I wrote an article a few days back about the Catholic philosopher, Ethan Muse. You can read it here. I was blown away by the number of people who read it. Over 7,000 people have read it in just a few days, along with a swarm of comments. I believe I advanced a charitable critique of Muse’s view of eternal conscious torment. Some may say that the title was a bit uncharitable, although no one has actually said this to me directly. But I made it clear in my first footnote, and even through a private email to Muse, that I was calling his logic deranged, not him. I do, in fact, believe that holding the view that most of humanity (past, present, and future) will be tormented for all of eternity is a deranged logic. I can’t see how this could be made into a sane logic. I think such a belief is, by and large, the product of someone thoroughly soaked in deep waters of theological dogma. In other words, I really don’t believe you can truly arrive at such a belief intellectually. It’s arrived at primarily through theology. You can try to reason your way through it intellectually, but it’s the theology that is doing nearly all of the work. That said, I now want to talk about the exchange between David Bentley Hart and Ethan Muse.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a deep reverence for Hart. He is the one who cracked open my entire philosophical imagination. He taught me how to think well about God, metaphysics, the mind, and the nature of reality. And his book, The Experience of God, remains, in my opinion, one of the most powerful books ever written on the existence of God. He is a world-renowned scholar, and I am told by those who know him personally that he is a very friendly person. I have never met Hart, although I would love to someday. If this ever happens, I would like to thank him for his work and the profound change it instilled within me. Be that as it may, Hart surprised me with some of the things he said to Muse. He was quite brutal and unrelenting in most of his comments. He was clearly very angry, and Muse, no doubt, felt attacked.
But despite this, at one point, Muse told Hart that he would pray for him. I thought this was a good move on his behalf. That said, the comments went back and forth for hours and hours. It was around 1:00 in the morning when they finally stopped. I remember trying to fall asleep, picking up my phone, trying to fall asleep again, and so on. I wanted to see what was being said. At some point, however, I felt compelled to step in and say something. I encouraged everyone to shelve it for another time insofar as it was, in my eyes, getting out of hand. I no longer felt that it was productive discourse. Since then, many people who saw the exchange have said things like, “Man, I used to respect Hart,” or “I can’t believe he acted like that! He’s such a man of great erudition. Why stoop so low?” I can understand why people would think this way. After all, I know Hart’s fiery style quite well, and even I was pretty surprised at just how far he went.
I want you to realize, however, what Hart’s reaction was all about. Hart wasn’t simply reacting to Muse.1 He was reacting to the idea that the vast majority of people will suffer forever in hell.2 Hart truly believes with his entire being that this doctrine is a form of profound abuse and malevolence disguised as “love.” He believes this so sincerely that he wrote an entire book called That All Shall Be Saved. I think Hart could have gone about this differently, but I myself, and many others I’ve spoken to, totally understand his revulsion. Telling the world that the vast majority of us are going to suffer for eternity has real-life consequences. Hart said in the comment section that he has known people who have suffered extreme bouts of anxiety and depression because of this doctrine. I think he also mentioned a woman who tragically took her own life because of the absolute fear she faced. I have had people message me about eternal conscious torment as well. Some of their stories would shock you right down to your bones.
For instance, I once had a young woman, probably in her early twenties, calling me daily on Instagram, leaving frantic voice notes, and so on. She was having a nervous breakdown about the possibility of being damned forever. Her breakdown was so intense that she had to be hospitalized. And the reason this all started was because she no longer wanted to be a Christian.3 So, she feared her soul was in grave danger.4 These aren’t merely abstract conversations or debates for everyone. These are ordinary people who are genuinely terrified. These are people who lie awake at night wondering if they will go to hell for eternity. And some of these people have abandoned belief in God altogether because of these psychopathic and diseased portrayals of God. So, the people who preach this doctrine should be prepared to face passionate backlash insofar as most sensible people see this as a serious problem. And they are going to speak their minds about it in varying degrees of intensity. If you can’t handle that, then you should probably think long and hard about telling people that their souls may very well endure never-ending suffering for all of eternity.
At the end of the day, I am in complete agreement with Hart that eternal conscious torment is a vile doctrine. It renders God’s love totally unintelligible for me. In fact, I wouldn’t want anything to do with this sort of God. And as for the people who preach this doctrine, I can’t help but believe it emerges from fear for their own souls, unexamined resentment toward others, or simply submission to whatever scripture or the church says. As for myself, I can’t imagine ever believing such a thing. I’m serious when I say this. I can’t imagine myself believing, let alone preaching, such things to people. How could I ever believe, for instance, that the vast majority of finite, imperfect, limited, damaged, ignorant, broken, and confused human beings are going to be consigned to eternal conscious punishment, and that this somehow presents no serious intellectual problem? None of us even chose to be here. And we aren’t even sure that God exists in the first place.5 How could I tell others that behind all of this stands a God of pure intellect, love, truth, and beauty? This would betray my most basic sense of love. I don’t believe things that run contrary to love. Take care, friends.
To be clear, Hart did attack Muse directly. But the ground of his attack was motivated by his revulsion toward eternal conscious torment.
Hart would be just as passionate if a single person were in hell forever. I would, too. Does anyone truly deserve to suffer endless punishment? Of course not.
You would think this poor girl’s church or family would have simply told her something like, “God is love. Live and walk in love, and everything will be okay.” Instead, they probably dumped all of this vile dogma into her head since she was a child. Of course, I don’t know who is to blame here, but I suspect she was brought up and surrounded by people who taught her that she must believe X, Y, and Z or else! How sad is this?
I am unsure what happened to this woman. I last heard from her about two years ago. Since then, she deleted her Instagram and all other forms of social media. I really hope she has found some peace.
Although I believe in God, we live in a world that seriously looks as if God doesn’t care about what the hell is going on. For this very reason alone, many people will reject God, and this rejection is totally reasonable insofar as the conditions of our world are quite horrible. These conditions raise extremely challenging questions and concerns about not only whether God loves us, but whether God even exists at all. Doesn’t God understand why so many people would reject him? Is his answer really to punish these people forever? Do you see why I called this logic “deranged?” I simply could never make intellectual sense of any of this.
In defense of those shocked by my anger, I should confess something. Since the onset of my cervical spinal condition, I have—with a prescription—begun using THC as the only effective pain therapy at night. The thing is that, as I have known since high school (ahem), cannabinoids make me truculent and a little paranoid. So at night I should never look at my phone. So your correspondents are right to be bothered by my ferocity, which in my sober hours would have been channeled into mere dry mockery or total indifference.
That said, I have two experiences that marked—or scarred—me on this. For family reasons, I have a special solicitude for children on the autism spectrum, and saw the terror and despair this odious teaching induced in a very vulnerable Asperger’s child. I describe something of it in the preface to the paperback edition of TASBS. Then there was a bright but troubled young woman who became suicidal (curiously enough) over believing in the torments of the damned, among them to her mind someone she cared about who had died recently. She did not, in fact, kill herself, so you did not quite get that right; but she tried.
I no longer have much patience for people like Muse who are so morally obtuse as not to grasp the foulness of this dogmatic psychopathy. He’s a less gifted philosophical mind than the Schmid fellow from what I’ve seen, but one doesn’t have to be an Aristotle or a Kant to recognize explicit evil.
I think one of the best points here is hidden in the footnotes; that people who hold this doctrine inevitably drill it into children as a logical consequence of holding the belief.
I remember as a child crying to my mom worried that my cousin wasn't going to go to heaven (because she wasn't being very nice), had classmates who had to worry about a parent going to hell because they didn't share their faith, and teenagers struggle with the passing of family members who weren't believers.
We also know it has been used to silence victims of abuse within the church, warning that telling anyone would be a mortal sin and such.
Finally I just don't think people who profess ECT to be true act like it is. We're all a bit morally inconsistent by nature, but most people I've met who believe in ECT hardly evangelize. So they just watch this incoming trainwreck of eternal torment happen (definitionally the worst possible suffering FOREVER) to most people on the planet without intervening. They are, in many of their interactions on this planet, talking to people destined for eternal flames without mentioning the news that could save them, with the only downside being social awkwardness.
They literally face a constant version of the trolly car problem where on one track there's a socially awkward interaction, and the oncoming track has eternal fiery torment for a person tied to the tracks, and usually choose to do nothing.