Abstract
It is not hard to see how the doctrine of hell makes many people uncomfortable. In the face of any great suffering, people instinctively ask how a good God could allow such evils to happen. This question is even more pressing when considering the pains of hell; for hell is traditionally understood to be the greatest suffering imaginable: eternal torment. This problem has not always been mitigated by representations of hell in literature. Among the gallery of horrors in Dante’s Inferno, one particularly gruesome torment is the punishment meted out to Mohammed and other infidels:
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Notes
Dante, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1982 ) 257–259.
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin ( London: Granada Publishing Company, 1985 ) 264–265.
Plutarch’s Moralia, vol. VII, trans. Phillip H. de Lacy and Benedict Einarson ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959 ) 295.
John Stuart Mill, “The Utility of Religion,” from Three Essays on Religion, 2nd ed. ( London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1874 ) 113–114.
Bertrand Russell on God and Religion, ed. Al Seckel (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1986 ) 67.
Walls, pp. 12–13.
Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation ( Notre Dame, In.: U of Notre Dame P, 1992 ) 12–14.
Jonathan Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 20, 71, 102.
Peter Geach, Providence and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977) 130–132. Also see below, chapter 3, pp. 54–55.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1991 ) 352.
Including John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. ( New York: Harper & Row, 1978 ) 369.
Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 ) 195.
Peter van Inwagen, “When the Will is not Free”, Philosophical Studies 75 (1994): 100.
Surely there could be free agents who did not have the power of moral choice…[for instance] because they saw with complete clarity what was right and wrong and had no temptation to do anything except the right…It is a good thing that there exist free agents with the power and opportunity of choosing between morally good and morally evil actions, agents with sufficient moral discrimination to have some idea of the difference and some (though not overwhelming) temptation to do other than the morally good.“ ”The Problem of Evil“, in Reason at Work, ed. Steven M. Cahn, Patricia Kitcher, and George Sher, 2nd ed. ( Fort Worth: Harcour Biace]ovanovich, 1990 ) 601.
If moral credit is to be earned, the possible evils resisted or rejected have to be tempting to some significant degree“. ”A Variation on the Free-Will Defense“, Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987): 164.
Robert Kane, “Libertarianism and Rationality Revisited”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 26 (1988): 455–456.
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Seymour, C. (2000). Introduction. In: A Theodicy of Hell. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0604-9_1
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