Back in the comments section of my post on Giving Thanks, an old college friend and I are discussing the age-old problem of why God permits suffering and other evils. This is a serious problem; in my view the Argument from Evil is the only really formidable positive argument for Atheism. (By a positive argument for Atheism, I mean something that provides specific evidence against God's existence, rather than merely making the negative claim that there isn't enough evidence for Theism to believe it. In order to show that Christianity is plausible, both claims must be addressed.)
The conundrum is famous: If God is the All-Knowing, then he knows what things are evil, if he is the All-Powerful, he should be able to prevent them, and if he is the All-Loving, then he will want to prevent evil. So why is there evil?
The only way to solve the problem is to postulate the existence of some good thing which cannot exist unless evil either exists, or is at least possible. (Common "defences" might refer to putative goods such as free will, the opportunity for humans to exercise virtues, the orderliness of the universe, an afterlife of a sort that depends on people having had certain experiences, etc.) If the good is such that it is logically impossible to get it without (possibly) getting the evil too, then the defence would be successful, since when we say that God can do anything, we don't mean that he can or would create a logical contradiction. (As C.S. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain, "Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.") I'm not going to attempt a detailed defence here, but I do want to make some general points about the Argument from Evil.
My first point is that God's omniscience actually makes the Argument from Evil weaker, not stronger. The reason is that we humans are not omniscient. If we are ignorant, there's no particular reason to assume that we know what is the morally best way to run a world. Suppose that you wrote down a list of all the things you regard as good (happiness, knowledge, beauty, whatever). Suppose you figured out a way to weight all of these factors numerically—of course, there's no way we could ever agree on how to do this, and I'm not convinced it even makes sense, but let's run with it—so that you could assert that some possible kind of universe (call it 
) is optimum: the best possible.
[Note for experts: my kinds of universes here aren't exactly the same as the "possible worlds" discussed by analytic philosophers. If the best possible kind of universe contains something like free will or nondeterminism, there will be multiple "possible worlds" 
consistent with the same overall plan of the universe, some of which may be morally better or worse compared to the others.]
Now if God knows about even a single kind of goodness that we are ignorant of, or if he weights the various kinds of goodness differently than us in any way, then of course God will view some other kind of universe 
as best. It seems infinitely unlikely that 
just by coincidence, so it seems to be almost certain that the universe will appear to us to contain evils that we can't explain. One can argue about whether this is a sufficient explanation, but it's definitely something that has to be taken into account. The idea that a superhuman entity which created the universe will see things exactly the way we do is absurd:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
(Isaiah 55:8-9)
The second point I'd like to make, is that the Argument from Evil has emotional force as well as intellectual force. Atheists tend to get annoyed when Theists suggest that Atheists don't believe in God because they resent him. I've certainly seen plausible cases of this, but I don't want to speculate that all Atheists are this way, since I don't like making unfounded accusations about individual people's characters. (Maybe that's why my Politics category only has one post in it so far.)
Nevertheless, leaving the Atheists aside for a moment, I think I can say from an examination of my own heart, and conversations with other people, that it's easy to carry an unconscious grudge against God for various real or imagined grievances in our lives, or the lives of those we care about. Even if we have no grudge, there can be a deep sense of pain from all the kinds of grief that we don't understand.
So the Argument from Evil carries emotional force as well as intellectual force. There's no necessary reason why an intellectually satisfying answer should be an emotionally satisfying answer, or vice versa. One should bear this in mind when evaluating the intellectual arguments, since we may be asking from an argument something that no argument can do.
Finally, I believe that Christianity has resources for addressing the Argument from Evil which don't exist in generic-brand Theism, or indeed in any other religion. It's much too simple to say that the existence of evil contradicts Christianity, when in fact the most basic doctrine of Christianity logically implies the existence of evil.
The basic doctrine is that 1) we human beings are wicked and deserve punishment, and that 2) in order to forgive us, God became an innocent human being and allowed himself to be tortured to death by us, and that 3) this act provides us with spiritual healing now, as well as physical immortality for all eternity. Now regardless of whether you like this idea, even if you find it implausible or downright incomprehensible, you must admit that it's an idea about how God relates to evil, and uses it for the sake of good. If there were no such thing as innocent suffering, Christianity wouldn't even be possible. If Christianity is true, then God has arranged things so that the most important thing that ever happened was a horrible but redemptive evil. All other evils, we view in the light of the Cross.
The simplest explanation for evil is: the universe (or God, whatever), does not care about evil at all, but simply allows both good and evil to occur. So there's just one doctrine: (1) the universe does not care.
Any explanation more complicated than that has to give more accurate predictions than that. Christ's death is not a sufficient prediction, because it's a past event, and the people who made that prediction (i.e. the Israelites) were the same people who made it happen (i.e. the Israelites).
I think we should be more precise here.
Call the "humanly ideal" universe Uh. Call the "real" universe Ur. Observation shows that Uh != Ur, i.e. the problem of evil.
Theodicies try to say that, actually, there is a "Godly ideal" universe Ug, and that actually, Ug = Ur (an assertion that must be borne by some argument or evidence).
You point out that due to omniscience, it is very very likely that Uh != Ug.
Now, given Uh != Ur and Uh != Ug, please tell me why I should accept that Ug = Ur.
(I have further arguments regarding probability, since plain Arestotelian logic is insufficient - we need Null-A here).
(continuing previous comment about Uh, Ug, and Ur)
Now, consider a universe composed of one bit. In that case, knowing Uh != Ur and Uh != Ug, the probability of Ur = Ug is 1.0 (consider the case that Ur is 0. Then Uh can only be 1. Knowing that Uh != Ug, we know that Ug can only be 0, which is the same value as Ur)
For a universe composed of two bits, knowing Uh != Ur and Uh != Ug, gives us the probability that Ur = Ug is 0.3333 (or 1/3) (consider he case that Ur is 00. Then Uh has 1/3 probability each of 01, 10, 11. Assuming Uh is 01, then Ug itself has 1/3 probability each of 00, 10, 11. So in that limited case, Ug = Uh 1/9 of the time (probability of Uh = 01 times probability of Ug = 00. But there are three possible cases of Uh, so 3 times 1/9 yields 1/3).
For a universe of N bits, 1.0 probability Uh != Ur (real observation) and O probability Uh != Ug (omniscient unlikelihood), then the probability (assuming O is 1.0) of Ur = Ug is 1 / ((2 ^ N) - 1). If O is non-1.0, then that is multiplied to that base probability.
We know for a fact that N (the size of the universe) is very large. According to this page, the number of bits in the universe N is 10^90.
The base probability of Ur = Ug without the omniscient unlikelihood is 1 / (2 ^ N). Adding omniscient unlikelihood does not seem to improve the base probability by much.
(I have more to contribute, this time regarding the probability of omniscient unlikelihood O)
almkglor,
You are of course perfectly correct that the nonexistence of a benevolent God is the simplest explanation for the existence of evil. The belief that there is a beneovolent God who permits evil for some good purpose is logically possible, but more complicated. I agree. That, of course, is why the Argument from Evil is typically thought of as an argument for atheism.
The remaining questions are: 1) Just how powerful of an argument for atheism is it? and 2) are there any positive arguments for theism which outweigh the Argument from Evil, and therefore make theism more plausible than atheism?
The purpose of this post was to address (1) only. Think of it as damage control, if you like. I'm trying to explain why the argument from Evil, although it has some force, does not completely settle the issue. In other words, that it is not grossly implausible that
, simply because 
. That's the point of my reflections on omniscience and the role of evil in Christian theology. Then, if I can say that there exists evidence for Christianity, which outweighs the evidence against it coming from Argument from Evil, then we should still believe in Christianity. And since Christianity includes belief in a benevolent deity, this in turn would imply that 
.
If you need me to write this out as a formal Bayesian probability calculation, I can do so. But there's nothing much too it: it's just the ordinary workaday observation that sometimes the evidence for a proposition can outweigh the evidence against it.
Note that (2), what I consider the positive evidence for Christianity, is not contained in the post you're responding to. I haven't really analyzed (2) much yet in this blog, since I'm still laying the groundwork with my analysis of what Science is and why it works. But it will come in due time. You can see my previous reply to you if you want to know what kind of evidence I regard as most convincing.
UPDATE: The number of bits in the universe is irrelevant to the probability calculation. It's related to how any particular license plate you see on a car is very unlikely if the plate was selected randomly, but nevertheless that doesn't disconfirm the "random selection" hypothesis much relative to the "vanity plate" hypothesis, since the odds are small either way.
But the basic analysis above shows that it is still grossly implausible. In short, you've just shown that the probability is 1 / ((2 ^ N) - 1) rather than 1 / (2 ^ N). The difference is 1 / (((2 ^ N) - 1) * (2 ^ N)).
Okay, lemme see if I get this straight: what you're saying is that "I don't know if Ug = Ur, but if we find evidence X, Y, Z, then the probability of Ug = Ur should improve over the prior base rate. In no way can X, Y, or Z depend on Ug = Ur because that would be circular logic." Is that right?
WHAT? Please explain this more fully. In fact, please give me your Bayesian priors and Bayesian analysis.
If what you're arguing is that a Universe composed of a featureless repeating substance is inherently boring and obviously not our world, then please consider the size of the Universe in compressed form, which is an approximation of the Solomonoff induction of the Universe's program. I doubt that that number is still significantly large enough that raising two to that number and getting the reciprocal would yield any probability large enough to be more salient than the probability I will be hit by a train tomorrow.
I am amused when people try to infer the quality of the universe
from its quantity. Surely this is a category error. Works of
art come in all sizes, and their quality is largely orthogonal to
how big they are.
As for the quality of the universe, too many people seem to prefer to
maintain a double standard here. If something good happens to us, that's
because we're lucky enough to live in this universe. If something
bad happens, that is somehow God's fault, more so than the good stuff is.
Sometimes I ask such people this question: "If you had a Big Red Button
that would annihilate the universe right now, would you push it?"
Generally (unless they're feeling suicidal) they'll say something like,
"No, the universe is an interesting and beautiful place, why would I
destroy it?" People tend to like the fact that they exist. They think
the universe is on the whole a pretty good thing—but only if it
happened randomly. If a Cosmic Artist invented that same cosmos,
he must somehow be considered naughty.
Most human artists understand that they must serve their work of art,
and that any attempt to impose an external program on the work of
art will reduce its artistic integrity. I believe that the universe
demonstrates just such artistic integrity: we would find ourselves
in a much less interesting story if God arbitrarily "fixed" things
for us whenever we think he ought to. We would be deprived of the
joy of our own character development. I am glad to have been written
into Our Story, even when things seem to be a bit suboptimal from
my perspective.
almkgor,
possible configurations of the world obeying certain laws of nature. And suppose---as a simplifying assumption which I don't actually believe, for purposes of illustrating the idea by taking an extreme case---that we have no idea which of these possible configurations God considers to be the best. In that case, if God exists we would consider each of the 
configurations to be equiprobable. Now if we observe some specific configuration 
on this hypothesis 
is
.
which also does not tell us specifically which configuration of the universe to expect. In this case, the likelihood ratio is the same:
.
and 
, we end up with the same likelihood ratio. Hence the probability ratio of 
and 
is just the ratio of prior probabilities, whatever they are. All else being equal, presumably 
wins since it's simpler.
Here's a simple toy model of probabilities to demonstrate why the number of bits in the universe doesn't matter. Suppose that there are
You might be tempted to say, that's grossly improbable because X is so large. But now suppose we have some other naturalistic hypothesis
So when we compare the relative merits of
Now obviously, in the real world
and 
don't make exactly the same predictions, so this model is too simple. For one thing, it's unreasonable to assume our knowledge of what God would consider "good" is completely inaccurate. Hence the Argument from Evil, which raises the posterior probability of 
. Conversely, if God does specific things like miracles which are unexpected naturalistically, then this can increase the probability of 
relative to 
. But I don't think the force of either of these arguments will be particularly sensitive to 
, precisely because the Naturalist and the Theist (if they accept similar scientific theories) will both have the same predictions for most (but not all) of the bits of data in the universe.
You wrote: "But now suppose we have some other naturalistic hypothesis N which also does not tell us specifically which configuration of the universe to expect."
I believe that this is one of the fundamental flaws in your estimates and calculations. Ug specifies one particular configuration, and the probability as listed above is 1/X; god is perfect/omniscient, and has one ideal configuration. However, Un does not specify one configuration. While there may be a perfect 'god universe' configuration out there, the naturalistic explanation has many, many, many possible configurations.
Comparing N and G in this context gives N a huge prior compared to G, and G has a correspondingly huge burden of evidence needed to catch up.
Dennis,
possible configurations is 
. If we knew which world was 
, and we observed something different from that, then the probability of 
would be 0, not 
. But since we don't know which world is best, both naturalism and theism have exactly the same posterior predictions (in the toy model, not reality).
In my toy model, it's important that we don't know which of the
Or is your point that
has a smaller prior probability because it makes more specific predictions (even though we are not in a position to know what those predictions are)? If so, that's not how Bayesian probability theory works. You don't punish a theory for making specific predictions. Making specific predictions is good, if you're in a position to observe those specific predictions. If you aren't in a position to observe the prediction, then it's a wash, and you can treat it exactly like it didn't make the prediction.
Let me be more specific. Let's suppose we have a deck of 52 cards, and suppose I flip up the card from the top of the deck and look at it. It's the
. Let 
be the hypothesis that the deck was shuffled randomly before I flipped the card. Let 
be the hypothesis that a cat burgler broke into my home when I was asleep, and put his favorite card on top. Clearly 
is less likely a priori, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the number of cards in the deck! I wouldn't say that the cat burgler hypothesis was less likely if there were more cards 
in the deck.
Now what about the likelihood ratios? If I think I know what the cat burgler's favorite card would be, I've got some data to extract a prediction from. But if I have no clue about his favorite card, then I just go with my prior probabilities, which don't depend on
. Agreed?
I wonder how much quality you'd find in a blank canvas. Hence the reduction to bits in compressed form.
The argument only works if you have absolutely no idea what Ug is. But I think for any reasonably well defined god, Ug will be at least constrained. If you really have no idea what Ug is, it's not clear to me that your god is meaningfully defined. The argument that since god is omniscient, we can't expect to predict Ug at all sounds, to me, like an ad hoc construction made specifically to evade this criticism.
A second point, not metioned above: I think that any Ug much different from Uh implies the god is not benevolent or not interested in us. Not that we should ignore the possibility of non-benevolent gods, but that would rule out the christian god, at least as commonly conceived.
Together, these two points make it very difficult for me to imagine a Ug consistent enough with both Uh and Ur.
Dear lavalamp,
Thanks for your contribution.
Yes, my statement that we can't predict Ug at all is a totally ad hoc assumption, and what's more, I don't believe it! That's why I called my probability analysis above a "toy model", i.e. a oversimplified model which one designs to explore a specific issue, rather than to fit the real world. It was designed to illustrate the specific point that the total number of bits in the universe doesn't affect the Bayesian analysis. That's why I went on to say "Now obviously, in the real world N and G don't make exactly the same predictions, so this model is too simple...." and then I described some of the specific ways in which it is too simple.
Ug is certainly quite different from Uh, but that's doesn't mean that God isn't benevolent. Uh is what we think is best for us. Ug could differ for one of two reasons: either (i) because he's not as interested in our benefit, or (ii) because he thinks he knows better what will benefit us. In the second case, Ug could differ quite substatially from Uh without implying that God isn't trying to benefit us. A parent may do things for a young child's benefit that are substantially different from what the child thinks are best, but that doesn't mean they aren't benevolent.
I don't know what the "christian god, as commonly conceived" would do, but if you take the Christian God as conceived by the Bible, then he very clearly states that suffering is one of the things that's good for us. He didn't leave us to speculate on this point. Although Jesus did heal many sick people as a token of his good will towards humanity, he also specifically says that "if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?" (Luke 9:23-25. In other words, Christians must be willing to experience something like death by torture, in order to become children of God as Jesus was. (see Heb. 12:5-13)
Perhaps to make things easier for us, God has arranged the world so that great suffering (though in different degrees) is likely to come at some point to all of us, religious or not, whether we seek it or not. So I think that if we're talking about the God of the Bible, then we're in for some pretty heady departures from Uh, or at least from what Uh would be if uninformed by divine revelation.
Two things in response.
A) It seems like your toy model differs from your real model on exactly the point you constructed it to defend yourself from? In the toy model, you can't tell the difference between Ug and Ur, but in your real model, you can. It seems like the number of (compressed) bits in the universe matters in your real model, but not your toy model. (In bigger universes, you have more evidence.) In other words, your toy model seems like a red herring?
B) Are you claiming that god values suffering as a terminal, or instrumental goal? If terminal-- well, it seems clear to me that makes him/her/it malicious, but that seems to be a pretty non-standard view for christianity*, so I doubt you hold it. If instrumental, then for that to be acceptable, it must be in service of a terminal goal that is a greater good than the suffering, and cannot be reached in any other way. I think there's a very low probability for such a goal existing.
*Caveat: I'm from a protestantish background-- I'm guessing you're more Anglican/Catholicish, and I know less about those traditions, so I could be wrong here. But "desires human suffering as a terminal goal" sounds so clearly malicious that I have a hard time believing it's standard anywhere...
Larry -- the proposition "the world is, on the whole, a really bad thing, worse than outright nonexistence" is quite different from the proposition "the world is much worse than should be expected if it's the creation of a supremely good and supremely powerful being". The second of those is what's claimed by people making an Argument From Evil; the first is the one you're giving evidence that atheists don't agree with.
Aron (on the possible not-badness of suffering) -- 1. in so far as Christianity (or a particular variant thereof) says that suffering is a Good Thing, it thereby becomes less plausible. 2. It seems to me that the commonest Christian view of this sort is that suffering is (sometimes) good by being *redemptive*; that is, sometimes something is very badly wrong, more badly wrong than any amount of suffering, and suffering is necessary in order to put it right. In so far as suffering is necessary (or outright good) for that reason, what we've got is a universe with something in it that's even worse than skeptics say all that suffering is. This doesn't seem like an improvement from the point of view of someone arguing for the existence of a good and powerful god. 3. Suffering is by no means the only bad thing in the world, and it is not the only bad thing to which a well-crafted Argument From Evil will appeal. For example, if traditional forms of Christianity are right then it is a very, very bad thing for a person to be badly wrong about God's existence, character and purposes, and many, many, many people are in fact badly wrong about those things.
Aron (on Ug, Ur, and Uh) -- I quite agree when you say "it is not grossly implausible that Ug=Ur, simply because Uh≠Ur", but I think that's responding to an argument different from the one skeptics are actually making. It's not the mere fact that Uh≠Ur that's evidence against the existence of a good and powerful god who cares about our affairs, it's the extent and nature of the differences between Uh and Ur. I think one can make a very good argument that those do make it grossly implausible that Ug=Ur, though of course they don't amount to a watertight proof that Ug≠Ur.
lavalamp,
A) Even in a realistic model, the total total number of bits in the universe is only relevant if we have strong opinions about how those bits ought to be, and observe them not to be that way, conditional upon what we've learned from previous bits. So the number of bits in e.g. the Andromeda Galaxy is not relevant, because there's no strong argument that God, if he were really benevolent, would have created it with different properties than we observe. (Things might be different if we observed alien life there, but we haven't yet.)
What really matters is the a priori implausibility of the assumption "God has some good reason for permitting lots of suffering/evils". I agree that this is somewhat implausible, but it's important to realize that we only takes this hit once. Suppose we take the Holocaust as an example of grevious evil. You may find it difficult to believe that God would have a good reason for permitting it. But suppose he does. Conditional on that, the genocide in Rwanda doesn't provide much additional evidence, because we already know from the Holocaust that God has some general sort of reason for permitting genocidal evils. This conditional-probability analysis applies even if we don't know what that reason is.
B) I'm only claiming that God values suffering in an instrumental way. As the author of Hebrews says, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
Is it improbable that such a terminal joyful goal should exist? I don't think it's all that improbable---even from the perspective of purely human wisdom uninformed by divine revelation---that suffering provides opportunities to build character, and that character is one of the most valuable things to have in life. The probability of this being a viable purpose for suffering is increased greatly, if this world is a preparation for the next life, rather than being the end goal all by itself. And of course that's what Christianity says it is.
Taking these things into consideration, I think the Argument from Evil decreases the probability of theism by maybe two to four orders of magnitude. That's a blow, for sure, but not an insurmountable one if there's compensating positive evidence. And part of the point of my top post was to argue that Christianity does better than generic theism, because
.
C) I'm actually of Protestant origin too--specifically the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition. That was originally an offshoot of Anglicanism, so maybe that's what you're detecting, although I'm pretty ecumenical in my reading. I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, and I'm currently attending the Free Methodist Church of Santa Barbara.
A) A properly compressed bitstring representing the universe is probably going to look a lot like a program expressing a set of physical laws, plus constants/initial conditions, etc. It probably won't even have a separate term for the andromeda galaxy. I agree that, given the rest of the universe, the andromeda galaxy gives us very little if any new information. I agree that the total number of bits isn't a good measurement unless you compress it. (This assumes the universe is computable, which seems safe at the moment.)
B) OK, I personally would put the range more like 3-8 orders of magnitude, but I can probably live with 2-4. However, I don't agree that christianity does better than generic theism, because generic theism isn't committed to a benevolent god. It seems to me that basically all religions that posit a benevolent deity and want to try to seem reasonable are going to have to end up using the justifications christianity uses (free will defense, etc), so the fact that christianity has this reasoning doesn't seem like much evidence one way or the other to me.
C) Hm, my spidey sense is rusty. I think the few occurrences of "St." threw me off. The last church I went to before it all stopped making any sense was actually a (non-typical) Wesleyan.
g,
I actually agree with a lot of what you say, but I have a few small points in reply:
Yes, to some extent. But I'm trying to argue that Christianity does more than just assert that suffering is a good thing, it also shows us through specific examples, and connections to other ideas, a way in which this could be the case. So I find the Christian view of why suffering exists to be much more satisfying and plausible than the generic theism view. It still contains some mysterious elements. But because of the Incarnation these mysterious elements are not totally hidden in God's mind, instead they have come into the world and have become visible.
I'm not sure this quite follows, since the net result of the thing going wrong, and then being fixed, could conceivably be better than the thing never going wrong in the first place. (A truly effective fix would have this property.)
And the suffering may be partly necessary for developmental reasons (something that turns a child into an adult) in addition to being redemptive (something that turns a bad person into a good person). That's why the author of Hebrews says that Jesus was "made perfect [i.e. complete] through suffering" even though he didn't sin. (See Heb. 2:10-18)
Also, although redemption through suffering does imply the existence of something worse than the suffering itself, there may be resources to explain the existence of that greater evil which wouln't apply to the lesser evil. For example, a free will defense is a lot more plausible as an explanation for moral corruption, than as an explanation for why people get cancer.
While this does count as a bad thing in the here-and-now, it's not necessarily a complete loss so long as the person eventually (either in this life or the next) discovers the truth and comes into loving communion with God. Some people might even gain valuable experience from making decisions on their own for several years, before they realize that God has a claim on their life.
But I agree with your main point here. If Christianity is true, then Hell is a much worse thing than any amount of earthly suffering. Although this could be used to gain some traction vis-a-vis the problem of suffering (obviously God should be more ruthless in causing suffering if it is needed to prevent damnation), it leaves a much worse evil to be explained. And this is something which is explicitly stated to be against the Christian God's goals, since "God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:1-4). However, since God is just this can only happen to people who deserve Hell and choose it by their actions. And the possibility of a bad outcome follows logically from the claim that true joy requires ethical character. If God declines to force ethics on an unwilling subject, then his two remaining choices are annihilation (i.e. capital punishment) or some version of Hell (i.e. life imprisonment). It's not obvious to me which of the two remaining choices is better, but apparently God has picked the latter.
lavalamp,
B) I think 8 orders of magnitude is a little high, but we're obviously in roughly the same ballpark as each other since you accept 3 as the lower range. And I guess I actually meant theism-with-a-benevolent-God-but-not-a-specific-organized-religion.
I've noticed however that very few monotheists believe in an active but nonbenevolent deity. At least, most people who accept the Argument from Evil end up disbelieving in God altogether, rather than accepting a nonbenevolent God. Is that because the thought of a nonbenevolent God makes people too uncomfortable, or is it that most atheists implicitly accept some argument that a God must be good, if he exists? (Polytheists often believe in malevolent deities, but their gods are conceived of as super-powerful but contingent beings, not the unique Creator of Everything)
The thing that's in Christianity but not other monotheistic religions is the Crucifixion as a central part of the theology of how God relates to the world. This considerably changes the emphasis of the standard defences. (As an aside, I've noticed that other religious traditions tend to teach that all suffering is deserved, while Christianity emphasizes the possibility of innocent suffering.)
C) The "saint" prefix is not a typical Wesleyan practice. It comes from this blog's highly eccentric canonization policy.
Aron: on 1, I understand but I think we have very different ideas about how "satisfying and plausible" Christianity's reasons for suffering are. For instance: yes, it gives specific examples, such as the alleged connection between the suffering of Jesus on the cross and the redemption of (perhaps some favoured subset of) the world, but it doesn't give credible explanations of how suffering is actually beneficial in these instances. (There are many mutually incompatible Christian "theories of the atonement", and none of them really makes much sense to anyone other than Christians.)
I also want to make a general point about the idea that Christianity has extra resources for dealing with evil that theism-as-such doesn't have. Clearly, Pr(Christianity|evil) can't be higher than Pr(theism|evil), though it can certainly *feel* otherwise (see: conjunction fallacy). Of course considering Christianity can draw attention to some justifications for evil (note: here "evil" is short for "the generally agreed facts about the existence, quantity, distribution, etc., of various kinds of bad things in the world) that might otherwise have gone unnoticed; but please don't neglect the possibility that what's actually going on is that you're pushing improbability from one place to another. That is: Christianity is *much, much more specific* than theism-as-such and its prior probability is correspondingly much lower. And every amazing thing you ascribe to it -- it explains evil! it justifies belief in objectively real moral values! it provides a non-question-begging explanation for the orderedness of the universe! etc. -- correspondingly reduces its prior probability when you build it into your definition of "Christianity" (or of "God" or whatever). The only way to get a real gain from this sort of manoeuvre is if you assume something that really isn't all that improbable, and get from it conclusions that otherwise would have been really improbable. That *might* work out in the case of Christianity, but it's a case you actually need to make and it's far too common to see it just swept under the carpet.
On 2, of course a greater final good might justify all that bad stuff. (Isn't that idea taken for granted when we have this sort of discussion at all?) My point is just that the worse the bad stuff is, the greater the justifying final good has to be -- and if the suffering is good because it's the way around something even worse, well then that something-even-worse must in fact be even worse, and the final good must be good enough to justify it.
On 3, for now I'll just note that "most people deserve hell" is itself a claim that's so implausible that any version of Christianity that makes it is thereby made much less plausible than it would have been without that claim. Oh, one other thing: you equate annihilation with capital punishment and hell with life imprisonment, but hell is in fact *infinitely worse* than life imprisonment whereas annihilation is *pretty much exactly the same thing as* capital punishment. Which makes it pretty weird, to my mind, to suggest (as I think you're doing) that the two look about equally bad and that it's not terribly surprising if God chooses "life imprisonment" rather than "capital punishment".
Regarding whether the Atonement makes any sense at all, that subject will justify an entire post all by itself. I think it may boil down to whether or not one is willing to accept a partially comprehensible explanation for what's going on. It sure helps if one already has basic concepts such as "sacrifice", "holiness", "atonement", and so on in ones worldview. Christianity started in a time and place where most people, even pagans, had these concepts. It must now engage in dialogue with people who don't have these concepts at all, except maybe when they read fantasy novels.
When I say that Christianity has extra resources for dealing with evil, what I mean is that P(evil | Christianity) > P(evil | benevolent theism). Obviously, the probability of Christianity cannot rise above the probability of theism. It can, however, be the case that Christianity is the most plausible form of theism given some set of evidence.
I agree. This makes it quite hopeless, I think, to postulate Christianity speculatively simply to explain away the Argument from Evil. In order to get to Christianity specifically we need evidence specifically for some of the special features of Christianity, such as the historcal argument for the Resurrection.
I don't endorse the claim that "most people deserve Hell". At least, not unless we use a very restricted and circumscribed definition for the tricky word "deserve". I do think that (i) without divine help none of us can reach the moral standard which God wants us to attain, and (ii) all of us (except young children) have had moments in which we chose a standard of behavior which, if we continued along that path without repenting, would eventually corrupt our character irretrievably, and in that sense we are all in danger of Hell. But (i) and (ii) by no means imply that we deserve Hell, because there is an enormous mitigating factor: we can't really help being that way. As a result, people can only strictly deserve Hell when they continually reject and resist God's way of salvation, for so long that they get stuck in that position forever. And by "reject and resist", I mean something a lot stronger than "honestly don't believe there's evidence for".
I do think there's a small minority of people here on Earth who are pretty much damned already, although it's not my place to judge and we have to hold out hope for even the worst of sinners. There's some terrifying case studies in St. M. Scott Peck's The People of the Lie. Another book which is helpful for seeing how ordinary people might choose Hell is St. Lewis' The Great Divorce.
When you say that Hell is infinitely worse than life imprisonment, I think you're begging the underlying question regarding whether existence in Hell is better than non-existence. If existence is better than non-existence even for those in Hell, then it seems to me that annihilation isn't better, no matter how long Hell lasts (if it exists in time at all).
Note: although you're free to go on using *'s if you like, the comments box does support italics and certain other html tags.
Ignoring the fluff and getting straight to the central point: yeah, I know I can use italics instead of *asterisks*, and in a couple of places I have. It's just that (1) sometimes I'm just too lazy to type the extra characters, (2) I actually quite like the look of the *starred* style, and (3) I think maybe the two forms of emphasis produce slightly different effects, though I'd have trouble putting my finger on exactly what the difference is, and sometimes I use both for that reason.
OK, back to trivia like whether God exists and whether anything can justify hell.
I agree that a proper defence of the idea of the Atonement -- or for that matter a proper attack on it -- would take a post in itself. (As it happens, my own issues with the idea don't stem from not having the relevant concepts in my brain; I was a Christian for thirtysomething years, and not a particularly oblivious or untheological one either, but I'm sure you're right that plenty of people are in that situation and that anyone wanting to make Christianity genuinely credible to such people has some work to do.)
I understand that your claim is Pr(evil|C) > Pr(evil|T); I just wanted to point out (1) that the thing that actually matters is Pr(C|what-we-know) rather than Pr(anything|C) as such, and (2) that it's easy to concoct theories with Pr(known-observations|theory) very close to 1, simply by building lots of those known observations into the theory, and that merely doing that doesn't actually give the theory any extra credibility overall because it just pushes improbability into the prior probability of the theory, and it's easy to overestimate how much you're raising Pr(observations|theory) and underestimate how much you're lowering Pr(theory). I'm sure you understand all this already, so I'll shut up about it now.
I take your point about deserving hell, so let me refocus a little. Traditional versions of Christianity imply something like the following claim: The majority (perhaps the overwhelming majority) of the human race, if God behaves optimally towards them, will most likely end up in eternal torment and deserve it. I don't know what your moral intuitions say about that, but mine are pretty unenthusiastic.
I'm not begging the question of whether existence in eternal torment is worse than nonexistence. I'm appealing to the obviously-correct answer to that question (namely "ye gods, of course it is") in order to address the quite different question of how credible the traditional doctrines of Christianity are.
I have read "The great divorce". It may very well be that otherwise-fairly-decent people can be put into situations in which they will "choose hell". If so, then it seems to me that a being of vast power and benevolence might reasonably be expected to keep them out of such situations as far as possible. And that the more carefully one thinks about CSL's portrayal, the less credible it looks -- at least, if one takes it as a serious proposal of a possible state of affairs in which "eternal damnation for a large percentage of the human race" is a reasonable outcome. (It's not perfectly clear to what extent it is intended as one, and for the avoidance of doubt I am making no claims about CSL's precise intentions.)
For instance, the denizens of CSL's kinda-sorta-pre-hell seem to be almost entirely oblivious of where they are and what their likely fate is. Is it supposed to be beyond God's power to tell them the truth convincingly enough that they can make a decision based on reality rather than cotton-wool-brained confusion? Or is he supposed to value their ignorance more than their salvation? (A ridiculous idea, for sure, but much of what Christians say about "free will" in these discussions seems to amount to obfuscated versions of that idea.) I think ultimately the answer is that in order to tell the sort of story he wanted to tell, CSL had to make these people ignorant and confused, and greatly limit God's ability or willingness to interact with them, and generally slant things in ways that make good sense narratively but seem awfully hard to justify as things a vastly wise and just and benevolent deity would choose.
(Note: I expect it's already obvious, but: The reason why I keep saying things like "traditional forms of Christianity" is that there are plenty of people nowadays (and there were way fewer in the past) who describe themselves, I think perfectly reasonably, as Christians, but reject some doctrines that used to be taken more or less for granted. The word "traditional" is not intended to express any value judgement, either positive or negative.)
I think we're all on the same page, but just to be clear: P(C) P(non-christian T|evil) depending on how each treats evil. Christianity is subset of generic theism, so its probability can never be higher than generic theism...
The universe seems much more compatible with an indifferent or malicious deity, so I too am puzzled that very few believe in one. Although, I think a lot of christians (not you, it sounds like) do actually believe in a malicious deity, they just haven't really thought about it carefully enough to notice... :)
Oh dear, it ate everything between my less than/greater than signs. Oops...
Well, I don't endorse this claim, certainly not as something which I know for sure. For all I know the overwhelming majority of people are going to end up being saved. If I believed that explicit knowledge of Jesus prior to death was necessary for salvation, then this claim would follow, but I don't believe this. (My reasons sre stated on my website in this conversation about why God doesn't speak more clearly.)
There is such a thing as the "will to stupidity". Take, as an example, the liberal clergyman character in the book. He is (or was) an intelligent and sophisticated individual who for various reasons dislikes the idea of factual truth as something applicable to matters of religion, or as applied to his current state in existence for that matter. St. Lewis' point is that this is really a disguised version of hatred for God. If he did come to know God, he wouldn't like it, and that's why he remains below.
But one could, alternatively, conceive of Hell as a place where people do perceieve God and the truth with perfect clarity, and find it extremely uncomfortable given their choice of preferences...I'm convinced that if the only problem with someone is that they need more clarity, then more clarity will be provided eventually.
But yes, if Christianity is true then it has to be in some sense an unavoidable a priori feature of reality (based purely on God's nature, logical necessity, and whatever are the basic goods which God wanted to include in the world) that sufficiently free people operating under conditions where God has made himself perfectly obvious may well decide they don't like goodness very much. Angels fall, men fall, the Israelites try to stone Moses, Judas betrays Christ, and God dies.
I don't deny that it's a queer thing. I do feel that some of its psychological aspects are very true to the reality about human beings as I know it (and I don't have a strong sense that I know better than God about the merits of people with radically different kinds of psychology). But this sort of feeling is difficult to communicate (akin to the considerations in Chesterton's book Orthodoxy), and in this blog I'd rather focus on more objective considerations which can be more easily analyzed. Namely the Historical Argument for Christianity, and later (once I've discussed some of the underlying Science a bit more) the Fine-Tuning Argument for Theism.
Aron,
If you think it likely that almost all will in the end be saved, then I kinda approve but I have to point out that this seems hard to square with Matthew 7:13-14, and with the great majority of the Christian tradition until very recently. Any of which you may or may not care about -- but note that if you aim to get out of the antecedent improbability of Christianity (on account merely of being very specific) by an appeal to testimony, then substantial divergence between your views and that testimony is a problem.
The "will to stupidity" that CSL puts in, e.g., the liberal clergyman is one of the more unattractive features of TGD. (I agree that the feature is there; the only reason why I didn't whinge about it before is that I felt I was already writing too much.) It's just one example of the (also unattractive and, I think, grossly unreasonable) tendency of Christians to diagnose people who aren't Christians, or who aren't their sort of Christian, as really being motivated by a "disguised hatred of God". Just consider for a moment how CSL's liberal clergyman got the way he is. How many people choose the life of a clergyman out of hatred for God? I'm thinking not very many. So, he (hypothetically) fell among postmodernists or something; either his condition is curable or it isn't. If it is, then it seems like surely God could have found better means to cure it. If not, then what this amounts to is that in this wonderful world God has made, it is possible -- and not terribly uncommon -- even for those who have chosen a life of dedication to God to talk with the wrong people, contract some diseased modes of thinking, and thereby put themselves into a state from which there is no ultimate way out but eternal damnation. You may decide for yourself what to think of that possibility, but it seems pretty implausible given the characteristics God is supposed to have.
The idea that it's an unavoidable a priori feature of reality that if creatures are sufficiently free then many of them will decide that they don't like God, especially when combined with the idea that God is supremely good and excellent, seems to me not so much "a queer thing" as "absolutely ridiculous". You may well be right that human beings as presently constituted are liable not to like God very much even with perfect information -- but the nature of human beings as presently constituted is precisely one of the things that a skeptic making an Argument From Evil sees as evidence against theism in general and Christianity in particular.
g sez:
You have accurately restated part of my "evidence", and ignored (perhaps unintentionally) the important part, which is the observation that many folks choose, for what I deem to be emotional reasons, to maintain an artificial separation between those two propositions by disingenuously redefining the terms "good" and "powerful", such that "good" becomes the quality of some kind of cosmic Santa Claus who always gives me the toys I think he should, and "powerful" becomes the capability of climbing down as many philosophical chimneys simultaneously as I care to erect. (But perhaps I malign the character of Santa Claus, who is reputed to be capable of putting coal in the stockings of some people who think they deserve toys. :-)
So my main point, which I hope you will evaluate for more than its propositional value, is that, for largely unconscious reasons, some people hold God to a standard they wouldn't hold any human artist to. Note, I am not claiming that religionists are any less emotional about the subject than anti-religionists; if modern psychology has proven anything, it's that we all bring our subconscious biases to the table of our supposed logic, often at the very point where we are defining our table in the first place. Moreover, our personal aversions often influence us just as strongly as our desires, if not more so. It's a very human failing, and tragically/comically, sometimes happens to the very people who most think they are immune to emotional bias. That's been my experience, anyway...
In any case, if any of our Gentle Readers finds this message irritating, please take it not as an accusation but rather as a call for a bit of self-examination outside the scope of propositional logic.
Larry -- I certainly didn't mean to ignore anything relevant. But on what grounds do you say that the separation between those propositions is artificial, and whyever do you think that separating them requires that one define "good" and "powerful" in those extremely-straw-mannish ways?
It seems to me that it's quite right and proper to hold God to a standard you wouldn't hold a merely human artist to, for exactly the same reasons as I would hold a world-class pianist to a higher standard than I do my six-year-old daughter.
I am quite sure that some people -- myself very much included -- make all kinds of errors when thinking about God and evil, for all kinds of reasons (including but not limited to unconscious God-hatred or whatever exactly you're proposing here). For sure, this means we should all engage in self-examination. But what does it mean for the discussion at hand?
Perhaps the idea is that we shouldn't discuss it at all because we might be subject to such biases. I would find it more convincing when Christians make such suggestions when atheists talk about evil, if they made similar suggestions when Christians talked about ... well, anything, actually.
Perhaps the idea is that there is some specific error or class of errors that some of us are making. In that case, let's talk about those errors and try to fix them.
Or perhaps something else?
What is Hell, anyways? I'm sure you believe that the stories about burning in hellfire or bathing in acid are just metaphors, but it seems like these metaphors are supposed to represent some immediately perceptible pain that is at least as bad as all of these things, physical or psychological. On the other hand, what I often heard expressed as the mainstream Christian position is that Hell is nothing more than separation/rejection of God. I can understand the view that the greatest good for a person would require accepting God and that any life separate from Him is infinitely lesser, but why this be so much more painful in the afterlife than ordinary experience on Earth? For comparison, consider Ted Chiang's appropriately titled story "Hell is the Absence of God". In this story Hell is completely identical to ordinary life with all its pains and joys except that in Hell there is no divine intervention in Hell (and plenty of it in very visible forms on Earth). If you take the view that Hell is nothing but the absence of God seriously than such a picture is much more intellectually honest than the fire-and-brimstone picture. In fact, there is no reason for God not to make Hell as pleasant as possible under the restriction that He cannot grant any spiritual pleasures that depend on having a connection to Him. After all, their suffering more won't lead to their eventual salvation. And yet, in Christian depictions of Hell I rarely see the Ted-Chiang picture of Hell, much less a heavenly Hell. Why is that?
Itai,
Chiang is a brilliant and creative writer, but I confess that I hated that particular story. Not so much because the author seems to have contempt for Christianity, but more because he clearly established that his world obeys certain rules, and then broke them arbitrarily at the end for no particularly good reason! (The fact that I disliked the story doesn't really affect your question, just wanted to get that off my chest.)
So why can't Hell just be beers and parties, as in Chiang's story?
(Actually, the most famous depiction of Hell in literature, the Inferno (the first book of St. Dante's Divine Comedy) does have something a little bit like what you are asking for, in his First Circle of Limbo, which is for pagans who lived virtuous lives but weren't baptized. They get to live a life of perfect earthly happiness, just without any hope of ever going to Heaven and seeing God face to face. But I think there are multiple theological problems with the idea of Limbo...)
Anyway, I think what you are missing theologically is the idea that sin has an effect on people's character. When you act in any way, you are not just changing the world around you, but there is also a "back-reaction" (to use some physics lingo) on your character, which also changes.
Christianity says that human persons are all made in the image of God, and were created to be holy like God. So any time someone you sin, you aren't just making the world a worse place, you are also deforming your character away from what it is supposed to be. You get a little bit more crazy, a little bit less loving, and a little bit more inhuman. On the other hand, every time you repent of evil and seek virtue, you instead become wiser, saner, more human, more like God.
So willfully turning away from God means a lot more than just being deprived of a special class of "spiritual" pleasures, while the lower pleasures all remain intact. It is a lot more like a fish trying to declare independence from water and swim on dry land. It is sufficiently unnatural, given the needs of the organism, that that fish will end up dying in torments.
As St. George MacDonald pointed out, any time you have the chance to become a better person and pass on the opportunity, you don't just stay the same, you actually become worse, because you have now modified yourself into the sort of person who resists truth and light. The Gospel of John puts it like this:
Human beings can remain in a state of ignorance and self-deception for a lot longer than a fish can survive out of water, but that is because the nature of the incompatibility is more subtle, and it takes longer to work to its final conclusion. But the proper object of our reason is Truth, while the proper object of our will is Goodness. God is Goodness and Truth, so to reject God---I mean intentionally, not merely because of a honest mistake in reasoning---is necessarily to reject one of these things as well, to cultivate a taste for falseness, badness, or cruelty. (See section VIII of this post for a little more about the possible psychology of this.)
Let's be a little more concrete here. Suppose an extremely narcissistic person obtains power, and demands that everyone flatter and affirm him, even while he behaves unjustly. (This has happened many times in history, so nobody should think I am talking about one particular person.) If anyone criticizes him, he lashes out at them and tries to punish them. This person is operating under the delusion that he is more important than other people, and his will and reason are misdirected towards self-indulgence rather than towards God. Let's suppose he dies in this state.
Now suppose that God comes down and raises all the dead to life again, and establishes a kingdom of perfect justice in the world. Sounds good, right? But this person will now be confronted with the truth that he is not in fact the most important person ever, and that he has harmed and abused others. The thing he wants most (flattery and power) he can't have in a just world, so there is a disconnect between his desires and reality. His natural response to not getting what he wants is to harm others, but God also prevents him from doing this, so he is doubly frustrated.
If this person is as I have imagined him, it seems that this will surely cause him to suffer. What's more, on some level it ought to cause suffering, because it is a symptom of a real badness in his character, so suffering is a truthful report that something is wrong in his soul (just like physical pain can be valuable to the extent that it gives a truthful and needed report that something is wrong with our body). Not to suffer in this circumstance would be delusion.
If he is willing to repent, this suffering can be temporary. If he is unwilling to repent, and God is unwilling to destroy him entirely, then it will last forever. Although I think that because of unchecked sin, the thing that remains will no longer quite be a person as we normally think of people. It will know that it was supposed to be a human being, but somewhere along the line something went wrong and it no longer is. This is Hell, but actually I do agree that God will not include any gratituous extra suffering on the side, besides whatever is required by the situation, given the constraints of justice / free will etc.
The last paragraph was kind of scary to write, but the good news is that nobody has to go there. We were created for perfect bliss in union with God, and in Christ he offers us everything we need to rescue us from sin and to satisfy our deepest longings.
"the Argument from Evil is the only really formidable positive argument for Atheism"
And even this argument is compatible with deism!
[There was some bizarre formatting in this comment, but I tried to edit it into what I hope was the intended form---AW]
Thank you for your response. I am impressed by how you are able to give such detailed responses to so many commenters here.
Out of a somewhat perverse curiosity, have you read Ted Chiang's "Omphalos"? It also touches on Christian themes from a somewhat secular direction, although it is a lot less contemptuous.
My question is based on a very common cultural depiction of Hell, which I will call the Justice Theory of Hell: That God inflicts an eternity of torment to sinners because it is just that good people are rewarded and evil ones punished. I believe a non-Christian is far more likely to get this as their impression for what Hell is supposed to be rather than that it is suffering as a necessary outcome of bad use of free will which God is actively trying to minimize even in the afterlife. Even when I hear people claim that Hell is merely separation from God or something that people choose for themselves, it frequently seems to me like they haven't fully internalized this view but implicitly still to some extent base their thoughts on some hazy notion of the Justice Theory. For example, I rarely see it fully acknowledged as a possibility for someone in Hell to afterwards leave it; at best some stories depict it as something the damned get offered but invariably reject. Whereas if it is a genuine choice anybody who rejected Christianity from a good-faith disagreement with its factual claims would quickly reconsider soon after being brought to life again, so that is a natural time for people to repent.
I asked whether God inflicts pain on people because the background I'm coming from made it seem genuinely plausible you would believe this. So far, it does seem like you have thoroughly rejected the Justice Theory of Hell, making certain common arguments about the immorality of Hell inapplicable (although your viewpoint does face other logical problems which some of the previous commenters discussed). However, I still see the wide-spread-ness of the Justice Theory as problem when it comes to defending the culture of Christianity. Do you have any thoughts on what is creating the Justice Theory as a prominent cultural artifact (whether or not anybody actually believes in it) and how it is influencing society? Any additions or corrections to my account of its cultural role?
Itai,
I haven't read Omphalos; mostly I've just read the stories in the collection "Stories of Your Life and others". But I'll keep an eye out for it...
I don't actually see what you call the "Justice Theory" as being entirely wrong (although there are some problematic aspects which I will get to at the end fo this comment), rather I think of it as being complementary to the Free Will picture I described above. (It seems theologically untenable to assert that the damned don't deserve their fate; because that would imply that God is either unjust, or else powerless to save people from injustice. And if Hell is not in any sense a punishment, then it would follow that a lot of the biblical passages about the subject are completely off-base.)
Let me try to be more precise about why I think the two pictures are complementary. I think that "justice" means treating people in the way that is most appropriate to treat them, in light of their specific behavior and circumstances. (As such, justice is definitionally a good thing.) In the case of human justice systems (like courtrooms, or Twitter), retribution is a rather blunt tool and can't usually respond very sensitively to what's going on in a person's heart. But God is perfectly just, which means that there is no such gap in God's ability to respond appropriately to humanity.
Furthermore, God is not just one being among many others, who occasionally intervenes in the world. Rather, God is the one who sustains everything in being by his power. So that everything that happens anywhere in the universe is in some sense performed and executed by God, including actions which are also free human choices (although that does not mean that God's motivations in allowing us to act unrighteously, are the same as our own motivations for doing so).
Because of these considerations, I think that (1) "God punishes sinners in Hell because that is the treatment they deserve" and (2) "Sinners punish themselves in Hell by refusing to repent and become the kind of people capable of being happy" are actually equivalent statements when both of them are understood and interpreted correctly...
Note that viewing Hell as a punishment is still consistent with allowing for the possibility of post-mortem salvation (which I believe in for Scriptural reasons, see 1 Pet 3:19 & 4:6), since it is just to release a person from a penalty once they no longer deserve it (e.g. parole). Nor does it imply that the punishment in Hell is maximally severe and unmitigated by mercy. In the penalty phase of a trial, a just Judge will select whichever is the lightest available sentence that is compatible with serving the other aims of justice (in other words, even as they punish, the judge is trying to minimize total badness, rather than to maximize badness for the crimial which would be pure vindictiveness).
Actually, the concept of "maximal badness" doesn't even really make sense in Classical Theism, since God is the maximal goodness, and he doesn't have any opposite! (In a certain limited sense, conceptually the closest thing to an opposite of God is sheer nonexistence, and of course there is no actual thing that has the property of not existing.) That's why the concept of Heaven is so much more fundamental to theology, since that is the acquisition of goodness itself (i.e. God) whereas Hell is nothing like "badness itself" (which is not even a coherent concept) but just the "negative space" implied by the possibility that a creature might fail to achieve the intrinsic purpose of its existence. I think that's why, at the end of the Book of Revelation, Heaven is described as a city with structure and organization (the achievement of the perfect order) whereas the Lake of Fire is completely undifferentiated and doesn't have any orgnaizational principle.
Actually, the Book of Revelation also includes elements suggesting both sides of the duality between (1) and (2). In chapter 20, those who are not in the Book of Life are cast (one assumes forcibly) into the lake of fire. Yet in the vision of the New Jerusalem, we get a very different metaphor for damnation: the gates of the city are never shut (Rev. 21:25), implying that the entrance is in some sense eternally unrestricted; yet the damned are like a pack of feral dogs (22:15) outside of the city. I imagine them as knocking over trash cans and eating garbage, even though God calls them to be washed so that they can enter the holy city (22:14).
Which stories do you have in mind? Not sure I recall any like that.
I agree (assuming that was the only obstacle). If a person has lived their life in a certain way, they might react to seeing perfect goodness with fear and loathing. On the other hand, another person might welcome it as the light they were seeking their whole life. I think if anyone can't imagine seeing absolute holiness, finding it unpalatable and shrinking away from it, they are either a much better person than I am, or else they have less imagination than I do :-). But fortunately God offers a means of atonement that allows us to endure his presence.
I agree that many people's popular conception of Christianity is "good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell"; but taken in isolation, this idea is not the Gospel, or really anything much like the Gospel. (It is much closer to being the theology of Islam, although even there it is an over-simplification.) Christianity problematizes the notion of "good people" by saying that we are all sinners, and it also says that God's mercy is freely available even to the worst of the "bad people". In saying that God loves sinners and sent Jesus to save them, Christian doctrine thereby also makes problematic the notion of Hell; it is precisely because people in the West have internalized Christian values of universal love that we see an ethical problem with Hell. ("Problematic" does not mean that there is no way of resolving the paradox, but rather that there is a paradox there to be resolved.)
That being said, there are certainly biblical passages which talk about Heaven as being a reward given to righteous people, so one cannot reject the formulation of "works" and "merit" entirely. Those passages reveal one aspect of the truth, but don't go into another aspect (how it is that people are able to be righteous in God's eyes in the first place). To use a physics metaphor, it can be true at one level that a wooden table is solid, but true at another level that it is made of particles with lots of empty space in between them. Similarly, it can be true at one level that good people are rewarded by God; but if you examine their righteousness closely enough, you find that it actually consists of a gracious gift of God, obtained through Christ's merit, and not through any work or effort of their own.