Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

I see two reasons for why not everyone can be saved.

1. There are persons who are transcircumstantially depraved. T-c depravity is entirely equivalent to the Calvinistic doctrine of positive reprobation. It postulates a peculiar species of man, one which is totally unreceptive to any kind of saving grace. I have written on it before, and my conclusion has not changed: William Lane Craig should be ashamed of himself for putting together such an idea.

2. The enormously complex human interconnections in the world do not allow everyone to be saved; instead, there must a some sort of utilitarian optimization of, say, total human happiness. I quote Rev 2:10 in On Craig on Salvation, Part II. But surely, the devil, too, may act through secondary causes: it is wicked men who will imprison the apostles. If the devil is doomed, why not those men? Against this I already made the point that God is too good an artisan to throw away his work. And I’m not even that sure there is a devil. But we can argue also that sending people to hell does not merely fail to add happiness to the total (however aggregated) but rather subtracts an enormous amount from it, as hell is pain that, thankfully, cannot be conceived. Henry Hazlitt makes a similar point in his The Foundations of Morality: if one half of the population enslaves the other half, there will be a great decrease in total utility. What of God’s artificially hardening people’s hearts in order to bring about some greater good? (e.g., Ex 4:21, Ex 7:3) I say that (1) this may have been merely a temporary effect and (2) this is all OT stuff which no longer applies to us.

Moreover, a case can be made that if some are condemned, then at least one half of the world are condemned. Presumably, each good person, scheduled for salvation, must encounter moral evil to overcome. But if, say, only 1/10 of the population were scumbags who are chaff to be burned, there may not be enough moral evil in the world to create a good challenge for the saints. Yet if exactly half the world are slated for hellfire, then, just as there is a single guardian angel for each person, there is a single human demon-in-the-making (or rather, human-in-the-unmaking) for each person, as well. A crude calculation, to be sure. But as we shall see, at least somewhat compelling.

Again it may be argued that the damned are an inescapable price to pay for the salvation of the elect. But my opinion is that this price, even in the form of a single condemned person, is far too high. If I were God, and if I foresaw the eternal torture of the damned, I wouldn’t have created the world. And if the number crunching in the previous paragraph makes sense, then the bliss of the saved may well be completely offset by the suffering of the damned. Why create the world then? Now we may further ask, what do the saved care about the damned? Let the whole world be deservedly destroyed, so long as I am OK. This may be a defensible attitude from my point of view (cf. Aquinas, ST, II-I, 4, 8: “Is the fellowship of friends necessary for happiness?”) but certainly not from God’s who would be revealed as profoundly incompetent and even insane to have led almost all of the world to ruin.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.