I’ve just finished reading “Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness” by the philosopher and inveterate riddler Raymond Smullyan. It’s less of a “study” than a collection of thoughts on three topics, loosely inspired by his reading of Martin Gardner’s “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”. The first part is about the relationship between belief in God and belief in an afterlife, and for me it was spoiled by the casual and uncritical assumption of dualism. (How can you endorse the idea of life after death without taking a look at the arguments for and against dualism?) The third is all about “Cosmic Consciousness”, and my instinctive reaction of “Woo” was exacerbated by random nonsense about “planes of existence” and the supposed directionality of evolution. Ugh!
But in chapter two, Smullyan takes on Hell, and this is worth the price of admission.
Martin Gardner argued that the question of (non-)belief in god was “the deepest, most fundamental of all divisions among the attitudes one can take toward the mystery of being.” Smullyan seems to argue that a more important dichotomy is between those who believe in ((And “endorse”, to eliminate belief based on fear.)) the doctrine of eternal, infinite punishment and those who reject it. Obviously, most atheists reject the doctrine ((“Most”, because theism and life after death are logically independent, and I’m no expert on the consequences of beliefs about reincarnation and karma.)), but so do many Christians. Smullyan distinguishes four groups of Christians: ((He doesn’t have much to say about Judaism, and even less about Islam.))
- An ultra-soft Christian believes that there is no such thing as eternal punishment.
- A soft Christian believes that God is unable to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
- A hard Christian believes that God is unwilling to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
- An ultra-hard Christian believes that eternal punishment is good and just, and that a truly good person will take pleasure in the sufferings of the damned.
Smullyan introduced an amusing approach to the question. “If God asked you to vote on the retention or abolition of Hell, how would you vote?” Not surprisingly, many of the believers that he asked were strongly conflicted about their responses!
For me, the most depressing part of the book was reading the poisonous language of “ultra-hard” thinking. Most of Smullyan’s quotations date back to the 18th and 19th century (Jonathan Edwards, for example), but we have all encountered plenty of contemporary examples. They believe that the “suffering of the wicked” is good in itself. And these beliefs have consequences in the real world. As Smullyan says:
I firmly believe that all of us – the best of us! – have cruel and sadistic tendencies; that is part of our animal heritage. And the one socially acceptable outlet for our sadistic needs is retribution. I cannot fault a person for feeling retributive – that is only natural, as I have indicated. I fault only the approval of retribution. I believe that retributive ethics is one of the main forces – if not the main force – that is holding back our civilization. I predict that as we become more civilized, the decline in retributive ethics, the decline in the belief in hell, the decline in the approval of capital punishment, the decline of war, the decline in crime – all these things will come to us hand in hand.
It seems to me that the emergence of a vocal atheist “opposition” has in large measure been provoked by a “hardening” of the religious population. “Hard Christians” (and, presumably, “hard Muslims”) seem all too ready to appoint themselves as the agents in this world of an uncompromising, and essentially sadistic God. In this confrontation, it seems to me that “ultra-soft Christians” should logically be allied with the atheists. (Smullyan argues, and I agree, that the “soft Christian” position is incoherent.)