Why would hell exist?
Marcus Gadson, a Dartmouth student and friend who blogs at The Gadson Review, has a post offering a justification for the existence of hell within the Christian religion. He offers three possible reasons - retribution, incapacitation (don’t let sinners pollute hell), and deterrence. I don’t really think these are sufficient for two reasons:
First - Hell is a disproportionately severe punishment. All three of Gadson’s justifications for the existence of hell are only valuable up until they violate the constraint that the punishment not be too severe. Perfect deterrence in society could be achieved through brutally torturing all convicted criminals, but we generally accept that such a punishment would be unjust. Indeed, in order for Gadson’s retribution point to work there has to be a proportional relationship between the crime and the punishment - it would be a very strange kind of retribution if the whole range of possible crimes were met with punishments that were arbitrarily lax or severe in each case. That means, that in addition to proving hell serves a purpose, Gadson also has to prove that hell doesn’t violate the proportionality constraint.
But hell can never be a proportional punishment because it is an infinite punishment for necessarily finite crimes. Transgressions committed on earth which are limited in scope by time and physics are punished for eternity with infinite, divine wrath. Gadson counters this argument by saying:
Now, we might be tempted to think there’s nothing so bad that an eternity spent in hell is a proportionate punishment. But that is from our view as humans, not God’s. Reading through the Bible, you find that God has really a low threshold for what constitutes a sin (at least in human eyes). Christ says that “whosoever looks at woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
It’s true that God does have this high standard, but it doesn’t really give a reason why, except that he’s God and can do what he wants. Given that Gadson is explaining why hell exists as a punishment for earthly sins, I think he has an obligation to do more than say it exists because God wanted it to. Given that it’s such a disproportionate punishment, I don’t think hell - as usually construed or understood - can actually be explained through Gadson’s judicial framework.
Second - I think one of the problems of analyzing the existence of hell under this framework is that it assumes God and society have analogous purposes for punishment. The best example of this problem, I think, is the deterrence argument. When societies set up laws and punishments, they don’t really care what citizens’ motives are for following those laws; it doesn’t matter whether someone chooses not to break the law because he wants to be moral or because he fears punishment. The same is not true for God. Because Christianity focuses so much on the personal relationship with God, the motive is what matters the most. I don’t think deterrence can really explain the existence of hell because I don’t think heaven/hell are meant to act as a carrot/stick combo for conversion. Assuming genuine conversion is what’s really important, badgering people into professing belief doesn’t make sense.
I think what this really means is that in order for hell to “work” within Christianity, it can’t really be understood as a terrible place of eternal punishment. Some thinkers have thought of hell as just an entrenched continuation of life on earth, a mundane, eternal life of separation from God. Regardless, some other alternate understanding (maybe just that hell is death and that’s all she wrote), which is less focused on hell as retribution or a deterrent, would make more sense.
