God, Hell and Moral Realism

A common criticism of Christianity is that it is internally inconsistent, that a loving god could not condemn souls to an eternity of Hell. I usually see this as an argument for atheism. I have recently encountered it not as a reason to doubt the existence of a Hell and its creator but as a criticism of Him. Or, in this case, Her.

The context is threads on my favorite fan fiction cite by my favorite authors.¹ The setting, borrowed from a Pathfinder scenario, is the planet Golarion in a universe created, complete with afterlives, by Pharasma, the creator god. She allocates souls to afterlives, good or bad,² according to what they have done in life.

One of the afterlives is Hell.

In the view of the protagonists of the threads and presumably their authors, Pharasma has not got it quite right. Her view of what acts count as good or evil is mostly, but not entirely, correct; there may be some things people ought to do that she counts as evil, some they ought not to do that she counts as good. More important, some people are sent to Hell; nobody should be. One of the long run objectives of the protagonists of the threads, one an immortal archmage and one a paladin who intends and expects to become a god, is to destroy Hell. Possibly also Pharasma.

Implicit in both the setting and the atheist critique of Christianity is moral realism: Moral categories, good and evil, are not arbitrary decisions of the creator or anyone else; they are facts. If Pharasma decided that torturing children for fun was good and sent people who did it to heaven or that feeding the hungry was evil and sent people who did it to Hell, She would be wrong. If the God of the Christian bible sends people to Hell for an eternity of torture, He is wrong too.

Moral realism is a claim that few people are willing to defend but most, so far as I can tell, believe, including most religious people. The religious would say that it is good to do what God commands but their implicit argument is that God, being perfectly wise, knows better than we what acts are good or bad. That Pharasma sometimes gets it wrong might be because she is not perfectly wise or because she is not perfectly good, perhaps not good at all.

Thinking about implications of the fictional reality, it occurred to me that I had seen the issue before, had written about it, in a different context.

The claim is sometimes made by religious people that atheists cannot be trusted, might do anything, because without God they have no basis for morality, no way to know that some acts would be evil or to care, no reason to refrain from committing them. The problem with this claim is that if humans had no way to distinguish good from evil without divine assistance they would have no way to distinguish God from Satan. When you discover the existence of a powerful supernatural being how can you tell whether he is good (God), evil (Satan) or, like the Greek Gods, a mix of good and evil like yourself? If you cannot, why should you take his advice for what you should or should not do?

The only answer I see to that question is that humans have some ability to make moral judgements on their own, to perceive moral facts. If good and evil are moral facts that can be perceived, humans who are atheists can perceive them too. They may not perceive them as accurately as humans with divine assistance, just at they may not do other things as well, run wars, which Joan of Arc and Mohammed were apparently very good at, or rear children, but they can do it.

The argument first occurred to me reading about Islamic philosophical disputes from more than a thousand years ago. The dispute that split Muslim philosophy in the ninth century between the Ash’arite and Mut’talizite (“rationalist”) schools, was in part about whether humans had any ability to discern moral truth for themselves or were entirely dependent on divine revelation. Unfortunately the Ash’arites, who by my argument were wrong on at least that issue, won.

My View of the Matter

I have described three possible views. One is atheism: There are no gods, there is no immortal soul hence no afterlives for it to be sorted into, what we see is what we get. It is a tragic view since it means that at some point in the next twenty years, very optimistically thirty, I will cease to exist, but that is no reason why it cannot be true.

Another is conventional monotheist religion: There is a God who created the universe, I have an immortal soul, where it goes will depend on how I have lived my life. God is good; if I have lived a decent life I can look forward to the indefinite future. Some variants are less optimistic about the odds of heaven and the alternatives than others, but they share a common pattern. Part of that is that some acts are good, some evil, both in reality and in the mind of God.

The third is the view revealed in the fictional stories I have described. There are gods, one of whom created the universe. Good and evil are real but the gods, including the creator, are not perfectly good. Existence continues after life, what happens to you depends on the life you lived, but the divine sorting may sometimes get it wrong. I have described it as from modern fiction, since that is what started me thinking about it, but it is pretty close to the world view of Greek or Norse paganism.

My own best guess, unfortunately, is the first; I am an atheist, although less confident in my atheism than most.

There are puzzles that my view of the world does not explain, most notably the existence of consciousness, the ghost in the machine, someone looking out of my eyes. My best guess on moral philosophy is moral realism.³ Neither that nor consciousness is strictly inconsistent with atheism, since a reasonable atheist should realize that even if his beliefs are correct they are not complete, that there are probably things about reality that he does not understand, an attitude encouraged by the study of theoretical physics, much of which does not fit our intuitions of what the world is like. But insofar as moral realism implies the existence of non-physical facts, facts that cannot be deduced from our picture of physical reality, it fits better with the religious view of things.

I am unwilling to accept any particular version of that view. Even if there is a non-physical reality, views of that reality differ by enough that the fact that a lot of people believe some one of them, say Catholicism or Sunni Islam, is at most weak evidence that it is true. Hence my second-best guess is that my atheist, materialist, picture of reality is incomplete, that what is missing is something along the general lines of religious belief, that consciousness, the soul, is not merely an epiphenomenon of the physical body. Whether there are any gods, whether one of them created the universe, whether their connection to morality is different from mine, remain open questions.

But I may find out. Hopefully not by a first-hand view of Hell.

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1. The site is Glowfic, the authors Lintemande and lantalótë. As one would expect, the average quality of threads is low, but the best are very good. To find them use the site’s search window to find threads by Lintemande and by Swimmer, go on to authors you come across and like. Many threads have coauthors; the format shows who wrote which characters. Other authors I sometimes like include Aevylmar, NormalAnomaly, JiSK, Alicorn and Apprenticebard.

2. There are nine, based on how good or evil, lawful or chaotic, someone was.

3. For how I acquired this view and where it led me, see The Machinery of Freedom Chapter 61, An Argument I lost: Where My Moral Philosophy Comes From.