God and growing block

1. On the growing block theory of time, if God is in time, God grows.

2. God doesn’t grow.

3. So, God is not time or the growing block theory is not true.

Divine timelessness

This is probably the simplest argument for the timelessness of God, and somehow I’ve missed out on it in the past:

1. God does not change.

2. Creation has a finite age.

3. There is nothing outside of creation besides God.

4. So, change has a finite age. (1–3)

5. There is no time without change.

6. So, time has a finite age. (4,5)

7. If something is in time, it has an age which is less than or equal to the age of time.

8. God does not have a finite age.

9. God is not in time. (6–8)

Premise (2) is supported by causal finitism and is also a part of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith.

Some philosophers deny (3): they think abstract things exist besides God and creation. But this theologically problematic view does not affect the argument. For abstract things are either unchanging or they change as a result of change in concrete things (for instance, a presentist will say that sets come into existence when their members do).

The most problematic premise in my view is (5).

Could a being in time be eternal in Boethius' sense?

Famously, Boethius says that an eternal being, unlike a merely temporally everlasting being, embraces all of its infinite life at once, “possess[ing] the whole fulness of unending life at once”. What’s that mean?

Our life is strung out across time. Sitting right now I as I am I do not embrace the past and future portions of my life where I am lying down or standing up. If I fully and vividly knew my past and my future, I would be a little closer to being eternal, but it would still not be true that I possess the fullness of that life at once. For it would still be true that I now only possess the property of being seated and not the property of lying down or of standing up. So I think epistemic things are not enough for eternity. And this seems intuitively right—eternity is not an epistemic matter. (Could you have an eternal being that isn’t minded? I don’t see why not.) A necessary condition for being eternal is being unchanging.

But being unchanging is not sufficient. Suppose I were everlastingly frozen sitting in front of my laptop. It would still be true that in addition to the present part of my life there is the future part and the past part, and further subdivisions of these, even if they happen to be boringly all alike. The life of an eternal being does not have temporal divisions, even boring ones. It is all at once.

Here is a weird thought experiment. Imagine you are an everlasting point-sized being with a rich and changing mental life. Suppose all your life is spent at the one spatial location (x₀,y₀,z₀). But now imagine that you get infinitely multilocated across all time, in such a way that your numerically same life occurs at every x-coordinate. Thus, you live your everlasting and rich mental life (x,y₀,z₀) for every possible value of x, and it’s the very same life. Your life isn’t spatially divided. The life at x-coordinate  − 7.0 is not merely qualitatively but numerically the same life as the one at x-coordinate  + 99.4.

Now, one more step. Your life is within a four-dimensional spacetime. Assume that spacetime is Galilean or Minkowskian. Now imagine rotating your life in the four-dimensional spacetime in such a way that what was previously along the x-axis is along the t-axis and vice versa. So now your rich and temporally varied mental life becomes temporally unchanging, but all the variation is now strung out spatially along the x-axis. Furthermore, whereas previously due to multilocation you had your life wholly at every x-coordinate, now you have your life wholly—and the numerically same life—at every t-coordinate. Thus, you have an infinite life all at once at every time for everlasting time. Your life isn’t temporally divided: tomorrow’s life is not simply just like today’s, but it is the numerically same as today’s, because your life is fully multilocated at all the different times.

Here is an interesting thing to note about this. This “sideways life”, varying along the x-axis, satisfies the Boethian definition of eternity even though the life is found in time—indeed at every time. If this is right, then having an eternal life in the Boethian sense is compatible with being in time!

Of course, God is not like you are in my weird story. In my story, your life includes different instances of consciousness strung out along the x-axis, though not along the t-axis. Still this kind of inner division is contrary to the undividedness of the divine mind. An eternal God would not have such divisions either. Nor would he be spatial. Perhaps an argument can be made that if God possesses Boethian eternity, then he has to be timeless. But I think that’s not going to be an easy argument to make.

If this is right, then I have overcome an obstacle to combining classical theism with the A-theory of time. I am convinced that an omniscient being has to be in time if the A-theory is true. But if a being can be in time and yet eternal in the Boethian sense, then a classical theist may be able to accept the A-theory of time. After all, Boethius is paradigmatically a classical theist.

That said, my own view is that the above argument just shows that Boethius has not given us a fully satisfactory characterization of eternity. And I have other reasons to reject the A-theory besides theistic ones.

Identity and eternity

Suppose that you are an immortal who lived for an infinite amount of time, and each year, your body replaces all its cells with new cells constructed from the matter in your food. Furthermore, you only eat local food, and at the beginning of each year it is randomly chosen by a coin toss whether you will live in Australia or America. Moreover, in the world we are imagining, the food in Australia and America has no matter in common.

Consider these two plausible principles:

1. If x and y are people living in worlds w₁ and w₂, respectively, and at no time t in their lives do they have any matter in common, then x ≠ y.

2. The identity of an already existing person never depends on what will happen to that person in the future.

But now whether you exist in year n does not depends on what happens in year n, since you are immortal and by (2) your identity was already determined in year n − 1. By the same token, whether you exist in year n does not depend on what happens in year n − 1, and so on. In particular, it follows that whether you exist now does not depend on any particular coin toss. However, by (1) whether you exist does depend on the totality of the coin tosses, since if all the coin tosses go differently from how they actually do, the matter in the body would always be different, and hence by (1) the person would be different.

But it is quite paradoxical that your existence depends on the coin tosses collectively and yet each one is irrelevant. This points to the hypothesis that beings that are significantly changeable cannot be eternal (and slightly supports causal finitism).

If you think that your identity also depends on your memories, add that in Australia and America you form different memories. If you think that your identity depends on your soul, then instead of running the argument about a human being, run it against something soulless.

If you think all complex objects have something like soul (as I do), the argument may not impress.

The pace of reception of goods

Suppose I know that from now on for an infinite number of years, I will be offered an annual game. A die will be rolled, I will be asked to guess whether the die will show six, and if I guess right, I will get a slice of delicious chocolate cake (one of my favorite foods).

Intuitively, I rationally should guess “Not a six”, and thereby get a 5/6 chance of the prize instead of the 1/6 chance if I guess “Six”.

But suppose that instead of the prizes being slices of chocolate cake, there is an infinite supply of delightful and varied P. G. Wodehouse novels (he’s one of my favorite authors), numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each prize is the opportunity to read the next one. Moreover, the pleasure of reading book n after book n − 1 is the same regardless of whether the interval in between is longer or shorter, there being advantages and disadvantages of each interval that cancel out (at shorter intervals, one can make more literary connections between novels and remember the recurring characters a little better; but at longer intervals, one’s hunger for Wodehouse will have grown).

Now, it is clear that there is no benefit to guessing “Not a six” rather than “Six”. For whatever I guess, I am going to read every book eventually, and the pace at which I read them doesn’t seem prudentially relevant.

At this point, I wonder if I should revise my statement that in the cake case I should guess “Not a six”. I really don’t know. I can make the cake case seem just like the book case: There is an infinite supply of slices of cake, frozen near-instantly in liquid helium and numbered 1, 2, 3, …, and each time I win, I get the next slice. So it seems that whatever I do, I will eat each slice over eternity. So what difference does it make that if I guess “Not a six”, I will eat the slices at a faster pace?

On the other hand, it feels that when the pleasures are not merely equal in magnitude but qualitatively the same as in the cake case, the higher pace does matter. Imagine a non-random version where I choose between getting the prize every year and getting it every second year. Then on the every-second-year plan, the prize days are a proper subset of the prize days on the every-year plan. In the cake case, that seems to be all that matters, and so the every-year plan is better. But in the Wodehouse case, this consideration is undercut by the fact that each pleasure is different in sort, because I said the novels are varied, and I get to collect one of each regardless of which installment plan I choose.

Here is another reason to think that in the cake case, the pace matters: It clearly matters in the case of non-varied pain. It is clearly better to have a tooth pulled every two years than every year. But what about varied torture from a highly creative KGB officer? Can’t I say that on either installment plan, I get all the tortures, so neither plan is worse than the other? That feels like the wrong thing to say: the every-second-year plan still seems better even if the tortures are varied.

I am fairly confident that in the novel case—and especially if the novels continue to be varied—the pace doesn’t matter, and so in the original game version, it doesn’t matter how I gamble. I am less confident of what to say about the cake version, but the torture case pushes me to say that in the cake version, the pace does matter.

Perdurance

Here’s an interesting thing. Suppose perdurance is true. Then God cannot be in time. For if perdurantism is true and God is in time, then God is composed of infinitely many temporal parts. But:

1. This violates divine simplicity.

2. These parts are concrete and presumably not created by God, so there are concrete things other than God that God didn’t create.

3. God acts in virtue of the temporal parts acting, but then God’s actions are not the fundamental explainers.

4. The temporal parts are all-knowing, so God is not the only all-knowing entity.

This is utterly unacceptable. So, one cannot both accept perdurantism and that God is in time.

God and the B-theory of time

1. All reality is such that it can be known perfectly from the point of view of God.

2. The point of view of God is eternal and timeless.

3. Thus, all reality is such that it can be known perfectly from an eternal and timeless point of view.

4. If all reality is such that it can be known perfectly from an eternal and timeless point of view, then the B-theory of time is true.

5. So, the B-theory of time is true.

I am not sure of premise (4), however.

Internal time and God

1. The internal time of a substance is constituted by the causal order within its accidents.
2. But God is a substance that has no accidents.
3. So God has no internal time.

Pity that both premises are controversial.

The blink of an eye response to the problem of evil

I want to confess something: I do not find the problem of evil compelling. I think to myself: Here, during the blink of an eye, there are horrendous things happening. But there is infinitely long life afterwards if God exists. For all we know, the horrendous things are just a blip in these infinitely long lives. And it just doesn’t seem hard to think that over an infinite future that initial blip could be justified, redeemed, defeated, compensated for with moral adequacy, sublated, etc.

It sounds insensitive to talk of the horrors that people live through as a blip. But a hundred years really is the blink of an eye in the face of eternity.

Wouldn’t we expect a perfect being to make the initial blink of an eye perfect, too? Maybe. But even if so, we would only expect it to be perfect as a beginning to an infinite life that we know next to nothing about. And it is hard to see how we would know what is perfect as a beginning to such a life.

This sounds like sceptical theism. But unlike the sceptical theist, I also think the standard theodicies—soul building, laws of nature, free will, etc.—are basically right. They each attempt to justify God’s permission of some or all evils by reference to things that are indeed good: the gradual building up of a soul, the order of the universe, a rightful autonomy, etc. They all have reasonable stories about how the permission of the evils is needed for these goods. There is, in mind, only one question about these theodicies: Are these goods worth paying such a terrible price, the price of allowing these horrors?

But in the face of an eternal future, I think the question of price fades for two reasons.

First, the goods gained by soul building and free will last for an infinite amount of time. It will forever be true that one has a soul that was built by these free choices. And the value of orderly laws of nature includes an order that is instrumental to the soul building as well as an order that is aesthetically valuable in itself. The benefits of the former order last for eternity, and the beauty of the laws of nature—even as exhibited during the initial blink of an eye—lasts for ever in memory. It is easy for an infinite duration of a significant good to be worth a very high price! (Don’t the evils last in memory, too? Yes, but while memories of beauty should be beautiful things, memories of evil should not be evils—think of the Church’s memory of the Cross.)

Second, it is very easy for God to compensate people during an infinite future for any undeserved evils they suffered during the initial blip. And typically one has no obligation to prevent someone’s suffering when (a) the prevention would have destroyed an important good and (b) one will compensate the person to an extent much greater than the sufferings. The goods pointed out by the theodicies are important goods, even if we worry that permitting the horrors is too high a price. And no matter how terrible these short-lived sufferings were—even if the short period of time, at most about a mere century, “seemed like eternity”—infinite time is ample space for compensation. (Of course, it would be wrong to intentionally inflict undeserved serious harms on someone even while planning to compensate.)

Objection 1: Can one say this while saying that the fleeting goods of our lives yield a teleological argument for the existence of God?

Response: One can. One can be quite sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is written by someone with great writing skills. But one can never be sure from a single paragraph in a novel that it is not written by someone with great writing skills. (For all we know, the author was parodying bad writing in that paragraph, and the paragraph reflects great skill. But notice that we cannot say about the great paragraph that maybe the author has no skills but was just parodying great writing.)

Objection 2: It begs the question to suppose our future lives are infinite.

Response: No. If God exists, it is very likely that the future lives of all persons, or at the very least of all persons who do not deserve to be annihilated, will be infinite. The proposition that God exists is equivalent to the disjunction: (God exists and there is eternal life) or (God exists and there is no eternal life). If the argument from evil presupposes the absence of eternal life, it is only an argument against the second disjunct. But most of the probability that God exists lies with the first disjunct, given that P(eternal life|God exists) is high. Hence, the argument doesn't do much unless it addresses the first disjunct.

Looping and eternal pleasure

Scenario 1: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then are annihilated.

Scenario 2: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then travel back in time, with memories reset, to restart that very same day of an internally looping life.

Scenario 3: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss, over and over infinitely many times, with memories reset.

Here are some initial intuitions I have:

1. Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 1.

2. Scenario 3 is at most a little better than Scenario 2.

But the following can be argued for:

3. Scenario 2 is no better than Scenario 1.

After all, you experience exactly the same period of bliss in Scenarios 1 and 2. Granted, in Scenario 1 you are annihilated, but (a) that doesn’t hurt, and (b) the only harm from the annihilation is that your existence is limited to a single day, which is also the case in Scenario 2. Time travel is admittedly cool, but because of the memory reset in Scenario 2, you don’t get the satisfaction of knowing you’re a time-traveler.

This is a paradox. How to get out of it? I see two options:

4. Deny the possibility of internal time loops.

5. Affirm that Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 2.

Regarding 4, one would also have to deny the possibility of external time loops. After all, it wouldn’t be significantly all that different for you if everybody’s time looped together in the same way, and so external time loops can be used to construct a variant on Scenario 2.

I personally like both 4 and 5.

Objection: On psychological theories of personal identity, memory reset is death and hence in Scenario 3 you only live one day.

Response 1: Psychological theories of personal identity are false.

Response 2: Modify Scenario 3. Before that day of bliss, you have a completely neutral day. On each of the days of deeply meaningful bliss, you remember that neutral day, but then have amnesia with respect to the last 24-hour period once each blissful day ends. By psychological theories, there is identity between the person on each blissful day and the neutral day, and hence by symmetry and transitivity of identity, there is identity between the person over all the blissful days.

Note: Scenario 1 is inspired by a question by user “Red”.

Eternal pleasure

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset before each repeat. If hedonism were true, this would be a truly wonderful life, much better than your actual life. But it seems to be a pretty rotten life. So hedonism seems quite far from the truth.

But could there, perhaps, be a pleasure such that eternal repetition of it, in and of itself, would be worth having? It would have to be a pleasure that carries its meaningfulness in itself, one whose quale itself is deeply meaningful. It would have to have be an experience of infinite depth. Could we have such an experience? With Aquinas, I think philosophy cannot answer this question, though theology can.

Might the damned design their hell?

In my Death and Afterlife class, we were reading about whether immortality is worth having. The following has become clear to me: it is not easy to design an eternal life that isn't in some way hellish. An eternal life of fixed capabilities would involve the boredom of infinite repetition, and we could easily get bored with a life of growing capabilities, too, as things become too easy. To have a good infinite life, a human being needs something utterly exceeding our ordinary life--like the beatific union with an infinite God--or a very carefully fine-tuned life, say a life where our capabilities grow without bounds but the problems set for these capabilities grow in such a way as to neither be too frustrating or too easy.

This makes plausible the model of hell on which the life of the damned is just a life they designed for themselves. For the damned would be designing a life apart from God, and yet being wicked would not be able to wisely fine-tune such a life.

But I don't think we should embrace without restriction the model on which the damned design their eternal life. For some clever but still wicked people could design an eternal life of infinite recurrence and great sensory pleasure, with amnesia between the recurrences. Such a life, while nightmarish from the perspective of an outsider who knows that all the pleasures are a cycle of repetition and forgetting, could be blissful from the inside. Likewise, a wicked person could design an eternal life at the level of a contented pig. Again, to the outsider it would be nightmarish, but from the inside the wallowing would be delightful. However, I think the biblical picture of hell makes hell not only miserable from the outside but also from the inside.

Perhaps we should have this model of hell: The damned design their own eternal life subject to the constraint that there is no longer room for self-deceit, forgetting, drunken stupor or the like. On this model, God imposes suffering on the damned, but he does it by means of bestowing three good things: (a) ensuring the damned are no longer capable of self-deceit, deadening of the intellect or the like; (b) giving the damned autonomy over their own infinite lives; and (c) ensuring that the life does not end. In fact, God could simply bestow these three good things on damned and blessed alike.

Another model of hell worth thinking about?

Suppose that objectively, hell lasts forever. But while the first objective year of hell is experienced subjectively as a year long, the second objective year "goes by faster" as we say, and only takes half a year, the the third objective year "goes by even faster" and only takes a quarter of a year, and so on. Thus, while the damned will always exist and always be suffering, they will only experience two years' worth of suffering over that objectively eternal suffering.

Now the difficult question is whether this is an orthodox view of hell. When Jesus talks about the suffering being everlasting, is he talking of subjective or objective time? We certainly wouldn't find the analogous view of heaven satisfactory. But heaven and hell aren't exact parallels: in heaven one is with God, and the absence of God is not much of a parallel to God.

Now, without affirming the model, it can still be of some use in apologetics. For suppose a non-Christian objects that nobody deserves an everlasting hell. One answer is Anselm's: an infinite crime deserves infinite punishment and some crimes against an infinite being are infinite. But given the above model or the alternate model here, one can say that an everlasting hell could involve only a finite amount of suffering. So one can say: if someone is damned, then either she committed a crime that deserves infinite punishment or her total suffering is finite. Since both options are compatible with everlasting hell, in neither case does the objection to an everlasting hell go through. And one can give this disjunctive answer while strongly inclined to think that the Anselmian infinite crime model of hell is superior, as long as the alternate model is not a heresy (if it is, I will of course withdraw it).

Eternal significance

I find myself pulled to the following two claims:

1. If nothing lasting can come from human activity (think of Russell's description of everything returning "again to the nebula"), then no human life has much meaning.
2. If nothing lasting can come from human activity, some human lives (e.g., lives lived in loving service to others) still have much meaning.

I don't think I am alone in finding myself pulled in these two directions. It would be nice if one could reconcile these two intuitions.

If the conditionals in (1) and (2) are material, then there is an easy way to reconcile these two intuitions. For if they are material conditionals, then (1) and (2) together entail:

3. Something lasting can come from human activity.

And given (3), there is no contradiction between (1) and (2)—both are trivially true because their antecedents are false.

This seems too facile. (Maybe only because I am not sufficiently convinced by my arguments here. But I also think that this interpretation ignores the anti-material marker "still" in (2).) But here is a more sophisticated hypothesis about these two intuitions. Suppose that God has designed our world so that only events that can have eternal significance are deeply morally significant. Then it is contingently true that:

4. Nothing that lacks eternal significance has deep moral significance.

Moreover, suppose that God implants in us a strongly engrained intuition that (4) is true. He does this in order to set our sights on eternity and to comfort us under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. (I think here of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.) At the same time, the moral significance of events does not entirely come from their eternal significance. Thus, such counterfactuals as

5. If lives of loving service to others lacked eternal significance, they would still have deep moral significance

are true, and moral reflection can discover these truths.

This hypothesis would explain why we are drawn to (1). We are drawn to (1) because we have a deep divinely implanted intuition that (4) is true, and (4) makes (1) very plausible. Moreover, the hypothesis can explain why we are drawn to (2), namely that with reflection we discover (5) to be true. (Contrary to what the name "subjunctive conditional" suggests, we do use the indicative mood for subjunctive conditionals sometimes.)

The hypothesis also explains why it is hard to find arguments for (1), why belief in (1) is more of a gut feeling than an argued position, but nonetheless a gut feeling that it is hard to get rid of.

Finally, the hypothesis is compatible with the possibility of there being non-theists like Russell who overcome their pull to (1). The intuition isn't irresistable. The only plausible story as to how (4) can be true is that, in fact, God makes all morally significant things have potential eternal effects. So a non-theist is likely to realize that (4) fits poorly with her overall view, and hence get rid of (4).

This hypothesis about (1) and (2) charitably does about as much justice as can be done to both intuitions simultaneously. This gives us not insignificant reason to think the hypothesis is true, and hence that there exists a God who makes morally significant events have potentially eternal effects.

Of course, one might come up with naturalistic explanations of the pull to (1) and (2). But I suspect that these naturalistic explanations will end up simply denying one of the two intuitions, and then explaining why we have this mistaken view. An explanation of our intuitions on which the intuitions are true is to be preferred for anti-sceptical reasons.

A common mistake about hell

A common mistake about hell, often made by both contemporary advocates of the doctrine and their opponents, is the Horrific Thesis:

(HT) It is better not to exist at all, or even not to have existed at all, than to spend eternity in hell.

Given HT, it is easy to argue against hell.  All things that exist, exist by the continual creation of God.  Everything that God creates, or continually creates, is on balance good.  Therefore, nobody is better off not existing.  Hence if HT is true, nobody spends eternity in hell.  

But HT is false.  First, consider its Scriptural warrant.  There is one New Testament text directly related to HT, given in Matthew and Mark:

As for that man [the betrayer], it would have been better [kalon] for him had he not been born [ei ouk eggenêthê] (Matthew 26:24, Mark 14:21).  

But that text simply does not sufficiently support HT.  First, it does not say that it was better for Judas not to have existed, but at most that it would have been better for him not to have been born.  Since Judas had already existed by the time of his birth--I say he existed about nine months before his birth, but in any case surely he existed some time before his birth--the counterfactual taken literally compares two scenarios: Judas being born and Judas dying in utero.  Now had he died prior to birth, his eternal destination would be wherever Jewish babies ended up after death--either heaven or limbo.  On this reading, then, we are told that Judas would have been better off dying in utero and ending up in heaven or limbo than wherever he ended up.  (If he would have ended up in heaven had he died prior to birth, then the text does not even entail that Judas went to hell.  Maybe he would have been better off had he died in utero because then he would have ended up in a better state in heaven or because then he would have avoided purgatory.)  Second, the word kalon might also have been translated as "noble" or "honorable"--in classical Greek that is the primary meaning and the word seems to have that meaning in some New Testament uses as well.  Thus, even if we take the "had he not been born" non-literally as meaning "had he not existed", the text could simply be telling us that it would have been more noble or more honorable for him had he not existed, rather than altogether better.

The other part of HT's Scriptural warrant are the scary descriptions--lake of fire, worm that dieth not--of what existence in hell is like.  But we should read Scripture consistently with Scripture.  And Scripture also tells us of a God who loves all, whose sun shines on sinner and righteous alike, who created everything and it was all good.  Thus we should temper our interpretations of the harrowing descriptions with the conviction that God does not create or sustain in existence that for which it would be better not to exist.

(Objection: Maybe it is agent-centeredly worse for the person in hell to exist than not to, but it is better that she exist than not.  Response: But better for whom or what?  God's activity is primarily guided by love.  When he acts for a good cause, he does so for someone or something.  Is it better for God that the person suffer?  The Christian tradition will not be happy with this reading.  Is it better for others?  But how?  Tertullian suggested that the saved will get joy from watching the punishment of the damned.  But even if he is right, this can only be true if the punishment of the damned has a value independent of the saved watching it, since the saved get joy only out of watching good things.  No, if it is better simpliciter that the person be in hell than not exist, it is better for the person in hell.)

One might ask, of course, if it is possible to have eternal suffering and yet to have a life worth living.  But surely the answer is positive.  One way for the answer to be positive is for Augustine and Aquinas to be right about the value of existence, or at least human existence: this value is such that it is worth existing no matter how much one suffers.  Another way would be if the overall suffering is combined with other valuable features that make the life overall worth living, whether or not the agent feels it to be worth living.  These could perhaps include:

• the intrinsic value of receiving one's just deserts
• the value of knowing various truths (such as that God exists and that one is a sinner)
• moral improvement (though one never actually reaches moral purity)
• the value of useful work
• playing a part in God's plan, especially the justice aspect of it
• etc.

It should also be remembered that an externally infinite length of suffering is logically compatible with the total amount of suffering being finite (though I am not endorsing the view that the total amount of suffering in hell is finite), e.g., due to asymptotic decrease or changes in the subjective flow of time.

We should, in fact, take the rejection of HT to be a part of the doctrine of hell.  For the rejection of HT follows from central theological commitments of the Christian tradition, and doctrines must be understood not in isolation but in the context of the implications for them of other doctrines.  And a fortiori we should not take HT to be an essential part of the doctrine of hell.  If we did that, we would have to absurdly say that neither Augustine nor Aquinas believed in hell, since they rejected HT.

Suppose we reject HT.  Then we can imagine the following.  God is considering creating ten billion people and then making sure, or all but making sure, that they are all saved, whether by means of offering them opportunity after opportunity for salvation, over a potentially infinite amount of time, until they agree, wiping their memories as needed, or by means of eventually canceling people's freedom and making them be saved whether they so choose or not, or by giving them such strong inclinations towards virtue that they are practically certain to do right.  But God might consider the following attractive alternative.  Create twenty billion people instead, where each has probability 3/4 of being saved.  So, about 15 billion people will be saved on this scenario (and so in terms of the number of people saved, it is better than the first scenario).  Moreover, each of these 15 billion people now has a much more serious chance of being damned, and hence her free choice has a greater significance and value than the choices that the ten billion people in the first scenario does.  Now, this scenario is tough on the approximately five billion people who will end up damned.  But these people are at least as well off existing as not, and so as long as God didn't intend them to be damned, and as long as God offered them serious opportunities for salvation, it does not seem that anything problematic has been done by God.  So there seems to be a serious case for God to actualize the second scenario instead--God could have a good reason to do so.  (This argument works poorly if Molinism is true.  Too bad for Molinism.)

Hence, if we reject HT, hell seems justifiable.  And we should reject HT.

Deep Thoughts XXVII

Only the eternal is forever.

[Actually, this is only a necessary truth on some readings of "forever" and "eternal". We need to read "eternal" as compatible with merely futureward eternity, but not pastward eternity. We need to read "forever" as implying infinite futureward temporal extent, so that existing at every time not count as sufficient for existing forever (imagine a world where the timeline has only a finite extent from beginning to end—we don't want to count a being that exists from the beginning to the end of time as existing forever in that world). It's worth noting that the converse of the above Deep Thought might not be a necessary truth. For a timeless being can be eternal, but I am not sure a timeless being counts as existing "forever", except of course in an analogical sense.]

An odd puzzle about eternal life

Suppose I am going to live forever. I promise you that I will one day sing Yankee Doodle to you. But I never do. It seems like in the world where this happens, I do something wrong, namely broken my promise to you (if it is acceptable to break promises with good reason, then in all of my examples add the proviso that there is no good reason). But when do I break the promise or do this wrong? At any given time t, I am in compliance with the promise (i.e., my actions are compatible with the fulfillment of the promise).

I can run the same puzzle on a finite interval. Suppose I have the superpower of singing Yankee Doodle at any exact given time I wish, and I promise you that before noon I will start to sing Yankee Doodle. But I don't. I've done something wrong. But when? At any time before noon, I am still in compliance with the promise, so I haven't done anything wrong yet. At noon, it's too late to comply, so I have an excuse for not starting to sing at noon—it wouldn't be the fulfillment of the promise. So when have I done wrong?

There are a couple of moves one could make in response:

1. We can say that the above paradoxes tell us something about the nature of time or action, such as that it is impossible for one to have an infinite number of choices.
2. We can deny the principle that if you do wrong, you do wrong at some time. Denying this principle may push one towards four-dimensionalism, though perhaps the denial is less radical in the case of omissions than of commissions.
3. We could conclude that certain kinds of open-ended promises are invalid. We could try to say that it is a necessary condition on the validity of a promise that the promise could (in a contextually relevant sense of "could") give one a reason to act on pain of violating it. Thus, I cannot validly promise you that the weather will be nice tomorrow, because the weather is not up to me, so I cannot (in the ordinary sense) get a reason to act on pain of violating the promise. In the Yankee Doodle cases, while I have a reason to sing Yankee Doodle at many different times, at no time do I have, or can have, a reason to sing Yankee Doodle on pain of violating the promise (because there is always more time). So the promise is not valid. This is an ad hoc restriction on promising: it is of the very nature of promises to give rise to reasons to do something on pain of violation of the promise.

I think (3) is probably the best way out.

Can timeless things change?

It seems that the answer has to be negative—isn't the idea utterly absurd? But suppose that an A-theory is true and Fred is a timeless being. Let W be the property of being (timelessly) in a world where a war is (presently) occurring. It seems that on A-theories this is a genuine property, and it was true in 1944 that Fred then had W and it is no longer true in 2008 that Fred has W. So it seems that Fred has changed in respect of W. The B-theorist is apt to deny the existence of such a property as W, and instead talk of the family of properties W_t of being (timelessly) in a world where a war is occurring at t. It was true Fred in 1944 had W₁₉₄₄ and it is true in 2008 that he does not have W₂₀₀₈, but that is not a change, since likewise it was true in 1944 that Fred had not-W₂₀₀₈ and it is true in 2008 that Fred has W₁₉₄₄.

So, if the A-theory is true (or at least if one of those A-theories is true that allow tensed properties like W), it follows that timeless beings change. Of course, the change is extrinsic. But even extrinsic change is puzzling in the case of a timeless being. Look at it from Fred's point of view. Does he or does not have W? It seems both, but that is absurd. In the case of a being in time, we would say that the question is ambiguous—does he have W at what time? But we cannot disambiguate this from Fred's point of view.

Here is something an A-theorist might say. She might say—in fact, I think that on independent grounds she should say it—that at every time, a different world is actual. (Right now, a world without a present world war is actual. In 1944, a world with a present world war was actual.) Then there is no contradiction in Fred's both having and not having W, since since in one world (the 1944 one) he has W and in the other (the 2008 one) he does not.

If we take this route, then the "objective change" that A-theorists are enamored of will be a movement (an orderly one) from one world to another. But Fred undergoes that movement just as much as you and I—in 2005 he was in the 2005 world, and in 2008 he is in the 2008 world—though there is a difference whose significance I am unable to evaluate at present (Fred exists timelessly in both worlds, while you and I exist presently in both worlds). It seems, then, that Fred undergoes objective change, while being outside of time. That seems absurd. Moreover, if we take this route then the following conceptual truth becomes really hard to account for: Nothing outside of time can undergo intrinsic change. But why can't Fred have one set of intrinsic properties in the 1944 world and another in the 2008 world? And if he did, then he would be changing in respect of intrinsic properties.

If the above is right, then it seems that what the A-theorist needs to do is to deny the possibility of timeless beings. This has some interesting consequences. If time began with the big bang, and if we are realists about mathematical entities, then the number 7 is about fifteen billion years old, give or take a couple of billion, and if time were to come to an end, then the number 7 would cease to exist. And once we've allowed abstracta to be in time, why should it be any more absurd to allow them in space? I do not know if these kinds of considerations form knock-down arguments against the view (and hence against the A-theory, if the A-theorist needs to go there), but they are worth thinking about.

The semi-eternal itch

Let w be a world where there is only one finite being, George. George has always existed in w. Moreover, each day for George has been just like the previous. Each day, George is mildly happy overall—except he has a minor itch that he can't scratch. Let us suppose that the laws of nature in w are such that they allow one deviation from the endless cycle of repetition from day to day—the itch can disappear (and only in one way, at one particular time of day). After the itch disappears, each day will be mildly happy, and indeed happier than before, and each day, except the first post-itch day, will be just like the previous for George (George won't remember how many days it has been he has lost the itch), forever. Here is an intuition:

1. It is better for George to have his itch disappear tomorrow than to have his itch disappear in a billion years.

But not all theories of time can do justice to this intuition. If time is relational (which also, I think, would imply that the B-theory holds), and we tell the details of the story right, then the world where the itch disappears today if the same as the world where the itch disappears in a billion years—both are worlds where there is an itch for an infinite number of years, and then there is no itch for another infinite number of years. Therefore, either time is not relational or else no situation like the above is possible. But the only good reason to think that no situation like the above is possible is if one thinks that there cannot be indiscernibles or one thinks that it is impossible to have existed for an infinite amount of time. Thus, either time is not relational or there cannot be indiscernible times or it is impossible to have existed for an infinite amount of time. Since I think time is relational, I conclude that either there cannot be indiscernible times or it is impossible to have existed for an infinite amount of time.

It's also not clear that presentism fits with (1). In both of the scenarios mentioned in (1), there is a present itch, and the future does not exist. So why should one of the scenarios be better than the other? If this argument, which I am less sure of, is right, then either presentism is false or it is impossible to have existed for an infinite amount of time.

It would be nice to do better than just getting disjunctive conclusions. For that, we'd need other arguments to rule out of more disjuncts.

Death and presentism

By "death" in this post, I shall mean the permanent cessation of the existence of a person. I do not know if death occurs (it does not occur among human persons), or even if it is metaphysically possible (it might be incompatible with divine goodness). Presentism is the view that only presently existent things and present events exist. Eternalism is the view that there are pastly and futurely existent things and past and future events. Growing Block is the view that there are pastly existent things and past events but no future ones (there are two versions of Growing Block, depending on what one says about the present).

The following argument is valid:

1. Death in and of itself is tragic. (Premise)
2. Existing within one region in space-time and being wholly absent from another region or set of regions in space-time is not in and of itself tragic. (Premise)
3. If Presentism is false, then Growing Block or Eternalism is true. (Premise)
4. If Growing Block or Eternalism is true, then a person's being dead at t consists in his existing in the region of space-time prior to t and being wholly absent from the region of space time spanning from t onward. (Premise)
5. Therefore, if Growing Block or Eternalism is true, death in and of itself is not tragic. (By (2) and (4))
6. Therefore, if Presentism is false, death in and of itself is not tragic. (By (3) and (5))
7. Therefore, Presentism is true. (By (1) and (6))

Now, one might worry that some deaths are tragic, such as those of good or happy persons, while others, those of bad or unhappy persons, are not. I am inclined to disagree, but I think the argument can be modified to handle this, for instance by modifying (2) to say that existing within one region and being wholly absent from another while being happy and good in the first region is not in and of itself tragic.

This seems to me to be a powerful argument for Presentism, as long as the Presentist can tell us what on her view makes death tragic that does not succumb to a similar argument. And I think she can do that. To be presently dead is tragic in that one does not exist even though one had existed. (This is not an instance of occupying one space-time region rather than another.) And that one will be dead is tragic in that its being the case that something tragic will happen is already tragic.

But I am still an eternalist B-theorist. So what do I deny in the argument? I have to admit that I have intuitions in favor of each of (1)-(4). But I think we can distinguish the intrinsic tragedy of death in two ways. First, we can think of the tragedy of death for the dead person, and second, we can think of the tragedy of his death for others or for the universe. When we talk of tragedy-for-others, I think we have reason to deny (2). For, yes, the total absence of a person from regions of space-time can be tragic for others, since it can entail that they cannot futurely meet this person, etc.

But the "in and of itself" in (1) and (2) probably signals that we're talking of the tragedy-for-self. But then we can actually build an argument against Presentism:

8. It is tragic for the dead person that she is now dead. (Premise)
9. Nothing is tragic for someone who does not exist. (Premise)
10. If Presentism is true, someone who does not now exist does not exist. (Premise)
11. Therefore, if Presentism is true, nothing is tragic for someone who does not now exist. (By (9) and (10))
12. Therefore, Presentism is false. (By (8) and (11))

Now we have true paradox. We have premises (1)-(4) which are all plausible and entail that Presentism is true, and premises (8)-(10) which are all plausible and entail that Presentism is false. We need to resolve this paradox. I do so, rather cautiously and not fully satisfied with this, by denying (1) and (8). What matters vis-à-vis the person himself is not so much the continuation of existence (death being its opposite), but an internal temporally infinite existence, as I have suggested in some past posts (e.g., see this one). Let me end by summarizing (perhaps in different form) some of the ideas from these posts.

Suppose that I live alone. It is, then, no better for me to live a hundred chronometric years of fulfilling and blissful spiritual and mathematical activity than it is to live fifty years of the same activity sped up by a factor of two. Well, then, it is no better for me to live for an infinite number of chronometric years, than to live the same activity at an ever increasing pace over the period of a hundred years, by having one's functioning sped up by a factor of two for the first fifty chronometric years, another factor of two for the next twenty-five, another factor of two for the next 12.5, and so on. That at the end of a hundred chronometric years I will be dead is no tragedy for me, if I have lived this life of infinite internal temporal length.

Or suppose that I have a space-time travel machine, an elixir of eternal youth and our universe is infinite spatially. In 2030, I will use my space-time machine to travel to the year 2000 in some other galaxy[note 1]. There I will live thirty good and meaningful years, and then in 2030, I will move to the year 2000 in another galaxy. And so on. Note that I do not exist in 2031 or at any later date. So I die before 2031. (Necessary truth: If I do not exist at t, but existed earlier, then I died before t.) But this death is no tragedy for me, because I am assured of an internally infinite span of good and meaningful life.

So, I cautiously deny (1) and (8) in the case of tragedy for the person. Therefore, I cannot accept either the first argument, which was for Presentism, nor the second, which was against.