Beyond us

A being that does not represent the world has no conception of what representation might be like, since the being has no conceptions.

A being that lacks consciousness has no conception of what consciousness might be like. The being might have intentionality (our unconscious thoughts, after all, have intentionality), and so might have the contentful thought that there can be beings that have some crucial mental quality that goes beyond the unconscious being’s mentality.

A being that lacks will presumably has no consciousness of what rational will or responsibility might be like. Again, the being might have the concept of beings with “something more” in causation of activity by means of thought.

The distinctions between non-representing and representing, unconscious and conscious, and involuntary and voluntary involve immense qualitative and value gaps. In each of the three cases, we humans exemplify the higher of the two options. At the same time, we are not alone in all these on earth. We share representation with all living things, I suspect. We share consciousness with many animals. But responsibility, I suspect, is ours alone.

I find it implausible to think that we are at the qualitative apex of the space of valuable possibilities. It seems quite likely to me that there could be beings that differ from us in further fundamental valuable qualities in such a way that we are on the lower end, and if we were to meet these beings, we would be unable to grasp what they have which we lack, though we might on testimony, or maybe even empirical observation of behavior, conclude that there is such a thing.

In fact, I suspect there are infinitely many such distinctions, and that God is beyond the higher side of all of them.

In heaven, might we be raised to have the further higher levels? Maybe, but maybe not. However, the mere epistemic possibility of us being gradually raised to acquire infinitely many further such irreducible values is enough to undercut any “argument from boredom” against eternal heavenly life.

Assuming there are infinitely many more such non-V and V pairs, I wonder what this infinity is. Does it have a cardinality?

An argument for purgatory

Here is a plausible argument for purgatory.

Start with these observations:

1. Some people end up in heaven even though at the time of death they had not yet forgiven all wrongs done to them by other people who end up in heaven nor had they been performing such an act of forgiveness while dying.

2. An act of forgiveness takes time, and at the beginning of the act one has not yet forgiven.

3. It is impossible to be in heaven without having forgiven all wrongs done to one by other members of the heavenly community.

Premise 3 seems clearly true: the perfection of the heavenly community requires it.

Premise 1 is pretty plausible. It does not seem that a minor bit of unforgiveness would damn one to hell.

Premise 2 is what I am actually least confident of. It is pretty plausible in our present state. But I guess there is the possibility that we can forgive in the very first instant of our presence in heaven, so that the act is already completed in that very instant. Maybe, but it doesn’t seem very human.

It follows from 1-3 that some people who end up in heaven have to initiate the necessary act of forgiveness post-death. When they initiated the act of forgiveness, they were not in heaven. Nor were they in hell, since they ended up in heaven, and one cannot transfer between heaven and hell. Hence, they must have been in some intermediate state, which we may call purgatory.

Here is a difficulty, though. Suppose a person in heaven is wronged by someone on earth
who will end up in heaven. This surely happens: for instance, a parent is in heaven, and their child on earth fails to fulfill a promise they made to the parent. If an act of forgiveness takes time, isn’t there a short period of time before the person in heaven forgives?

I don’t think so. Perhaps a part of becoming the kind of person that ends up in heaven is one’s having engaged in a prospective forgiveness of all who might wrong one (or at least all who might wrong one and yet are going to be a part of the heavenly community, since the argument above only requires one to forgive such persons as a condition for heavenly beatitude). Some have engaged in it in this life, having transformed themselves into perfect forgivers who have always already forgiven, and others need purgatory.

An argument against strong universalism

1. It is impossible end up in heaven without forgiving all evils done to one at least by other people who end up in heaven.

2. Some people have had evils done to them by other people who end up in heaven.

3. No one is necessitated to forgive evil done to them by other people.

4. So, at least one person is not necessitated to end up in heaven.

This is an argument against a strong universalism on which God necessitates everyone to go to heaven. It is not an argument against a weaker universalism on which there is a possibility of eternal damnation but no one in fact chooses it. (For the record, alas, I think the Biblical evidence is that the weaker universalism is also false.)

Why do I think the premises are true?

Premise 1: Heavenly beatitude is that of a perfect community of love. Such a community of love is impossible if one has failed to forgive evils done to one by other members of the community.

Premise 2: St Paul did evil to a number of people before his conversion.

Premise 3: This is probably the most controversial of the premises. There are two ways of arguing for it. One is by saying that necessitating someone to forgive is unfitting, and so we have good reason to think God wouldn’t do that—and presumably nobody else but God would be capable of necessitating forgiveness. The second is to note that it is impossible to be forced to forgive. It’s just not forgiveness if it’s forced. One can be forced to stop resenting, one can be forced forget, but that’s not forgiveness. This is akin to promising: it is not possible to force someone to make a promise—the words just wouldn’t be binding.

It's worth noting that the argument also tells against Calvinism.

Another argument for animals in heaven

1. All embodied humans are animals.

2. Some embodied humans will be in heaven.

3. So, there are animals in heaven.

But of course given the subject heading, you were likely interested whether there are non-human animals in heaven. That, too, can be argued for on the basis of the fact that we are animals.

4. The complete fulfillment of an animal requires it to be in an appropriate ecosystem.

5. Humans are animals.

6. An ecosystem appropriate to humans includes plants and non-human animals.

7. After the resurrection, the human beings in heaven will be completely fulfilled.

8. Thus, the human beings in heaven will be among plants and non-human animals.

Are there animals in heaven?

This argument is not a complete answer to the question, but is a start:

1. It is unlikely that all non-human earth animals will go extinct before the Second Coming.

2. It is unfitting that the Second Coming be a time where all non-human earth animals go extinct.

3. What is unfitting is unlikely.

4. So, it is likely that some non-human earth animals will survive the Second Coming.

Corruptionism and care about the soul

According to Catholic corruptionists, when I die, my soul will continue to exist, but I won’t; then at the Resurrection, I will come back into existence, receiving my soul back. In the interim, however, it is my soul, not I, who will enjoy heaven, struggle in purgatory or suffer in hell.

Of course, for any thing that enjoys heaven, strugges in purgatory or suffers in hell, I should care that it does so. But should I have that kind of special care that we have about things that happen to ourselves for what happens to the soul? I say not, or at most slightly. For suppose that it turned out on the correct metaphysics that my matter continues to exist after death. Should I care whether it burns, decays, or is dissected, with that special care with which we care about what happens to ourselves? Surely not, or at most slightly. Why not? Because the matter won’t be a part of me when this happens. (The “at most slightly” flags the fact that we can care about “dignitary harms”, such as nobody showing up at our funeral, or us being defamed, etc.)

But clearly heaven, purgatory and hell in the interim state is something we should care about.

Pascal's Wager and the beatific vision

To resolve the many gods and evil god objections to Pascal’s Wager, we need a way of comparing different infinite positive and negative outcomes. Technically, this is easy: we can represent these outcomes as an infinite quantity in some system like the hyperreals or vector-valued utilities, and then multiply these by probabilities, and add. The real difficulty is philosophical: how do we make probability-weighted comparisons of these infinite utilities? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to a 20% chance of a Muslim heaven? How does, say, a 30% chance of a Christian heaven compare to avoiding a 5% chance of a hell from an evil god?

I want to make a suggestion that might help get us started. On Christian orthodoxy, heavenly bliss is primarily constituted by the beatific vision—an intimate union with God where God himself comes to be directly present to consciousness, perhaps in something like the way that the qualia of ordinary acts of perception are often thought to be directly present to consciousness. How nice such an intimate union with a divine being is depends on how good the divine being is. For instance, plausibly, such a union with the kind of being who loves us enough to become incarnate and die for our sins is much better than such a union with a deity who wouldn’t or even couldn’t do that.

Gods that have morally objectionable conditions on how to get to heaven are presumably not going to be all that wonderful to spend an infinite time with—even a small chance of a beatific vision of a perfectly good God would beat a large chance of an afterlife with such a god. (Of course, some people think the Christian God’s conditions are morally objectionable.)

There is an important sense in which the beatific vision is intensively infinitely good—i.e., even a day of the beatific vision has infinite value—because the good of the beatific vision is constituted by the presence of an infinite God. Because of this, afterlives that feature something like the beatific vision may completely trump afterlives theories that do not. This may help with evil god worries, in that it is plausible that suffering we can undergo will intensively be only finitely bad. If B is the value of the beatific vision and H is the (negative) value of hell, then pB + qH will be infinitely positive as long as p > 0.

I am not saying that taking the beatific vision into account solves all the difficulties with Pascal’s wager. But it moves us forward.

In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

Decisions in heaven

Suppose I will live forever in heaven, and I have two infinite decks of cards. Each card specifies the good things that will happen to me over the next day. Every card in the left deck provides a hundred units of goods. Every card in the right deck provides a thousand units of goods.

Each day I get to draw the top card from a deck I choose and then I get the specified goods.

Consider three of the strategies I could opt for:

1. Always draw from the left deck.

2. Always draw from the right deck.

3. Alternate between decks.

Clearly, strategy 1 is not a good idea, so let’s put that aside.

There is an obvious argument for preferring 2 to 3. If I opt for strategy 2, then every other day I will be much better off than on strategy 3, and on the other days I will be at least as well off as on strategy 3.

But there is also an argument for preferring 3 to 2: on option 3, over the course of eternity, I get all the goods from both decks.

Moreover, even if one does not buy the argument that option 3 is better than option 2, it seems no worse: for while on option 3, the greater goods of the right deck get delayed more, a good is no less valuable for being pushed further off into the future.

Heaven, the goods of others and the defeat of evil

There is a delight in competing athletically with one’s child: if they win, it feels good, and if one wins, it feels good, too. (The hedonic ideal is achieved when the child wins about 60% of the time; then one feels proud of their superiority, but not rarely one has the pleasure of beating a stronger opponent.)

Parental love makes it easy to love another as oneself (to paraphrase what C. S. Lewis says about Eros). It thus gives us an image of what it is like to be in heaven: we will greatly enjoy the goods had by others. This gives us an attractive picture of how the joy of heaven could fit with enduring differences in personal characteristics. Perhaps being an extrovert would not be true to my self and to God’s vocation for me, and so maybe even over an eternity in heaven I won’t be extroverted. But if so, I will still be fully happy for the joy of the heavenly extroverts, without any regret that I am not one of them, while they will be fully happy for me introverted joys, also without any regret that they are not like me.

Here are two controversial (for very different reasons) applications of this. First, there is a genuine and distinctive good in being a woman and there is a genuine and distinctive good in being a man, and it seems to make sense for a person to desire the goods of the other sex, regardless of whether it is possible to have them oneself. In heaven, however, Joseph can enjoy Mary’s good in being a woman and Mary can enjoy Joseph’s good in being a man, without Joseph regretting that he personally “only” has the good of manhood and Mary regretting that she personally “only” has the good of womanhood. That is what total love is like.

Second, given an eternalist or moving block theory of time, the past will always be fully real. This in turn gives us a solution to the problem that various important goods, such as marriage and self-sacrifice, will not be available in heaven. For we will be able to rejoice in others’ past possession of these goods, without regret for the fact that they aren’t ours and now.

The second point, however, raises the following problem: Won’t we also grieve for others’ past—and even present, if hell is a reality (as I think it is)—subjection to great evils? Maybe, but in God’s plan there is a crucial asymmetry between good and evil. Evils are defeated. How this defeat happens is deeply mysterious. But because of this defeat, I suspect the grief for a defeated evil will not hurt, precisely because of the evil’s being defeated, while goods remain undefeated and hence the joy for them will always delight.

In fact, the last point suggests something to me. A lot of philosophers of religion have said that it’s not enough for theodicy if evils are justly compensated for or their permission is in some way justified. We need these evils to be defeated. I think this is mistaken if all we are after is a response to the problem of evil. But we also need a response to the problem of why the past and present suffering of others doesn’t cause the saints pain in heaven. And it is here that we need the defeat of evil.

An argument for animals in heaven

In quick outline, here’s a valid argument:

1. There are plants in heaven.

2. If there are plants in heaven, there are non-human animals in heaven.

3. So, there are non-human animals in heaven.

Let me expand on the argument.

Humans in heaven (i.e., on the New Earth, after resurrection) will have both supernatural and natural fulfillment. The natural fulfillment of humans requires an appropriate environment. That environment requires plants. A heavenly city with no trees or grass or flowers just wouldn’t be heavenly for us. This is fitting as humans were made for a garden. The fall turned the garden into a field of hard labor for survival, but all will be restored, and so there will be a garden again.

But plants, of the sort that form the natural environment of humans, require an ecosystem that includes non-human animals. There need to be pollinators in the air and worms in the ground. And how eerily quiet a garden would be with no birds chirping, how unnatural for humans.

This does not mean that there will be a resurrection of animals. Just as a plant can be perfect without living forever, a non-rational animal can be perfect without living forever. One may, however, worry that we will form attachments to non-human animals and would be saddened by their death. There are three responses. First, perhaps some non-human organisms could live forever, namely particular ones which are important to humans: say, a bonsai or a companion dog. Second, perhaps we wouldn’t form these attachments, maybe because no animals would be tame. Third, it might be that we would all transcend time to the extent that (a) our memory would not fade and (b) we would all have the correct view of time, i.e., eternalism, so that we would be constantly aware that our beloved animal exists simpliciter, albeit in the past.

Will dogs live forever?

Suppose a dog lives forever. Assuming the dog stays roughly dog-sized, there is only a finite number of possible configurations of the dog’s matter (disregarding insignificant differences on the order of magnitude of a Planck length, say). Then, eventually, all of the dog’s matter configurations will be re-runs, as we will run out of possible new configurations. Whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has already felt, remembered or done. It will be literally impossible to teach the dog a new trick (without swelling the dog beyond normal dog size).

But a dog’s life is a material life, unlike perhaps the life of a person. Plausibly, a dog’s mental states are determined by the configuration of the dog’s (brain) matter. So, eventually, every one of the dog’s mental states will be a re-run, too.

And then we will run out of states re-run once, and the dog will only have states that are on their second or later re-run. And so on. There will come a day when whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has felt, remembered or done a billion times: and there is still eternity to go.

Moreover, we’re not just talking about momentary re-runs. Eventually, every day of the dog’s life will be an identical re-run of an earlier day of the dog’s life (at least insofar as the dog is concerned: things beyond the power of the dog’s sensory apparatus might change). And then eventually every year of the dog’s life will be a re-run of an earlier year. And then there will come a year when every coming year of the dog’s life will already have been done a billion times already.

This doesn’t strike me as a particularly flourishing life for a dog. Indeed, it strikes me that it would be a more flourishing life for the dog to cut out the nth re-runs, and have the dog’s life come to a peaceful end.

Granted, the dog won’t be bored by the re-runs. In fact, probably the dog won’t know that things are being re-run over and over. In any case, dogs don’t mind repetition. But there is still something grotesque about such a life of re-runs. That’s just not the temporal shape a dog’s life should have, much as a dog shouldn’t be cubical or pyramidal in spatial shape.

If this is right, then considerations of a dog’s well-being do not lead to the desirability of eternal life for the dog. As far as God’s love for dogs goes, we shouldn’t expect God to make the dogs live forever.

This is, of course, the swollen head argument, transposed to dogs, from naturalist accounts of humans.

But maybe God would make dogs live forever because of his love for their human friends, not because of his love for the dogs themselves? Here, I think there is a better case for eternal life for dogs. But I am still sceptical. For the humans would presumably know that from the dog’s point of view, everything is an endless re-run. The dog has already taken a walk that looked and felt just like this one a billion times, and there is an infinite number of walks that look and feel just like this one to the dog ahead. Maybe to the human they feel different: the human can think about new things each time, because naturalism is false of humans, and so differences in human mental states don’t require differences in neural states (or so those of us who believe in an eternal afterlife for humans should say). But to the dog it’s just as before. And know that on the dog’s side it’s just endless repetition would, I think, be disquieting and dissatisfying to us. It seems to me that it is not fitting for a human to be tied down for an eternity of a friendship with a finite being that eventually has nothing new to exhibit in its life.

So, I doubt that God would make dogs live forever because of his love for us, either. And the same goes for other brute animals. So, I don’t think brute animals live forever.

All this neglects Dougherty’s speculative suggestion that in the afterlife animals may be transformed, Narnia-like, so that they become persons. If he’s right, then the naturalistic supervenience assumption will be no more true for the animals than for us, and the repetition argument above against dogs living forever will fail. But the argument above will still show that we shouldn’t expect brute animals to live forever. And I am dubious of the transformation hypothesis, too.

At the same time, I want to note that I think it is not unlikely that there will be brute animals on the New Earth. But if so, I expect they will have finite lifespans. For while an upper temporal limit to the life of a human would be an evil, an upper temporal limit to the life of a brute animal seems perfectly fitting.

Heaven and materialism: The return of the swollen head problem

Plausibly, there is a maximum information density for human brains. This means that if internal mental states supervene on the information content of brains and there is infinite eternal life, then either:

1. Our head grows without bound to accommodate a larger and larger brain, or

2. Our brain remains bounded in size and either (a) eventually we settle down to a single unchanging internal mental state (including experiential state) which we maintain for eternity, or (b) we eternally move between a finite number of different internal mental states (including experiential states).

For if a brain remains bounded in size, there are only finitely many information states it can have, because of the maximum information density. Neither of options 2a and 2b is satisfactory, because mental (intellectual, emotional and volitive) growth is important to human flourishing, and a single unchanging internal mental state or eternal repetition does not fit with human flourishing.

Note, too, that on both options 2a and 2b, a human being in heaven will eventually be ignorant of how long she’s been there. On option 2b, she will eventually also be ignorant of whether it is the first time, the second time, or the billionth that she is experiencing a particular internal mental state. (I am distinguishing “internal mental states” from broad mental states that may have externalist semantics.) This, too, does not fit with the image of eternal flourishing.

This is, of course, a serious problem for the Christian materialist. I assume they won’t want to embrace the growing head option 1. Probably the best bet will be to say that in the afterlife, our physics and biology changes in such a way as to remove the information density limits from the brain. It is not clear, however, that we would still count as human beings after such a radical change in how our brains function.

The above is also a problem for any materialist or supervenientist who becomes convinced—as I think we all should be—that our full flourishing requires eternal life. For the flourishing of an entity cannot involve something that is contrary to the nature of a being of that sort. But if 2a and 2b are not compatible with our flourishing, and if 1 is contrary to our nature, then our flourishing would seem to involve something contrary to our human nature.

This is a variant of the argument here, but focused on mental states rather than on memory.

The mystery of God

Suppose you have never heard music, and you are watching a video of a superb ballet, with the sound turned off. And then someone turns the sound on. You now know a dimension of the dance you wouldn’t have expected or thought of. It transforms your understanding of the ballet radically.

Similarly, but more radically, when we humans learned that the perfectly one God is three persons, we learned something that we would not have expected, something that not only we wouldn’t have thought of, but something that we would have likely denied is at all possible. It is something that should radically (in both the etymological and the common senses of the word) transform all of our understanding of God. Of course, what we learned turns out to be logically compatible with the doctrine of God’s unity, but that it was compatible is a part of the surprise.

I suspect that similar transformations of our understanding of God await in heaven. Doctrines that are related to our doctrinal understanding of God as the doctrine of the Trinity is to the unity and simplicity of God. Experience that are radically different in kind from anything we have had.

But is it not plausible that God is such that any finite understanding of him is subject to such transformation? If so, then this gives us one way of countering the “eternal ennui” worry about heaven. For such transformations of our understanding of, and hence of our loving relationship with, God could occur for eternity then.

Eternal life and the crucible of character theodicy

Consider the crucible of character theodicy, that we are permitted by God to meet with great evils in order to form a character with virtues like courage and sacrificial love whose significant exercise requires significant evils.

I take it that it’s clear that forming such a character is worthwhile. But there are at least three problems with this theodicy:

1. While such character formation is valuable, is it valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils? Wouldn’t it have been better if God just gave us the virtues directly, rather than having us pay a great price?

2. Even if it is valuable enough to justify our suffering great evils, wouldn’t it be better if we suffered fewer or lesser ones?

3. What about those who suffer and develop a vicious character?

I think these three problems can be overcome if we think about heavenly life as an infinite value multiplier.

Ad 1: There is clearly some additional value to having virtues that were formed through significantly free exercises of them rather than having had these virtues imposed on one. In heaven, on infinitely many days one has and enjoys the value of having virtues. But if one has formed these virtues through significantly free exercise, then on infinitely many days one also has and enjoys the additional value of having virtues that were thus formed. That’s an infinite additional increment. So as long as the disvalue of the sufferings in this life was finite—which surely it was—it’s worth it.

Ad 2: The greater the sufferings that one endured courageously and the greater the sacrifices one made in love, the more fully one owns the resulting courage and love. For in more extreme exercises of these virtues, one has a greater opportunity to abandon the path of virtue, and one’s presence on that path is more truly one’s own. And this deeper ownership over one’s virtue—bearing in mind, of course, that all one has is a participation of God, and that grace is deeply involved—adds an additional value of virtue-ownership throughout an infinite number of future days. Hence, it adds an infinite amount of value, which is surely worth it.

Ad 3: This is probably the most serious worry. Start with this thought. God is choosing whether to snatch Judas up to heaven in the first moment of his existence, imposing on him a perfectly virtuous character, or to give Judas the opportunity to freely develop and own that character. A toy model for this an extended utility calculation. On the first option, we have an expected utility of

• V(eternal unowned virtue),

where V is value. On the second option, we have an expected utility of

• pV(eternal owned virtue) + (1 − p)V(Judas chooses vice)

where p is the probability that Judas would come through the crucible well. (Of course, this line of thought requires rejecting theological compatibilism and Molinism.) Here, V(eternal unowned virtue) and V(eternal owned virtue) are each infinite and positive. Plausibly, V(Judas chooses vice) is negative. Is it infinite? That’s not clear. One might think that on orthodox Christian views of hell, it is both negative and infinite. But that need not be the case. It could be that the suffering and vice in hell actually decreases from day to day, so that the total amount of suffering and vice over eternity is actually finite (think of how 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 2).

If V(Judas chooses vice), the argument still isn’t over, but I will assume that V(Judas chooses vice) is finite—we could just build that into the theodicy. In that case, we can basically neglect V(Judas chooses vice)—when the other quantities are infinite, a finite subtraction is only going to be a tie-breaker.

So now the question is whether V(eternal unowned virtue) is bigger than or equal to pV(eternal owned virtue). And here it seems very reasonable simply to make a sceptical theist move. We don’t know what was Judas’ probability of coming through the crucible well. We don’t know exactly how V(eternal owned virtue) compares to V(eternal virtue). It could be that a day with owned value is three times as valuable as a day with unowned virtue. If so, then as long as p > 1/3, God’s giving Judas the opportunity for freely choosing virtue was worthwhile.

There are many objections, of course, that one can make. Here’s one that particularly comes to my mind: Wouldn’t it be better for God to first give people the opportunity to freely choose a virtuous character, but then if they refuse to do so, to impose that character on them? After all, at least some infants go to heaven after death. But they haven’t developed a virtuous character through the described kind of crucible. And so it seems that God imposes on them a virtuous character.

There are two things I’m inclined to say to this. First, there is a relevant difference between the case of imposing virtue on an infant and imposing virtue on someone who has chosen against virtue. Second, those who choose virtue own their virtue more fully if they had the possibility of not having that virtue at all.

Heaven

One of the things that most strengthens my faith is compelling accounts of heavenly happiness. I think there are at least two reasons why such accounts tend to strengthen faith. First, a compelling account of heavenly happiness rebuts the "sounds like fairy tale" objection to Christian faith. Second, a compelling account of heavenly happiness resonates with us in a way that gives us evidence that we are meant for a different kind of life than the one we have hear. I wish there were more sermons on heaven. And we philosophers also should work more on giving good accounts of what heaven might be like.

Diversity of goods, heaven and theodicy

Alice was tortured for weeks, but she remained loyal to the true and the good. Alice’s moral victory over her torturers was of great value. Let’s take it for granted that this situation represents something that is on balance a great good for Alice (and for the world). But suppose that God was choosing between Alice’s moral victory, on the one hand, and Alice doing something else that was virtuous, worthwhile but not painful—perhaps with great singlemindedness throwing herself into producing a great work of art. One might well make the judgment that while Alice’s moral victory was a great good, given the horrendous cost to Alice, it would on balance have been better for God to have steered her life away from the suffering and towards a good that comes without much pain.

I am sceptical of this judgment, but for the sake of the argument let’s grant it. Nonetheless, I think the assessment should change if one adds to the above a story about an infinite heavenly afterlife. Here is why. The judgment was that while there was great value in Alice’s moral victory, it would have been good to substitute a painless but valuable achievement for it.

But what if, instead, the question was this:

• Is it better for Alice to have the painful moral victory plus a hundred painless but valuable achievements, or just the hundred painless but valuable achievements?

If we grant the initial judgment that Alice’s moral victory was of great value, then we need to say that the first option is on balance better. The life with the painful victory and hundred painless achievements not only exhibits the additional good of the painful victory, but also exhibits the higher-order value of a diversity of types of goods.

Now ask this question:

• Is it better for Alice to have the painful moral victory plus an infinite number of painless but valuable achievements, or just the infinite number of painless but valuable achievements?

It sure seems like the first option is the better one. But now when we ask the initial question, whether God shouldn’t have given Alice a painless achievement instead, in the context of a theory of God that includes an infinite happy afterlife, that is in fact what the question comes to. The additional painless achievement would not add much to the infinitely many painless achievements in heaven. But the painful achievement adds something different in kind.

And when we add to the story that in the afterlife Alice (as well as her friends, likely many in number) will be able to enjoy, infinitely many times, the memory of her moral victory, without the memory of her suffering being itself a source of suffering (for, I take it, there is no suffering in heaven), it sure seems worth it.

But what if instead Alice cracked under torture, thereby losing the good? Well, now how well the story works depends on other questions. If we have Molinism, then it doesn’t work very well: given Molinism, God can foresee that Alice would crack, and so the value that there would be in her victory is irrelevant. But given simple foreknowledge (or open theism, but that’s a heretical option) God’s decision whether to put Alice in that situation can only be based on chances. For all we know, the chance of Alice’s cracking under torture, given the grace that God gave her, was not very high, and so the significant chance of the great goods of having a diversity in the types of goods one experiences and of having an infinite number of reminiscences of that diversity was worthwhile. Or, at least, we have little reason to think it wasn’t.

Eternal pleasure

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset before each repeat. If hedonism were true, this would be a truly wonderful life, much better than your actual life. But it seems to be a pretty rotten life. So hedonism seems quite far from the truth.

But could there, perhaps, be a pleasure such that eternal repetition of it, in and of itself, would be worth having? It would have to be a pleasure that carries its meaningfulness in itself, one whose quale itself is deeply meaningful. It would have to have be an experience of infinite depth. Could we have such an experience? With Aquinas, I think philosophy cannot answer this question, though theology can.

Inside and outside

In The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis sketches a picture of heaven which is like an onion, with multiple layers, but with the inside of each layer bigger than the outside.

We can get a two-dimensional model by imaging a spherical space with an even bigger bubble sticking out of the sphere in one area.  A two-dimensional being could seamlessly transition from the original area to the bubble area. And of course we can enhance this by supposing bubbles on bubbles, larger and larger. The result would look like a snowman.

But even in the single bubble case, there is the question of the sense in which the bubble area counts as the inside and the rest as the outside. After all the bubble area is the larger one.

I think scenarios like C. S. Lewis's make us realized that the distinction between inside and outside may be rather arbitrary.

This reminds me of the joke about the mathematician who was given a rope and told he could have as much land as he could enclose. He made a small circle of rope around himself and said: "I stipulate that I am on the outside."

Eternal nagging, endless second chances and hell

Jabba the Hutt asks for a passionate kiss. You really don't want to do it and you don't. So he asks you again the next day. And again the day after. And so on. Each time Jabba asks you, there is some small chance you'll agree. Let's say that that chance is always at least one in a googolplex. Now suppose you and Jabba live forever. He asks you every day. Then by the Law of Large Numbers, it is nearly certain (i.e., has probability one or one minus an infinitesimal) that one day you will agree, no matter how disgusted you are by him.

The practical inevitability of the kiss means there is a sense in which your agreeing has been forced out of you by Jabba's eternal nagging, even though you were free on the particular occasion when you agreed to the kiss. We might say that you were quite free not to kiss on day n, where n is the day you actually kissed Jabba, but you were not really free never to kiss him. Yuck! How is it freedom when you are guaranteed to kiss a disgusting giant slug?

Now the two best alternatives to the traditional Christian doctrine that those who after a set deadline (death, say) opt against God are excluded from heavenly union with God are:

• Imposition: God imposes moral transformation on those who do not freely opt to love him.
• Endless Second Chances: God ensures that those who refuse him nonetheless always have another chance.

Here I take for granted Jerry Walls' argument that for a sinner moral transformation is metaphysically necessary for heavenly bliss, as heavenly bliss is constituted by a love relationship with God.

It's pretty plausible (pace compatibilists) that in Imposition, God takes away the agent's freedom to refuse him. But if the eternal nagging argument works, then in Endless Chances it looks like God all but takes away the agent's freedom, making it all but inevitable that the agent will eventually agree.

It is offensive to compare God to Jabba the Hutt. Yet for the person who is opposed to God, eternal union with God is subjectively rather like kissing Jabba the Hutt. Nor would it make the story more palatable if Jabba were to promise to make you enjoy the kiss, say by exuding pheromones or changing your preferences, as soon as you say "yes" to him. Of course, objectively God is infinitely lovable--but those have rejected him have set their hearts against that truth.

Objection: God could set up a version of Endless Second Chances on which it is not inevitable that the agent will agree by allowing each of the agent's refusals to affect the agent's character by even further lowering the chance of subsequent acceptance of God's offer. If the subsequent chances decrease sufficiently (say, by a half each time), the overall probability of eventually accepting might be significantly different from one.

Response: Yes, but this loses out on what I take to be one of the main merits of hell, that hell stops the agent's moral deterioration. On this picture, there is a significantly non-zero chance that the agent will continue morally deteriorating for eternity. And that's unfitting.