Hell
I am in the middle of reading "The Language of God" by Francis Collins. Like Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", he accurately represents science, so the differences between their positions and mine come down to philosophy and faith. The thought that keeps striking me is how much I share in common with them: science, history, etc. The major difference is that they make assertions about what exists outside the universe (God, the supernatural), and I profess agnosticism about it due to lack of evidence. The further thought that has dogged me lately is this: why does that simple difference carry such gravity? In the end, the answer to this question is not the existence of God, nor is it life after death. In the end, the answer is the doctrine of hell.
With no hell, it does not matter if we believe in a god or not. A God without a hell is one that recognizes the limitations placed on our knowledge and does not punish us for not recognizing him in this universe. This God is also not so petty as to take offense at the musings of men. With no hell, it does not matter if miracles happen or not (like Collins, C.S. Lewis, and Miller conjecture). These three would have little difficulty with a person voicing disagreement about supernatural intervention into the natural order if they did not believe that such opinions led to the damnation of one's soul. With no hell, the presence or absence of any other kind of afterlife is also a neutral question. The assertion of heaven, reincarnation, or eternal nothingness would be questions of much less offense if people didn't believe in hell as an option. Ultimately, it is hell - not God, not the supernatural, not Creationism, not Biblical inerrancy - that is the most damnable doctrine, since it is the one that stands in the way of rational discourse about all of the others.
2 comments:
With no hell, it does not matter if we believe in a god or not....
I disagree. For most of my Christian period (even the liberal phase, after I'd given up believing in Hell, or even much caring about an afterlife at all), I clung to the idea of God as Ultimate Meaning, that even if I ceased to exist as a separate conciousness, the fact of my life would be taken up and preserved as part of that larger whole. I blame C.S.Lewis' Neo-Platonism for this way of thinking. It took me a while to get OK with the idea that my personal significance probably will not outlast those who knew me (ie. no more than 75 or so years after my death).
You make a good point. Taking away the idea of hell does not in itself remove every difference between theists and non-theists. However, I believe a theist is much less threatened by the idea of atheism if they do not believe that entertaining an atheist's argument puts their soul at risk of eternal punishment.
Your comment pointed me to your website, which is pretty cool.
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