I’m not going to undertake here a thorough refutation of the free will defense of infernalism, but just present a few thoughts.
The free will defense of infernalism states that in order for humans to truly love and be loved, we must have free will. In order for us to be more than robots, we must have the ability to choose freely whether to love God. And therefore, if we truly are free, some of us may well choose to reject God, and that must mean we get hell. C.S. Lewis said, “some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot” (“The Shocking Alternative” from Mere Christianity).
But what is seldom pointed out is that if free will is so important to our value in the eyes of God and to our eternal fate, why does each of us have so little of it? I do not argue that we have no free will, simply that our free will is only partial, incomplete. I consider it a fairly obvious axiomatic truth that we have some power of choice, at least. Others may disagree with me and say free will is entirely illusory, but if they are right, everything I or they say on the matter is moot anyway: I have no choice over what I am saying here, and you have no choice how or whether to respond to it. There is no point worrying about the matter. (However, if those who say we have no free will are right, we have no choice anyway whether we worry about these things or not, and so on.)
That being said, how much free will do we have? It seems each and every one of us has chosen sin to the point where we deserve perdition and can avoid it only by the grace of God. It seems to be a standard theological claim that without the resurrection and grace of Christ, we’d all go to hell, and we’d all deserve it.
Funny how literally billions of people, all quite free, just happen to fail to make the right choice. If you gave an exam to billions of students and every last one failed, you might come to the reasonable conclusion the exam was unfair. (On the other hand, if we really do want to blame the billions of students instead, keep in mind the professor who wrote the exam up is the same one who tried to teach them in the first place. We would have reason to question his competence.) In fact, we are told not only that it is impossible for us to be sinless by our own efforts, but that it is the sin of pride to see it otherwise.
In other words, we are all inevitably damned by our own free will.
“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Indeed, I believe this quotation to be true. And if we were able to count up all our various crimes we might each of us truly say, “I might have sinned even more, but I chose not to; I might have sinned much less, but I chose not to,” and so on. I do not understand sin as sin in the most serious sense without the concept of free will. One might err in a state of unfreedom, but one must have some freedom to truly sin. But the record would seem to indicate that without exception we all freely choose to do what must make us deserving of damnation. (Of course, if we take up the idea instead that we are born deserving damnation because of the sins of distant ancestors, so much for the idea of free will. Clearly, we have no more freedom than robots after all, and the free will defense of hell falls.)
Either way, it seems this “free will” is a trap. Nor is this changed by the fact that any given sin of ours on any given occasion could have been avoided. It seems we all inevitably freely choose to sin from time to time (that is, if the sin is not inevitable on any given occasion, it will inevitably and frequently come nonetheless, and freely) and therefor become hell fodder.
The free will defense of hell tells us therefore that we need this free will in order to truly enter heaven, but that this same “free will” inevitably leads to us deserving the opposite.
Now, if we are in the midst of this paradox, that of inevitably freely choosing to sin, but we are told we still have enough free will to warrant our crimes serious enough to receive damnation, why might we not turn this on its head? Why not say that we shall all inevitably freely choose to accept the love, grace, and forgiveness God offers us and thereby be saved? C.S. Lewis and the infernalists object to this, but I don’t think they can do so without having to note that the same God who so cherishes our freedom in order to make meaningful eternal union with him possible, seems to have presented us in the meantime with a very strange sort of freedom indeed. When we are offered the grace of salvation we must be free to reject it or that grace is naught, it seems, but the same free will so necessary to our salvation earlier bound us powerlessly to be damned. We are forced to need salvation, but not forced to get it.
Let me put this another way. If we can claim we were free when we inevitably damned ourselves, why can we not be predestined (all of us) to receive salvation and say we accepted that in freedom also?
I said earlier that we must have freedom to truly sin. But is it not also the case that we must have as well unfreedom in order to sin? That is, must we not also be tempted to sin? And is not temptation, especially when we consider that it conflicts with our better impulses, a form of unfreedom? Who, being free from temptation, would choose to be tempted? Is the recovering alcoholic, torn between putting her life together and having another, potentially disastrous drink, more free that someone who just doesn’t want that drink at all? To be tempted is to have a will or desires divided against themselves, and this does not sound like freedom to me.
But this is where the story of Adam and Eve, quite frankly, screws us up. The way it is so often read leads us to think their fall into sin actually makes sense. They knew they should not eat the apple, but they were tempted, and fell. We all have this experience. But that is because we are free, but less than perfectly free. Would not a perfectly free Adam and Eve not be tempted to begin with? To understand their story, we would have to look at them through pre-lapsarian eyes, which is something we do not have (and hence, perhaps also a reason why Lewis could not imagine the creature he said he could not imagine).
In other words, sin, though real, does not make sense. And that is why hell does not make sense either, because it cannot exist without sin. (You may counter that if sin exists despite not making sense, hell might then exist anyway, but I would ask you on what basis. The existence of sin is experiential. On the other hand, many of us have suffered greatly, but I take it we have no direct evidence of the hell the infernalists are talking about.)
Alas, I feel as if there are further and more elusive developments to make on all this, but I must end here for now. There is something about philosophy and theology that always seems to avoid complete closure. This essay threatens to become a book. Indeed, one reason I blogged little until recently was my fear I could say nothing without saying everything, and that doing so was impossible anyway. But I then decided to accept the necessary lack of thoroughness needed to get anything done. Better a series of imperfect blog posts than that handful of long and perfect articles that are never written.