Pages

Monday, May 04, 2020

Annihilation and infant damnation

There are roughly three positions on hell:

A. Infernalism

On this view, eschatological punishment is never-ending. The damned suffer conscious eternal misery. 

B. Universalism

On this view, hell has a back door. Everyone will be saved in this life or the afterlife, although some may have to suffer remedial posthumous punishment to be saved.

C. Annihilationism

The impenitent will cease to exist. In principle, they could simply pass into oblivion when they die and that's it. That would dovetail nicely with physicalism. 

However, the Bible has a doctrine of the general resurrection, so annihilationists need to tack that on somewhere. The solution is to say the impenitent will be physically restored at the general resurrection, then annihilated. It's an ad hoc harmonization but the best they can do given the hand they dealt themselves. 

1. A related issue is the final fate of those who die below the age of reason. Because Infernalism is historically the dominant position, there's a traditional debate about whether some who died below the age of reason experience eternal misery.

However, as annihilationism gains grounds in nominally evangelical circles, that raises a parallel question in annihilationist eschatology regarding those who die before the age of reason. For instance:

Blake Giunta “Does Paul think all Jews who stay Jews are judged sinners and condemned to hell?” I answer: YES. Does this commit me to saying all children are likewise condemned? No. (Long discussion.) Moreover, I’m an annihilationist so I don't really mind saying they go to hell–i.e. punishment unto outer darkness. (E.g. I suspect my 6 month old would go to hell. It’s just that, unlike sinful adults who will first consciously suffer God’s just punishment/wrath prior to annihilation, innocent children like my son Luke would simply and immediate go right back to non-existence without pain. On my model, God has good reason to do this, and does no wrong because God does not owe Luke any more existence than he was already gifted.) 

2. That raises a number of questions. Blake doesn't seem to view annihilationism for those who die before the age of reason as punitive. The principle, rather, is that God never owes them existence in the first place, so God doesn't wrong them by not prolonging their existence. 

3. Does Blake think this is what happens to everyone who dies before the age of reason? It isn't punitive with a view to what they'd do if they grew up? It's not about their counterfactual future. 

4. God may have no obligation to initiate their existence, but having done so, does he assume a responsibility to and for rational creatures if he makes them? For instance, I may have no obligation to father a child, but having fathered a child, do I not thereby assume a parental duty to the child I fathered? Is there a duty to carry through with what I  began? 

Let's say I don't own my son existence, but I father a son anyway. At that stage, do I have the prerogative to make him revert to prenatal nonexistence, as if he never existened in the first place? 

One problem is that it isn't really a rollback the status quo ante, but a positive loss. My son now had the experience of conscious existence. So he has something to lose.

5. It seems to mean human existence has no inherent value. They don't exist, then they do exist, then they cease to exist. Their existence or nonexistence is entirely arbitrary. Like putting them in a time machine and sending them back to before they existed. Like flipping a coin. 

6. It seems to make creation gratuitous, as if there's no purpose for their existence. Like evolutionary dead-ends. Take the child who dies in a spontaneous miscarriage. On the annihilationist view, his existence simply terminates at that point. There's no intermediate state. No general resurrection for him. It was just a glitch. It arbitrarily ends at that point. 

No comments:

Post a Comment