Boomerang objections

As this reviewer notions, when annihilationists raise philosophical objections to the traditional position, their objections boomerang on annihilationism:

There are objections to conditionalism, of course, most which focus on matters of biblical interpretation, and I will not rehearse them here (for more see this pair of essays by Alan Gomes: 1, 2). Since I am trained as a philosopher, I will focus on some of the philosophical motivations for the view. With respect to proportionality, the objection that finite sins do not merit infinite punishment is ambiguous. In what sense are sins finite? Is it in terms of the amount of time it takes to commit them? If so, why couldn’t this undermine conditionalism as much as it does traditionalism? After all, the consequences of sins are eternal in both. Interestingly, this does not go unobserved by a contributor in this volume who argues that a good God could never perform divine capital punishment on sinners, and opts for a view where one goes out of existence as a result of one’s own spurning divine grace. According to this author, God is not in the business of meeting out punishment in the afterlife, which seems implausible given the biblical evidence cited above. 

Perhaps the finite/infinite distinction is to be understood in terms of harm: no sin could do infinite harm; therefore, it is not worthy of infinite punishment. But this is far from obvious. Suppose Smith would have repented at time t2, had Jones not murdered him at t1. Since Smith is forever shut out from the presence of God, Jones’s sin causes Smith an infinite loss. Assuming Jones does not repent, why shouldn’t Jones be suffer this same infinite loss too? Thus, the proportionality objection proves too little and the goodness-of-God objection proves too much. Conditionalism should probably just stick to the biblical arguments and not wander into these rhetorically empty maneuvers. 

http://ochuk.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/rethinking-hell-a-review/