Dialogue with Doogle55, prompted by the following comment I made to the video Does the Christian View of Hell Make Any Sense? w/ Fr. James Rooney on 1/25/2023
Without love, there's no heaven.
Without freedom there's no love.
Without the possibility of choosing to be separated from God for all eternity there's no freedom.
Hell is a necessary requirement for the viability of free will. Without hell there's no free will. Without free will there's no love. Without love there's no heaven.
Conclusion:
Without hell there's no heaven.
Line of dialogue with Doogle55
@Doogle55 I'm all with you there.
The doctrine of Annihilationism
@Doogle55 I agree with the premise that "without existing there is no pleasure or suffering." That doesn't mean that non-existence is preferable to existence with suffering. If God created, I, as a believer, am bound to believe that He had a worthwhile reason to do it. As for creating a being that will end up in a state of ECT1, I agree that is not worthwhile from that being's perspective. But anybody's perspective compared to God's perspective is virtually meaningless. I mean, granted that God exists and it is the Christian God, who is beyond time and space (not spatially, but metaphysically), who knows what every single human being from the beginning of history is thinking every single second of their life, who knows the final and definitive state of affairs, there is no way to compare His point of view with anybody else's.
Now, that said, I am quite certain that the notion of hell as ECT is incorrect, that it is, indeed, a heresy that the Church will have to contend with rather sooner than later.
It would be too long to write here a comprehensive explanation of my reasons for saying so. But suffice it to say that I start from the indubitable Christian truth that God is the only source of all being, and the only source of eternal life (which is His love). Now, one thing is sure, and everybody agrees on it: whatever else hell is, it is, at the very least, an eternal separation from God, who is this only source of being and eternal life. If these premises are correct, it necessarily follows that there can be no life, nor being, in hell.
This could be explained a lot further, but I think it is an irrefutable argument for the doctrine of Annihilationism. I've posed several theologians and apologists this simple challenge: "Where does life and being come from in Hell?" If they say, "from God," I counter with, "so you mean to say that the love of God (only source of eternal life) is in hell?" If they insist, I would have to point them to the Catechism that very explicitly states that hell is "eternal separation." If the love of God is in Hell, there is no separation. Besides, if God is in Hell in any way, shape or form, it would defeat the main reason given for the existence of hell, which is, "to guarantee human freedom." That presence of God in hell would violate the freedom of those who are there because they freely chose to reject him.
So far, I haven't found any satisfactory answer. Instead, I've found several very prestigious theologians, such as Card. Ratzinger, who maintain that hell and eternal death are the same thing. Furthermore, from beginning to end, it's abundantly clear that the final destiny of humankind according to the Bible is reduced to only two alternatives: eternal life or eternal death. Including Jesus Christ, the one who is often cited as speaking of hell more than anybody else in the Bible, speaks a lot more times about the eternal life as the thing He came to promise and to make available to us, without any clarification about the kind of eternal life, which obviously implies that its opposite is not "eternal life of suffering." The opposite of "eternal life" is "eternal death."
I'm not sure I understood the point you were trying to make about antinatalism…
The goal of the creature is the goal of the Creator
We start from the premise that God is our maker. Since He is an intelligent agent, he made us for a reason. Hence, God's reasons must be our reasons, like the raison d'être of a hammer is the same as the reason the hammer maker had in mind.
Christianity's story is that, as you shrewdly point out, since God has no needs or worries, he cannot have ulterior motives to create us. That, together with the Christian definition of God as Love (which is not just a platitude, but a deep theological insight), leads us to conclude that the only reason God could have to create us is an entirely unmotivated and random act of love. You say that God’s reasons are not our reasons. I addressed in the previous paragraph by simply stating that the reasons of a creator are, by definition, the reasons of the creature. I gave the example of the hammer, but any other example of creation would be equally helpful. Like, for example, the goal of the creator of a billiard ball is to make something smooth that rolls unimpeded over the felt; hence, the goal of the billiard ball is to roll unimpeded over the felt. The inescapable consequence of the conclusion that God created us out of love is that what we perceive as the goal of our nature must also be God’s goal in creating us. Since the goal of our nature is ultimate and perfect happiness, it follows that God’s goal in creating us is for us to be ultimately and perfectly happy.
I know this may come as a surprise, but it shouldn’t be. We’ve grown abnormally inclined to view God as the enemy of our happiness. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is our Pride that makes us prone to think that it is us the ones who know what is good and what is evil (the eternal temptation since the garden of Eden), what will make us ultimately happy and what will not. It is when we don’t have the humility to admit that we do not know what will make us happy better than the One who created us which makes us see God as enemy of our happiness. But this is as absurd as thinking that the car manufacturer that wrote the instruction manual is a killjoy because it’s always telling us what to do (in order to fulfill the end of the car): put gas this or that type, do a service every 1,000 miles, etc. When we don’t follow God’s commands because we think we know better how to achieve happiness is like one who decides to put coca-cola in the gas tank, even though the instructions clearly “command” us to put gasoline grade 93, to bring the car for service every twenty thousand miles instead of five, and so on . . .
ECT stands for Eternal Conscious Torment. It is considered the traditional view on hell, and the most popular at the popular level. It’s worth noting, though, that the Catholic doctrine does not spell out the notion of hell in much detail at all. It pretty much limits itself to saying that there is an eternal state for those who die in a state of rebellion against God. For those who die in a “state of grace” (the life of God in the soul) there is a state of eternal union with God, just like they desired in life, commonly known as Heaven. Those who don’t die in a “state of grace” (without the life of God in the soul), are allowed to make true their desire to be separated from God. This state of eternal separation from God is what is commonly known as Hell. The mainstream of theological scholarship for the last two thousand years has been what is lately known as ECT: the belief that the human soul is immortal, and those who reject God go on to “live” in a state of Eternal Conscious Torment.