Recently in Afterlife Category

First, an update. As you will recall, in Part 2 we saw that Jamie Smith seemed to be thinking that the scriptural case for universalism could be "so easily refuted" that he was going to ignore that case (and that he was doing universalists who would appeal to such a case a "favor" by ignoring it), and we were asking (OK: with a bit of taunting thrown in) Jamie what decisive refutation he might have in mind. Well, Jamie has now responded (not just to my post, but to two other blog posts as well), but it looks like he's not going to be telling us what (if any) refutation he might have had in mind, because he doesn't specify it in his response, and its title would seem to indicate he's not going to be saying any more on the subject: "Once (and only once) more on the 'new universalism'." You will also recall that in connection with my request, I had claimed that some pretty serious scriptural cases for universalism have been attempted. And Jamie does say this in response (it's item 2 below that we're directly interested in; I give the material before it to help set the context; there's also a third item in this section; the parenthetical material and the stuff in brackets is all Jamie's):

C. So I wish I had more retractions to make. You can chalk this up to either my stubbornness or my stupidity, or both. Just a few minor points: 1. Yes, the "new" universalism is not "new"--there are ancient streams of this. Yep, OK. 2. There are people who offer rigorous arguments, biblical cases for universalism, etc., etc. Turns out people have written lots of books on this. (Gee, really? Well, gooolllly...if only uh'd known...) Yep, got it. [See B.2 above]

Yes, of course, I see what look like marks of (very heavy) sarcasm here. I've always thought that I was reasonably adept at discerning what's being communicated through sarcastic material, but in this case I'm quite unsure. I'm inclined to read these as retractions Jamie is making, throwing in some peculiar remarks, the intent of which I'd then be guessing is to diminish the importance of the points being conceded? (Yes, it is rather strange in that case, since he is on this reading diminishing the importance of how good the scriptural case is, when his very own view would seem to make that the centrally important issue. But in the context of his whole post, it might make sense, for it seems that he might be indicating that this whole topic is just extremely unimportant to him. So the strength of the scriptural case can be central, but if it's central to an unimportant topic, at least to him, it's still not important?) But who knows? Maybe these aren't retractions, but explanations made through heavy sarcasm for why he is not making any retractions here?

At any rate, I'm inclined to just venture a guess that Jamie doesn't really know of any really decisive refutations of the serious scriptural cases for universalism, but was taking it that there were decisive refutations for the best cases for universalism (perhaps because he was seriously in error about what the best cases were like).

If so, he is far from alone....

"In hope, the Church prays for 'all men to be saved'." -- The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd. ed., entry 1821

As promised in the previous installment, we will now begin to look at the case against hoping that all people will be saved. As I've been asked: How can Christians possibly be against even hope on this matter? Well, as it turns out, in a post that has been noticed at, for example, The Gospel Coalition, James K.A. Smith has recently written up a case against this hope, "Can hope be wrong? On the new universalism" - which is quite interesting, given Plantinga's recent expression of hope (that we looked at last time) and Plantinga's very deep ties to the Calvin Philosophy, since Smith (or Jamie, as we know him) is a member of the Philosophy department at Calvin College.

Jamie recognizes how counter-intuitive his anti-hope stance will seem to some, writing this about what he calls the "'at-least-I-hope' strategy":

Doesn't it just name what all of us secretly desire? Indeed, wouldn't we be quite inhuman if we didn't hope in this way?

The basic type of explanation for why this hope is wrong given by the best of the no-hopers is that hoping that all will be saved betrays or constitutes an insufficient level of commitment to some view (often a theory of everlasting punishment for the lost, combined with the claim that there will indeed be some who are forever lost) contrary to universalism - and Jamie's case against hope seems to be of this basic type. I will address this basic case (and also Jamie's own use of it) in a later post.

Here I'll clear the way for that by first registering a few complaints about some features of Jamie's post that go beyond the basic strategy - in I think some unfortunate ways...

Perhaps spurred on by the release of and subsequent discussion of Rob Bell's book, Love Wins, there seem to have been from Christian sources a lot of recent expressions of hope that all people will be saved. In case you missed it, one example of such an expression (though one quite independent from the Love Wins brouhaha) that will be of interest to many readers of this blog came from Alvin Plantinga, in this interview. Money quote:

That's called universalism. And I don't myself quite believe it, but I don't disbelieve it either. I think it's something that a Christian should at least hope for.

As far as what he thinks is true, Plantinga seems here to be leaning toward universalism. At least that's how I'm inclined to read the above bit, given the "quite" in the "I don't myself quite believe it," and the absence of such a "quite" in what comes next. And the rest of what Plantinga says also inclines me to such a understanding. (He discusses universalism at 2:10 - 4:45 of the video.) But the endorsement of hope in the last sentence of the above is equally interesting.

But also in the air these days are reactions against such hope. In a blog post that is itself an enthusiastic endorsement of hope on this matter (but also a denial that more than hope is called for - and the post also seems to me to contain a little lapse in modal logic), Paul Griffiths notes:

Bell has been excoriated, scarified, and cast into the outer darkness by some in the evangelical world for defending such a hope. They are the ones who are quite sure that universalism can't be true, and that to affirm it is to reject orthodoxy.

As I know from recent facebook discussions, some Christians (as well as interested non-Christians) are dumbfounded that any Christians would reject even hope on this matter. In subsequent posts, I hope (!) to address what might be thought to be wrong with such a hope, answer such worries, and discuss the role of hope in the Christian life a bit.

Here I just want to set up that discussion by making an important preliminary point. In many Christian churches, communities, and institutions, one can get into trouble for being a universalist, and this drives a lot of Christian universalism (and openness to universalism) underground (as I discussed a bit several years ago here). And this may cause suspicion that some of those who express hope, but not belief or acceptance, that all will be saved may really believe or accept universalism, and are expressing mere hope here in order to avoid trouble. And I have little doubt that that's so in at least some cases. But certainly not in all cases -- and I would certainly think, for example, not in the case of Plantinga. Many seem to genuinely hope that all will be saved, while quite genuinely finding the reasons for thinking that hope will be realized to fall short of justifying acceptance of universalism. The hope-without-acceptance position may constitute an effective shelter for underground universalists from the heretic hunters (in some segments of Christianity), but it does so in part because it's a reasonable position to more genuinely occupy - and a position that many reasonable Christians genuinely do occupy. At any rate, I will be discussing the hope-without-acceptance position as a genuine stance a Christian might take, and not as position to publicly adopt while more privately holding something else.

I've now watched this debate between William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan twice: once alone and once with interested ethics students (for extra credit!). It's very good, and Kagan pushed buttons on Craig's arguments in many of the ways I thought that his arguments should be pushed.

There's an intuition that if there is no God or afterlife, then life loses its significance. Paul writes, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die'" (1 Cor. 15:32b). The author of Ecclesiastes (2:15-16) writes

Then I thought in my heart, 'The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?' I said in my heart, 'This too is meaningless.' For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered; in days to come both will be forgotten. Like the fool, the wise man too must die!

Craig has written,

Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again. (Reasonable Faith, p. 59, 1994 edition).

Many existentialist philosophers have seemed to agree with this line of thinking. You get this impression from Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche.

Kagan calls this into question. In his closing statement, in the last minutes of the recording, he says,

It seems to me that one essential point of disagreement between Craig and me is something that I asked about several times. It's this move that, to my mind, is the move from the thought that, without theism, then our actions don't have eternal cosmic significance, to the conclusion that, therefore, without theism our actions don't have significance - objective, moral significance. That just seems to me to be a mistake. It seems to me that if I love somebody, the reality of that loving relationship is valuable, of real value, of genuine objective value, and it's not in any way threatened by the fact that I will die, my wife will die, my children will die ,and eventually the universe will come to an end. The fact that billions and billions of years from now, it's all going to be the same doesn't mean it's all the same now. I certainly want to concede that if you're looking for this kind of cosmic significance, atheism's not going to provide it for you. But that wasn't the subject of tonight's debate. The subject of tonight's debate was whether you needed that kind of cosmic significance to have morality, and on that issue, I'm quite confident that the answer is 'no'.

I take Kagan to be insightfully calling into question this premise:

1) If x does not have eternal, cosmic moral significance, then x does not have objective, moral significance.

And I must say that (1) still has a strong pull on me. Yet, Kagan's reasoning in his quote here (and throughout the debate) seem compelling as well. I was wondering if anybody had arguments either for or against (1).

My favorite universalist passage is Romans 5:18. (Originally, my favorite one was I Corinthians 15:22, and I was then pleased to learn that that had also apparently been the favorite universalist passage of Abraham Lincoln. But I was putting it over Romans 5:18 because I was mistakenly thinking that Romans 5:19 severely curtailed the power of Romans 5:18. For this mistake, and why it's a mistake, see my quick discussion of Romans 5:18 in section 2 of "Universalism and the Bible".) Among the nice features of Romans 5:18, I'll here quickly note just one. A decent percentage of the "refutations" of universalism I encounter make this move: They claim that while all will indeed be made alive in Christ, this life will turn out to be a bad deal for many, because they will be made and kept alive in order to face judgment and eternal torment! Now I think that (among its other problems) this move is based on an extremely bleak, excessively narrow, and wholly implausible understanding of Paul's use in such contexts of the likes "alive" / "life" (and correlatively of the likes of "die"), especially as they occur in phrases that talk about such things as being made alive in Christ. (But any port in a storm, I suppose.) So perhaps I just shouldn't even worry about such maneuvers. But it is nice, given the potential worries many apparently have here, that Romans 5:18 throws in that bit about "acquittal", saying Christ's act "leads to *acquittal* and life for all men."

But what about that "leads to"? It's long seemed to me the most likely escapes here would focus on the "leads to", rather than the "all" of this passage. (Why I take a dim view of at least the most prominent forms of attempted escape that focus on the "all" is explained in my previous post here.) Maybe this passage just describes how all people are led, or what possibilities are opened to them, while leaving it open that some won't follow this leading or actualize the relevant possibility?

But that's not how such claims work....

AIRLINE OFFICIAL: All the passengers survived the crash.
REPORTER: Do you mean that all of the passengers survived in the "all without exception" sense of 'all', or in the "a great many" or "all without distinction" sense?
A: All I meant was that all of them survived in one of those last two senses you mention. I didn't mean they all survived in the "all without exception" sense of 'all'. And unfortunately, several passengers did die.
R: Oh.

******

RELATIVE: I was so excited when I heard on the news that "all the passengers had survived"! "Henry's alive!" I called out. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that the news report was using the "a great many" / "all without distinction" sense of 'all', and that in fact several passengers had died! Now I'm left wondering about poor Henry.

******

A: I wonder how the students in our town's high school did on the big state test? How did the underclassmen do? How did the seniors do? I can't wait to find out!
B: I was just at the high school and heard the news on that: All the students passed the test.
A: Really? Even that Johnny kid from down the block? I wouldn't have thought he could possibly pass.
B: He did fail.
A: But didn't you say that all the students passed?
B: I meant that all passed in the "a great many" / "'all' without distinction" sense of 'all'. I didn't mean that each and every one of them passed.
A: Oh.

There are many ways by which non-universalists try to evade the universalist implications of the New Testament passages typically cited as teaching universalism (like those presented in section 2 of my on-line defense of universalism). Sadly, one of the most common is to claim that 'all' (and its Greek equivalent) does not always mean "all without exception", but has some other, weaker sense, and to urge that the passages are only saying that all will be saved in one of these weaker senses of "all"...

So I'm teaching this honors undergrad class on C.S. Lewis and the Problem of Evil here at Baylor. Today we covered parts of "Animal Pain" from _The Problem of Pain_. I must say that well prior to reading Rowe, I was very struck with the problem of animal pain. I regard it as in certain ways much more troubling than the problem of human pain. In fact, it constitutes--and I'm probably not alone here, though at one time it was rare to find anyone who even talked about it--one of the two objections to theism which have any real weight with me, and it bears much, much weight.

In the chapter, Lewis suggests that...

Occasionally one meets with the idea that, granted, bringing in eternal life really does help a lot with the problem of evil or with hiddenness, nonetheless bringing in eternal life is a cheat because it begs the question or something like that.

I can see how one can object to the eternal life move by saying that some things are so horrendous that God shouldn't allow them even if he compensates those to whom they happened. Or that an omnipotent God shouldn't need to compensate. Or that God has some kind of a duty never to be hidden (but: surely a lover is permitted to hide for a while, since otherwise it would be wrong to play peekaboo with infants who don't understand about object persistence). But the "it's a cheat to bring in eternal life" move is not this move. Rather, it grants, at least for the sake of argument, that if there is eternal life, then God can have a justification for allowing the evil or being hidden.

I am having a hard time seeing how this "it's a cheat" move is supposed to work. Let T = theism, L = eternal life and E = the atheological arguer's favorite evil/hiddenness evidence. Then: T is equivalent to T&L or T&~L. Now to grant that eternal life would solve the problem would be to grant that P(T&L|E) is not significantly less than P(T&L). Now let the theist grant, in a spirit of mutual accommodation and simplification, that E is conclusive evidence against T&~L: P(T&L|E)=0. But now:
P(T|E) = P(T&L|E) + P(T&~L|E) = P(T&L|E).
But P(T&L|E) is not significantly less than P(T&L), it was granted. So, basically, the atheological evidence E lowered the probability of T to around the probability of T&L before that evidence.

Now, if in our background there is the fact that there are person, then P(L|T) is quite high. If God made persons, it is very likely that they (or at least those who do not deserve to not have it--there might be room for tweaking of what exactly L says), it is very likely that he made them to have eternal life. But if P(L|T) is quite high, then P(T&L) is pretty close to P(T). Since P(T|E) is not much smaller than P(T&L), it follows that P(T|E) is not much smaller than P(T).

So I just don't see how the "it's a cheat" move is supposed to work. Once one grants that the probability of T&L does not go down very much given E, then given the very plausible claim that most of the probability of T is contributed by T&L portion, it simply follows that the probability of T does not go down very much given E.

Suppose there is a perfect being (God)--a being maximal in power, knowledge, and goodness. Then this being will likely "save" (restore relationship with) everyone (all humans) eventually because:

1. God desires that everyone enjoy union with Himself.
2. If (1) is true, then God will do everything he can, without sacrificing a higher good, to maximize the chances of everyone enjoying union with Himself.
3. Granting each person an indefinite number of times the capacity to enter such a union (through repentance, trusting in Jesus, whatever) doesn't sacrifice a higher good.
4. Granting each person an indefinite number of times the capacity to enter such a union is something God can do.
5. Granting each person an indefinite number of times the capacity to enter such a union maximizes the chances of all his creatures eventually entering such a union.
6. Therefore, God will grant each person an indefinite number of times the capacity to enjoy union with Himself.
7. If (6), then everyone will eventually enjoy union with God (argument for this to come).
8. Therefore, everyone will eventually enjoy union with God (be "saved").

Here's why to believe each of the premises.

The standard age-of-accountability view includes the following claims:

1. At some age (which may not be the same for everyone), each person becomes morally responsible.
2. Before that point, (a) it would be unjust for God to hold the person responsible for their sins, or (b) they aren't really sins until that point, or (c) God would always be merciful in such cases when justice might still be deserved.
3. After that point, the gospel message applies, and those who repent and follow Christ are saved, while those who don't are not.

Now there's an unspecified fourth issue that an age-of-accountability view might go either way on. What criteria determine what the age of accountability is, and do the criteria admit of vagueness such that there isn't a clear line between being morally responsible and not being morally responsible? So we get the following two views:

There's a tradition in Christendom which says that faith in Jesus Christ as one's savior, and commitment to him as lord, is necessary for salvation. (Different Christian traditions might state this requirement differently; the important point is that almost everybody who hasn't been in contact with Christian missionaries, or isn't part of a chain which goes back to Christian missionaries, will fail to meet this requirement.)

There's another Christian tradition which says that one must have this faith before one's death.

While I see somewhat strong scriptural merit behind the first tradition (despite a growing number of Christian philosophers rejecting it; I think they're called inclusivists), I don't see much scriptural merit behind the second tradition. Furthermore, as my friend Patrick Todd pointed out to me at the Pacific SCP, it seems arbitrary for God to pick death as the moment beyond which there is no return. From the standpoint of eternity, why then? What's so important about that point? It seems that a less arbitrary point would be when a person has shaped his character in such a way that he would never have the faith which I described in the first paragraph of this post (this shaping might happen via what Robert Kane calls "self-forming actions"). A picture of how all this might happen is illustrated beautifully in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Furthermore, I bet that inclusivists might be more open to exclusivism if they rejected the second tradition.

So, I don't see much scriptural merit behind the second tradition. On the more philosophical side (and hence, more germane to this blog), it seems that death would be an arbitrary point at which to judge people's eternal destiny.

We've been listening to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles on CD. I read them when I was about ten years old, and I never got around to re-reading them, so some of it is almost as if I'm experiencing them for the first time. When I got to the following scene from the Silver Chair, it struck me as a strange argument, sort of like Pascal's Wager, but something rubbed me the wrong way about it. The main characters were in the Green Witch's underground domain and had fallen under her influence, which was causing them to lose their belief in the above-ground world. Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle then gives the following speech:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it sounded as if he didn't care whether the world was real. He was going to believe in it anyway, because it's more pleasant to believe in it. How can the upper world be so much better than the underground world that its mere finite value of being better would be worth believing in a lie if it's not true?

When I raised this issue with a friend, he said, "But it's Pascal's Wager!" I said, "No, it's not!" He insisted that the upper world is Aslan's world, which I'd been thinking of as the place at the end of the world that they went to in the previous book, and the upper world was just Narnia, which is the analogue of Earth. But we were interrupted and never managed to finish the conversation.

I realized later, when teaching Pascal's Wager, what Lewis must have been up to, and it's actually a neat trick. If he was seeing Narnia as a placeholder for the eternal reward of Pascal's Wager and the underworld as a placeholder for this life, then you have an interesting argument that isn't quite Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager concedes for the sake of argument that life in this world is more pleasant if you don't believe in God but then argues that the chance of eternal reward in heaven compensates for that in terms of rational decision theory. You shouldn't even need 50% likelihood of God's existence for the wager to be worth it given that the reward is infinite and the cost merely finite if you bet wrong. But Lewis' Wager is different in exactly one way: it doesn't make the concession. It takes the finite value of life in this world to be better if you believe in God than if you don't. So life is finitely better if you believe in God, and the afterlife is infinitely better if it turns out there is one. Therefore, it's a no-brainer. You might as well believe in God. If it turns out you lose the bet (i.e. God doesn't exist), you still end up finitely better off, and if you win (i.e. God does exist) then you get an infinitely better result.

One interesting result of Puddleglum's Wager is that it easily avoids the problem Mike Almeida raises against Pascal's Wager. Mike's problem (which I'm not taking a stand on at this point) relies on its being better in this life not to believe.

[cross-posted at Parableman]