From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 8:16 AM
To: alt.atheism.moderated
Cc: James Holding
Subject: Best argument for justness of hell?

James Patrick Holding (aka J.P. Holding) is the pseudonym of one Robert
Turkel, who maintains a Christian apologetics web "ministry" at
http://www.tektonics.org/. On his web site he issues to skeptics his
"chicken challenge":

     The challenge is simple: Pick up any essay of mine and refute it.
     [.. I]f I hear nothing, I'll guess I'll just have to assume that
     no one can respond to my material.

I have been systematically and comprehensively dismantling the "material"
in his essay about the Trilemma (i.e. that Jesus was liar, lunatic, or
lord). Turkel has been responding selectively to my criticisms, but is
apparently too "chicken" to dare name me or let his readers see my unedited
arguments. I by contrast have no fear of anyone reading him in all his
tedious and ineffectual detail. I am continuing to post our entire debate
to Usenet, and it is available through Google Groups from links at
http://humanknowledge.net/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Theology/Trilemma.html.

In his February response, Turkel referred to an email debate we'd had on
the justness of hell.  He simply lied when he said

     when I made the point elsewhere that eternal punishment wasn't
     unjust at all, as the reward for offense against infinite
     holiness, all he could do was call that position names.

I then pointed out that I had "sent him this (AFAIK unrebutted) argument":
-------------------------------
I don't see the issue of the justness of hell substantively addressed in
your essay. You outline the beginning of an argument:

  1. God is infinitely good.
  2. All sin and evil are therefore, morally, an infinite distance from
     God.
  3. Any who commit sin/evil, therefore, are an infinite distance from
     God's standard of goodness. There is an infinite gulf between God and
     the sinner.
  4. Our finiteness means that we are unable, ourselves, to pay for/atone
     for our sins, for we cannot cover by any means that infinite distance
     with finite human works.

I was expecting you to then state that only infinite punishment is
appropriate for this infinite distance, and proceed to give justifications
for these statements. But instead, the rest of the article is not about the
justness of the infinite price, but rather about the doctrine that Jesus'
self-sacrifice paid this price.

This leaves an argument that hardly needs rebutting. You make the startling
claim that 99.999% sinlessness is somehow an "infinite distance" on some
moral dimension from 100% sinlessness. Unfortunately, you give no
justification for this curious claim that on the spectrum of sinfulness,
one endpoint is somehow "infinitely" far from every other possible point.
While it is obviously true that any amount of sin is qualitatively
different from the complete absence of sin, it is by no means obvious (and
in fact quite counter-intuitive) that any amount of sin is in effect an
infinite amount, and that all amounts of sin are thus equivalent. Your
argument thus provides no rebuttal to the prima facie absurdity that a
single white lie in an otherwise sinless life could warrant an eternity of
torment.
-------------------------------

Now Turkel blatantly misrepresents the disposition of our debate:

     (Our critic also failed to answer a reply sent to him, making the
     point that a person could no more be "99% sinless" that one could
     be "99% pregnant".)

Holding indeed responded to the above detailed argument with the single
sentence:

     There is no such thing as "99.999% sinlessness" any more than
     there is any such thing as being "99.999% pregnant".

First, my example of "a single white lie in an otherwise sinless life"
could obviously be construed as "99.999% sinlessness" on a straightforward
basis of time spent sinning, but Turkel did not dare respond to my
example.  Second, and more importantly, Turkel in this throwaway sentence
does not even dare engage my denial that a single sin constitutes "infinite
distance" on some moral dimension from 100% sinlessness.

So instead of arguing that any sin is itself infinite and thus merits
infinite punishment, the best Turkel can do is merely call sin an "offense
against infinite holiness". Here on a.a.m. I recently shredded another
Christian's similar argument, thusly:

     Non-perfection is simply not the same thing as infinite
     imperfection. This is just a simple confusion of the two concepts
     of negation and infinity. The Christian argument is essentially
     this:

     God is perfectly good. Even a single evil act in a lifetime of
     sinlessness makes one fall infinitely short of God's standard of
     perfect goodness, and thus constitutes grounds for eternal
     punishment.

     An equally invalid argument can be made the other way:

     Satan is perfectly evil. Even a single good act in a lifetime of
     evil makes one fall infinitely short of Satan's standard of
     perfect evil, and thus constitutes grounds for eternal reward.

It's not surprising that Turkel attempted no substantive rebuttal to my
argument, even when I later re-sent it to him and then re-posted it to
refute his lie that "all [I] could do was call [his] position names". As I
told this other Christian,

     It's becoming clear that you don't have the stomach to defend an
     irrevocable unending period of net punishment or inflicted
     suffering for a repentant person.  That's not surprising; I've
     yet to interact with anyone who does.

Despite his one-sentence claim to the contrary, Turkel seems to be yet
another Christian who cannot mount a defense of the justness of hell.

--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net