On Craig on Salvation, Part II
An argument of sorts against my attack on Craig’s personal eschatology is this: picture Earth as a garden, a God’s garden. Some, even most, parts of it are still uncultivated. In fact, most of the garden is covered with weeds which are burned (in hell) after they die. The few Christian flowers struggle alongside these weeds and are saved. Perhaps billions of Asians, all of those who lived before Christ, etc. were indeed “weeds” and were destroyed accordingly. God doesn’t care for them; they were impervious to grace and the theological virtues.
Unfortunately, here we imagine God as a most incompetent gardener. No human gardener of even minimal skill allows his own place to overgrow with nasty wild plants that would choke his beautiful flowers. Even less plausibly would he plant the flowers in arbitrary places within the thickets of weeds, as if by throwing the seeds on the ground randomly.
Craig may object that it is up to the plants to become either flowers or weeds. Indeed so, but the weeds are not only depraved; they are necessarily depraved; they have no chance of ever turning into flowers. That this happens “freely” is beside the point. Being depraved is the weeds’ essential property; it’s part of their nature. They are humans, but of a different kind than the saved. They look the same, but are in reality monsters. For them this life is just a brief prelude to the inexorable coming of eternal horror, of weeping and the gnashing of teeth. (Of course, these people may not seem particularly evil in this world, e.g., “thus without grace man cannot merit everlasting life; yet he can perform works conducing to a good which is natural to man, as ‘to toil in the fields, to drink, to eat, or to have friends,’ and the like.” (ST, II-I, 109, 5) But they will surely be stripped of any remains of the Holy Spirit in their hearts in the afterlife, according to: “I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away.” (Lk 19:26))
Nor is this the problem of evil restated in different terms. The predestined share the world with the reprobates, but the question is not why the former suffer; it is why the garden in which humans grow as a whole is in such miserable shape. Did God abandon His garden because of the Original Sin? The concept of the Original Sin is problematic, of course, but even if we accept it, wasn’t abandoning us an enormous overreaction on the part of God?
Craig may again point out that he does not really aim to find out the criteria for salvation; all he is saying is that if a person is to be condemned, then he is condemned in every possible world in which he exists. If the most important criterion is belief in the articles of faith, then we have to account for most of the world’s population’s not having this belief. And we do so in the manner described. If the most important criterion is works of mercy, then we postulate that those who fail to do works of mercy in the actual world would fail to do them also in every non-actual possible world. And so on.
Again this means that the property of being depraved is essential to a damned person. Yet sinful actions are never essential, unless one subscribes to the notion of positive reprobation, which the Catholic Encyclopedia calls a “repulsive doctrine.” Craig might try to argue that the condemned’s free will is such that he will always choose evil over good (or apparent good over true good). But if his will is so set, then he is, in a way, already confirmed in evil and resembles demons in this respect. Further, Craig might say, God is a utilitarian Who maximizes human happiness, and He cannot save the reprobate without lowering the total utility. For example, if God saves X, then Y, Z, and W will be condemned, and vice versa. Hence God chooses to save the three and allow one to destroy himself. But now the one who is sacrificed for the greater good is no longer essentially depraved, unless God causes him to be such in order to cover His bases during the heavenly trial. Thus, Y, Z, and W are saved though X, perhaps partly thanks to his own actions: “I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life. … He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death.” (Rev 2:10-11) (This kind of utilitarian reasoning is likely behind Craig’s assertion that God, though omnipotent, may still not be able to save everybody; hence, the world in which everyone is saved is “unfeasible” for God.) I deal with some of the implications of God’s utilitarianism elsewhere.
Another point. Suppose that an essentially damned person dies as an infant. Surely, God will grant him some kind of happiness in the life beyond, let’s say, in limbo. Therefore, it would be a huge good work on our part to identify all the essentially damned, if it were possible, and kill them as soon as they are born or, better yet, abort them, for “it would be better for them if they are never born.” (paraphrasing Mt 26:24) This seems like an unhappy for reason result.
Thus, the brotherhood of men splits into two races: the chosen flowers and their enemies, the beyond-redemption weeds, who seek to strangle them spiritually. The two wage a merciless battle, the City of God vs. the City of Man. It’s as if the social body is fated to have cancer which must be cut off and disposed of in the furnace of hell. In fact, perhaps most of this body is cancerous, even though God has minimized the severity of the illness by creating the best possible world. The communion of saints is a highly exclusive club.
Now that the issue has been put in these fairly stark terms, I wonder how Craig would reply. (The alternative is universal salvation, and we can even keep Craig’s idea that if X is actually depraved, then he is necessarily depraved, though deny that anyone is actually depraved.)