs just for kicks.

So, basically, as a JW you are under constant threat of demonic attack -- all the time. You can never let your guard down.

And, you have to be constantly searching out ways in which you might be inviting demons into your life. Antiques, horoscopes, ouija boards, your circle of friends, music, books, bad thoughts, etc., etc..

It's enough to make anyone crazy. And, they teach this to the kids -- totally unwatered down.

Comment #15 by: Sarah Braasch | December 30, 2009, 3:01 pm

This alternative suggests that the experience of being in Christ's immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell.

I see. So the experience of Christ's presence will be so overwhelming that we won't care about, or think about, or indeed even remember the people we love.

And how exactly will we be ourselves, then?

My thoughts and feelings about the people I love are a central, crucial part of what makes me who I am. The best part, arguably. And Craig thinks that in heaven, this will just disappear?

And he thinks that's a good thing?

What's more: Compassion and caring for others is supposedly a major part of Christianity. And yet somehow, our heavenly reward for living a compassionate and caring life is that we get to have that experience permanently stripped from us after death. How does that work, exactly? And again -- how is that a good thing?

What is wrong with these people, anyway? Do they even hear themselves? Do they know what they sound like?

Comment #16 by: Greta Christina | December 30, 2009, 3:37 pm

What's most amazing to me about the whole William Lane Craig response is just how painfully obvious it is that he's making the whole thing up. It makes me wonder if he believes any of the tripe he's shoveling, because I smell the stench of cynicism on this poorly-conceived and half-ass attempt at an answer.

Comment #17 by: nfpendleton | December 30, 2009, 3:40 pm

My thoughts and feelings about the people I love are a central, crucial part of what makes me who I am. The best part, arguably. And Craig thinks that in heaven, this will just disappear?

Of course, Greta. Individuality and Christianity rarely play well together.

Comment #18 by: Thumpalumpacus | December 30, 2009, 5:25 pm

This post reminds me of that cartoon I saw about a child in heaven resting on the clouds and looking down to see his grandma being dragged to hell for not accepting Christ and he remarks along the lines of "Well, she sure did bake some good cookies."

Comment #19 by: Tommykey | December 30, 2009, 7:07 pm

What is wrong with these people, anyway? Do they even hear themselves? Do they know what they sound like?

Greta, my favorite was a Christian blogger who goes by the name of Rhology who claimed that if Jeffrey Dahmer was sincere in his conversion to Christianity in prison before his death, then he is in heaven right now. As for the people Dahmer killed before they had a chance to turn to Jesus, well, apparently they're shit out of luck. Jesus Christ. The ultimate get out of jail free card.

Theists like to quote that line from one of Dostoevsky's characters, "Without God, all things are permissible." I propose a corollary to that. With God, all things are permissible, as long as you say the right magic words before you die.

Comment #20 by: Tommykey | December 30, 2009, 7:11 pm

Bright machines? So in heaven everyone's a bright (in Dawkins's sense)?

Comment #21 by: Pete Schult | December 30, 2009, 8:25 pm

If the Christian God exists we are all in a lose-lose situation. Either we all go to Heaven and become smiling Worship-Robots, or we go to Hell which is even worse. There is no other path.

Horrible.

I think Hell has become a doctrine with quite different utility now than it had when it was first created. I imagine that, at first, Hell served primarily to reassure Christians that, whatever their sufferings at the hands of the Romans and all other Antichristian forces, they would ultimately triumph and their enemies be cast down and punished.

Now, it has become a mind enslaving device that prevents people from leaving the faith because they are afraid of a horrible, torturous fate at the hands of their omnibenevolent God.

Comment #22 by: David | December 30, 2009, 8:32 pm

What a twit. I love how he finishes his argument:

"I'm not claiming, of course, to know if either of these alternatives is true but merely claiming that they serve to defeat Talbott's argument for universalism."

One of their favorite ploys when cornered in one of the silly beliefs their religion forces upon them is to retreat to "possible" explanations. As soon as they come with something even just slightly plausible they feel they can dismiss your arguments in total. Craig demonstrates this perfectly with the last sentence of his post. Translation: "I might be pulling this out of my butt, but it still refutes your argument."

Comment #23 by: billf | December 30, 2009, 9:48 pm

Craig: theology fail. The Zen monk D.T. Suzuki said that if there were a single soul in Hell then he would refuse Heaven.

The question usually does not arise because religion is community-based; the believer's unconscious assumption is that all their loved ones are saved. Thus collective egotism suppresses cognitive dissonance.

I can think of few Hells worse than a place that calls itself Heaven but shows you loved ones in Hell, and expects you to like it. The solution would be to reject such a false Heaven and rejoin your loved ones in false Hell; for love is Heaven.

I admit that the preceding paragraph is poetry, not to be taken literally. I just think that my poem is better than Craig's.

Comment #24 by: paradoctor | December 30, 2009, 10:01 pm

This! This is one of the strongest reasons that hastens my deconversion. Spending an eternity as a god-worshipping robot is stupid and boring. If god so value human's free will as not to interfere with it while on earth, why strip it away when the said human make it to heaven?

Comment #25 by: An Indonesian Atheist | December 31, 2009, 12:01 am

This alternative suggests that the experience of being in Christ's immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell.

Yup. JC is that powerful. I mean, it worked for Judas, right?

Sarah Braasch "There is an absolutely fantastic medieval mural in the cathedral in Albi, France…"
Do you mean The Last Judgement? Looking at it, I can't help but notice how (except those in Hell and those begging for mercy), well, organized everyone is. Heaven is like being queued in His Most Divine Bureaucracy.

pendens proditor "The most compassionate and humble person who had ever lived could end up in Hell (very easily, according to God's rules) and it would simply be evidence to them that this person wasn't as pious as he or she seemed."
Don't forget that you don't go to Heaven because you're good ("Good fruits" are just a side-effect of the Holy Spirit and you don't have to have the latter to do the former). Nobody is good and even at your best, you're still not perfect (which is intolerable to the God that made you the way you are knowed what you'd do). You go because God chose you, before you were born, when He did that voodoo that He do.

Leum "Being a Christian isn't about being good, it's just about being saved."
"Personal salvation". Only those filthy Catholics believe in works.
"Jack Chick has some tracts that illustrate this principle quite nicely…"
Oh, Jack…the line between "righteous" and "malevolent sociopath" is so fine…

paradoctor "The Zen monk D.T. Suzuki said that if there were a single soul in Hell then he would refuse Heaven."
And you can ask him about that…when you see him in hell! Take that, sinner! Also, God loves you.

Comment #26 by: Modusoperandi | December 31, 2009, 12:01 am

I'm not claiming, of course, to know if either of these alternatives is true but merely claiming that they serve to defeat Talbott's argument for universalism.

Craig seems to suffer from the delusion that a response to a position automatically counts as a refutation. How does Craig's made up crap, which Craig admits his answer is, defeat Talbott's made up crap? The only stuff that defeats anyone's made up crap is truth, something with which neither Talbott nor Craig seem to be very familiar.

Comment #27 by: the chaplain | December 31, 2009, 9:07 am

Sarah Braasch: "There is an absolutely fantastic medieval mural in the cathedral in Albi, France, which depicts, quite vividly and graphically, the demonic torments of hell, with the saved looking down from heaven (alongside a beatific God), snickering, pointing and guffawing while the damned are having their heads torn off and their entrails feasted upon by demons."

IINM Albi is the place the 'Albigensians' were named for. Do you have any idea if that mural is from before or after the Albigensians were exterminated by the orthodox Catholics in that area?

Comment #28 by: Jim Baerg | December 31, 2009, 10:04 am

It's from after. Apparently, much of the inspiration for depicting such hellish horrors was to keep any latent albigensians (cathars) in line. The cathedral also looks like a fortress. I have never seen another cathedral like it anywhere else in the world. There's a ton of info online about the mural and the cathedral and the history.

It was painted by a group of unknown artists during the mid 15th century and is considered one of the great masterpieces of the late Middle Ages. (From some web site -- I forget which one.)

It's been more than a decade since I've seen it up close, but, now, I have a desire to go again. On the day I was there, so long ago, there was a young couple getting married in front of the mural. It was such an odd juxtaposition.

Comment #29 by: Sarah Braasch | December 31, 2009, 10:45 am

This is an interesting topic. I've always found it interesting that humanity does a very effective job of making Hell seem real and detailed while Heaven seems rather vague. I've read Dante's Inferno, but have yet to read Purgatorio or Paradiso.

Stealing people's memories of the suffering of others is a morally neutral limitation on their freedom? By what bizarre reasoning could anyone possibly arrive at that conclusion? Taking away that knowledge stops us from acting in ways that we would otherwise want to, which is the essence of making a moral choice.

I couldn't agree more. In my pathophysiology class, my professor told us that Alzheimer's Disease is most feared by the elderly, because it takes away the part of your brain that makes you who you are. My grandmother had Alzheimer's Disease. After seeing what she went through, I think one of the scariest things that can happen to a person is taking away memories or taking away the ability to think. If Heaven involves such things, count me out.

Comment #30 by: Sharmin | January 1, 2010, 1:27 am

[...] Daylight Atheism > Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost http://www.daylightatheism.org/2009/12/remembering-the-lost.html – view page – cached Freethought in the light of the sun - a blog on atheism, science, philosophy, current events and the hypocrisy of the religious right. [...]

Pingback #31 by: Twitter Trackbacks for Daylight Atheism > Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost [daylightatheism.org] on Topsy.com | January 1, 2010, 4:43 am

Sarah, I noticed that, implicit in the artwork you pointed to, is somewhat the surreal notion that clothes are more difficult to "resurrect" than bodies.

Sharmin, your point about Alzheimer's is well taken, and that very disease demonstrates one of the absurdities of "heaven" or "hell" - ie which "you" is the one you will "arrive" with - the "you" at 10 just figuring things out? The "you" at 20, convinced you've just figured it out? the "you" at 30, figuring out how to make ends meet? the "you" at forty, finally getting a handle on the finances? the "you" at fifty, figuring out how to tactfully point out to the teens and 20's people in your life how much more they've got to figure out? the "you" at 60, when no one cares any more about what you're just beginning to figure out? the "you" at 70 when you no longer care what anyone else cares about, and no longer figure you'll ever figure it all out? the "you" at 80, surrounded daily by all those strangers with familiar faces, which you have to keep trying to figure out, with a memory that's more of a net than a bucket?

Which of these is the real "you." If you settle on one, then you lose/forsake all the others. If you could somehow become "all of them" at once, you would lose the mystery of your own future and the pathos of your own past, all curiousity sated, all growth potential gone. How could you be you?

Not to mind the additional multi-layers of complexity contained in your life-long varying web of relationships - the subject of OP.

Comment #32 by: Scotlyn | January 1, 2010, 7:28 am