Heaven

Emerson Green

1 month ago

Sin in Heaven

Some apologists have asserted that you do have free will in heaven, but you wouldn’t want to do anything evil in heaven. After all, god is right there. So there’s no natural evil, because god has taken care of all the hurricanes and earthquakes and so on. I’m not sure why he couldn’t just take care of natural evil here, if he’s wiling to do it in heaven. At any rate, there’s no natural evil and there’s no evil caused by free will because even though everyone has it, no one would choose to sin in god’s presence. But according to them, Satan and his followers rejected God while they were in heaven, so not everyone is intimidated into behaving by god’s presence. If we could have the freedom to reject god in heaven, though, why wouldn’t god start everyone off in heaven and then allow them to reject them after that, like he did with the angels? Then we would know for sure that he was real, we would know exactly what he wants (i.e. which religion is true), and we would know exactly what we were rejecting. We would even have the example of Satan, so we would know exactly what would happen if we rejected god. How would that be worse than what we have now, when we don’t even know if god is real, let alone who he is or what he wants from us, or the consequences of rejecting his will.

But putting Satan aside, let’s say that no human has ever committed sin in heaven, because you just wouldn’t want to in god’s presence. The idea that you would have the ability to do evil, but would simply never choose to do evil amounts to god changing our natures in some way. With your nature, as it exists, without god tweaking it, you want things and do things that god condemns. You also have thoughts that are “sinful,” and according to Jesus, having sinful thoughts is the same thing as actually carrying out the act. So you would have to believe that for trillions of years, your nature, which is supposedly inherently evil, will never cause you to even have a single thought that god wouldn’t approve of. In order to prevent even sinful thoughts from arising, god must be changing your nature to some degree. But if it’s possible to shape our natures in such a way that’s acceptable to god and never causes us to even have evil thoughts in the first place, why couldn’t this have been our nature to begin with? If we still have freedom in heaven, and never have any sinful desires, like you have now, that must mean that you have been changed; but again, why wouldn’t god have just made our nature that way to begin with? Admitting that it’s possible to create our natures in such a way is to admit that god intentionally brought unnecessary evil into the world, which makes him malevolent. If it’s possible for our natures to be such that we don’t even have evil thoughts, but still have free will, then a good god would have made this our nature to begin with.

Free will?

Of course, maybe we don’t have free will in the afterlife and that’s how we get to a place with no sorrow. The other most popular answer from Christian apologists is that god actually does remove our free will in heaven, which kind of defeats the supposed reason for having it in the first place (namely, that it’s better than the alternatives). So if you A) think that the free will theodicy is powerful and B) think that heaven is better than life on earth, you need to explain how heaven manages to be so great. Either we get to keep our free will and never choose to commit evil, or we don’t have free will and god ensures there is no evil. Let’s just bite the bullet and say, “No, there is no free will in heaven,” (which some Christians actually do). It’s interesting that Satan and other angels apparently had the freedom to reject god in heaven, which means that angels have free will in heaven while humans don’t. At any rate, now that we’ve given up free will in heaven, it’s possible for there to be no sorrow, since god has total control of everything and is running a planned economy in regards to morality and behavior. But this has another disturbing implication that further contributes to the image of everyone in heaven being a lobotomized, brainwashed version of themselves. If there really is no sorrow in heaven, that means something else is being taken away from you: your love for other people.

Without gutting us of our free will or otherwise drastically altering our natures, there would still be the suffering that would be visited upon those in heaven who would be missing their children or their parents or friends or partners. If knowing that your child is burning alive at that moment doesn’t cause you to suffer, then you aren’t you anymore. The thing that looks like you isn’t you; You are dead. The creature in heaven is a robot programmed to worship God for all eternity. If you have no free will and god is in control of everything, including your nature and your feelings about loved ones, you’re essentially a doll that god is playing with in his insane, nightmarish dollhouse. You have no free will, you never commit an action or even have a thought that god doesn’t approve of, you don’t care that many of your family and friends are burning alive, and you’re singing to the madman who did this to you for all of eternity. What kind of lunatic even wants to be worshiped, let alone for trillions of years? And if you do argue that god eliminates our free will in heaven, you can’t say that god put the tree in the garden or gave us free will because he wants a real relationship with us, and if we don’t have the option to reject him, it’s not real love.

And that brings me to a crucial question: How good does heaven actually sound, when it comes down to it? As fun as it would be to spend eternity with Ray Comfort and Betsy DeVos and Dinesh D’Souza, how much does ceaseless worship actually appeal to you? Even if you’re a Christian, how much time do you spend doing it now?

Divine Justice

So we’ve talked a little about why the possibility of heaven or the existence of heaven creates huge problems for theists who are trying to answer the problem of evil. But in that context, heaven is usually invoked to serve a different function. Some apologists have argued that god will correct all wrongs in the afterlife, which makes up for them. Every tear will be dried and every injustice will be rectified. But that can’t be true. On Christianity, someone who has had every evil committed against them on earth could still end up in hell, and an absolute monster could end up in heaven.

This is because the criteria for going to heaven, as I’m often told, entails accepting Jesus’ free gift of salvation. I have to believe and accept god into my heart, and all my sins will be washed away. So you have to be a Christian, and the right kind of Christian. Catholics have the doctrine of extra ecclesium nulla salus — no salvation outside the church, and many protestants don’t consider Catholics to be true Christians. These are not small questions, considering what’s hanging in the balance. And it’s completely ahistorical to say that these differences don’t matter. There were centuries of violence in Europe over which Christian was the true Christian, and those who died thought it was a worthy cause to die for. Today, Christians just smile politely while they think to themselves that Unitarians are going to find out how wrong they really are when they wind up in hell, which I guess is an improvement. Whatever it takes to get them to stop killing each other. I’m glad we created secularism and liberalism and hold religious toleration as a value (no thanks to religion), but it would be great if god could just take a break from whatever he’s doing and clear this up for us.

You’re not sent to heaven or hell based on how much suffering you caused, or even how much sin you committed. It’s decided by sincerely believing the right things. But how does believing one thing over another merit being burned alive vs. not being burned alive? You can’t claim that hell is about justice when all one has to do to get out of hell, no matter the evil they committed, is utter a magic set of words or believe the right doctrines. You also can’t claim that hell is about justice when you can sin a lot less than others and still go there because you didn’t say the magic words and believe them sincerely.

As Frank Turek is fond of saying, god is a gentleman. He’s too loving and principled to let you into heaven unless you believed it was there before you died. God won’t force you or coerce you; you can either accept his loving invitation to worship him for eternity or you can go be in pain forever. It’s totally up to you. It’s not like god could’ve created more than two places to go in the afterlife, or allow annihilation to be an option, or not make the two places undetectable so nobody even knows for sure that they’re real. And never mind that he made the rules for going there and didn’t make those rules clear.

Besides appealing to god’s gentlemanly nature, believers love to excuse god’s psychotic behavior here by appealing to his perfect justice — he’s too committed to being a good judge to let abject criminals like ourselves off the hook for our sins, just like it would be unjust to let a mass murderer walk free.

This is a form of justice where someone in Auschwitz goes to hell but any guard at Auschwitz can go to paradise because he believed the right set of propositions and was saved by grace. I mean, how else are things going to be made right without setting Holocaust survivors and polytheists on fire for trillions of years? God is too just to do anything else. Even on the terms of Christians, heaven is not a good answer to the problem of evil, because, as I mentioned, you don’t end up in heaven or hell based on the amount of sinning you did — you’re saved by grace, not by works. So the criteria for going to heaven — being saved by grace and not by works — completely undermines the afterlife as an answer to the problem of evil. It was already a terrible answer to begin with, since no finite crime merits an infinite punishment. But if we’re judged in the afterlife by our beliefs or whether we accepted Jesus’ gift of salvation, it can’t be invoked at all as a safety net that guarantees ultimate justice. Despite all this, Christians still have the nerve to ask, “Where’s the ultimate justice in a godless universe?” In a naturalistic universe, Hitler did get away with it and his victims are dead. But at least Nazis aren’t being rewarded in heaven while their victims are being punished in hell for all eternity. Because of the bizarre criteria for being sorted in the afterlife, there is more justice in a godless universe than a Christian universe.

Substance Dualism

I don’t know how any of us would get to heaven if we didn’t have a soul — a nonphysical substance, separate from our physical bodies, that is able to contain the information that defines you and carry on the processes that define you after your physical body decays. But if all we are is a collection of atoms, which is what appears to be the case, there’s just no way for the information that is you to be conserved and transmitted somewhere else; your first person, subjective experience appears to emerge out of the particular arrangement of atoms that defines who you are; change that arrangement, say, in the brain — even by just a little — and fundamental parts of your psyche can be changed. If you’re more than a collection of matter — if you argue that your personality, desires, or conscious experience are beyond the physical world — why can I simply rearrange matter and change core parts of your personality, alter your desires, and even alter your conscious experience? For more on substance dualism and these sorts of questions and the responses from dualists, you can listen to Science vs. The Soul from a while back.

Moving on, I’ve heard conservation of energy — that energy cannot be created nor destroyed — invoked to support the idea that we will persist after death; but the energy is not what you should be concerned with. Yes, your body’s energy won’t be destroyed (it’ll be going to microorganisms, most likely), but it’s the information that makes you, you. It’s the complicated processes of your brain and the rest of your body that interact to create your first person experience and your sense of self — the self being an emergent phenomenon that can stop happening if we manipulate the underlying processes that generate it. When you put out a fire, the fire doesn’t go anywhere; the process just stops. The flames were obviously real and no energy was destroyed, but the fire doesn’t exist anymore.

Emergence

The concept of emergence can help clarify this point. Emergence is an important idea, and it happens to relate to the subject at hand, so let’s take a moment to get on the same page about what it means. Unfortunately, the word has been used in more than one way, which has muddied the waters for those who want to use the term in a sensible way. I distinguish between weak and strong emergence to try to exclude some of the more dubious ways emergence is used. Weak emergence refers to a different level of analysis or a different way of talking about some phenomenon, which I’ll explain in more detail. Strong emergence, on the other hand, refers to something truly new coming into existence that can’t be explained, even in principle, by it’s more fundamental constituents. I reject strong emergence entirely, but weak emergence, or as I’ll call it going forward, emergence, is one of the most powerful explanatory frameworks ever developed, at least in my mind.

Let me read a little from The Big Picture by Sean Carroll, which is where I first learned about emergence back in 2016 when the book came out.

“Why does the world of our every day experience seems so different from the world of fundamental physics? . . . While there is one world, there are many ways of talking about it. We refer to these ways as models or theories or vocabularies or stories; it doesn’t matter. Aristotle and his contemporaries weren’t just making things up; they told a reasonable story about the world they actually observed. Science has discovered another set of stories, harder to perceive but of greater precision and wider applicability. It’s not good enough that the stories succeed individually; they have to fit together. One pivotal word enables that reconciliation between all the different stories: emergence. Like many magical words, it’s extremely powerful but also tricky and liable to be misused in the wrong hands. A property of a system is emergent if it is not part of a detailed fundamental description of the system, but it becomes useful or even inevitable when we look at the system more broadly. . . . It is far more common to find situations . . . where one theory is appropriate in a subset of the domain of another theory, perhaps just a chain of multiple theories. Indeed, this is closest to the notion of a hierarchy of sciences, introduced by French philosopher Auguste Comte in the 19th century. In this view we start with physics at the most microscopic and comprehensive level; out of that emerges chemistry, and then biology, and then psychology, and finally sociology. It is this hierarchical picture that leads people to talk about “levels” when they discuss emergence. Lower levels are more microscopic, fine-grained descriptions, while higher levels are more macroscopic and coarse-grained. What matters is not the existence of a hierarchy but the existence of different ways of talking that describes the same underlying world, and are compatible with each other when their domains of applicability overlap.”

Emergence unifies all the sciences and creates a coherent picture of reality; it breaks down the illusory boundaries between disciplines. It’s one of the defining elements of my worldview and has been for a few years now. It’s not that I have something unique or profound to say about it, I just use it — I’m tempted to say — every day. It’s such a powerful theoretical framework and so clarifying when you’re trying to make sense of complex systems, how our knowledge hangs together, and the natural world at large. I really don’t understand why it isn’t in the public consciousness, since it’s such a powerful concept.

Back to the subject at hand: I think what we observe suggests that you emerge. Your personality, your first person point of view, your sense of self all appear to emerge from more fundamental interacting parts, like an atoms from subatomic particles, or like sociological, political, and economic systems emerge from a bunch of interacting psychological systems. Political systems and economic systems are as real as tables and chairs and molecules; they’re all higher-level descriptions, theories, stories, or different levels of analysis or different ways of thinking about things we see. We can talk about the same phenomenon on a sociological level, a psychological level, a biological level, and in principle, a chemical or physical level, though it would be impractical and impossibly cumbersome. They’re all just different ways of talking about collections of matter behaving in some way. So as for the subject of “where does something go when it stops existing”: Imagine a sociological system in which every single psychological being died except for one; or imagine a molecule where we ripped away every single atom that composed it and threw them to the wind except for one lone atom. The higher-scale system that emerged from the interacting lower-scale systems isn’t there anymore, but it didn’t go anywhere. And as I mentioned, I think that what we observe suggests that your personality, your first person point of view, your memories, your sense of self are emergent phenomena.

Natural Laws

As I mentioned at the outset, I don’t know how any of us would get to heaven if we didn’t have a soul and or were a collection of nothing but physical material. Substance dualists agree that my body is made of physical material. We both agree that our bodies are made of atoms. But when my mind wants to raise my right arm, my physical arm goes up. How is it, if I have an immaterial soul, that my mind, which isn’t a part of the natural world, interacts causally with the natural world and moves the chunk of atoms we’re calling my arm? I thought our soul was undetectable by science? If you want to say there’s another kind of material in addition to the matter of your brain, you have to explain how that something else interacts with the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up your brain and the rest of your body.

You also have to explain how the laws of physics relevant to your body are incomplete or just wrong. Substance dualists are trying to say that there’s this stuff that routinely influences matter; but somehow, every controlled experiment we’ve ever performed has failed to detect such an influential particle. If this stuff does somehow interact with physical matter, why haven’t we actually found it? It apparently interacts with matter all the time, so you’d think the laws of physics would be violated regularly, since they currently don’t include any reference to this substance or it’s interacting with matter. You’d think that all kinds of things would be screwed up all the time, in the same way we’d expect all kinds of experiments and technology to stop working if we suddenly stopped taking the existence of electrons into account. If we just chose a particle at random to ignore completely in all our experiments, nothing would come out right. And yet, this isn’t happening even though we’re ignoring this very influential soul stuff that routinely affects protons, neutrons, and electrons. Somehow, we’ve missed it while managing to build incredible technology and create life-saving medicine, and while building other fields of science that are contingent on our understanding of physics, like chemistry and biology, without ever discovering a single thing that contradicts these woefully incomplete laws.

Population Demographics of Heaven

All the atrocious in the Old Testament — the slavery, genocide, the brutal and arbitrary hierarchies — it’s all very distant and abstract to believers, so it’s not hard to excuse with some half-baked explanation. But everyone knows someone who has miscarried or lost a child. So despite the belief that we’re all born evil, thanks to “original sin,” many Christians believe that fetuses or infants or children who die young go to heaven. If not for scriptural reasons, because the alternative is simply too hard to swallow, even for believers who defend a character like Yahweh. And it’s certainly a relief that Christians, for the most part, are not teaching aggrieved mothers and families that their deceased toddler is in hell. But this weaseling out of the implications of original sin has some implications of its own. For example, why not kill all the young people you truly love, unless you’re so selfish that you’re willing to risk their going to hell for an eternity just so you can spend a few decades with them. The least you could do is perform lots of abortions so those unborn souls go straight to heaven with no possibility of going to hell. Or even older children, as long as they’re below the age of accountability. Send those kids to blissful paradise, if you really believe in heaven and eternal hell.

I don’t expect Christians to suddenly become pro-choice to send people to heaven, even though they should if they really believe what they’re saying. But the vast majority of terminated pregnancies don’t come to an end artificially or in an abortion clinic. We know things now that our goat-herding ancestors who wrote the Bible didn’t. For example, we now know how haphazard and unintelligent the reproductive process actually is, and we know just how few of the human lives that begin naturally ever come to term. According to researcher Greg S. Paul, as few as 25% of all conceptions are carried to term, based on data from embryology and from neonatal doctors. So as many as 75% of human lives that begin — beings that have eternal souls and according to many, should be granted full personhood and rights — die naturally before birth, often before the mother is even aware she’s pregnant. That’s the majority of souls already. We can go on to consider the infants who die in childbirth or shortly thereafter; add to that the children who die before the age of accountability, whenever that is. The point is that these are not edge cases. Of all the humans that have ever existed, they’re the rule and not the exception — the ones who die young and therefore go straight to heaven are easily the majority. This means, as Valorie Tarico puts it, “Ninety-eight percent of Heaven’s occupants are embryos and toddlers.” That statement hinges on the idea that the unborn and the very young go to heaven. If you stay consistent with your concept of original sin, however, they go to hell. In which case, 98+% of the occupants of hell are embryos and toddlers, and never had the chance to accept or reject god in their lifetime. Either way, the theological implications are significant. I’m going to go on quoting Valorie Tarico: “Most fertilized eggs die before implanting, followed by embryos and fetuses that self-abort, followed by babies and then little kids. A serious but startling statistical analysis by researcher Greg S. Paul suggests that if we include the ‘unborn,’ more than 98 percent of Heaven’s inhabitants, some 350 billion, would be those who died before maturing to the point that they could voluntarily ‘accept the gift of salvation.’ The vast majority of the heavenly host would be moral automatons or robots, meaning they never had moral autonomy and never chose to be there. Christian believers, ironically, would be a 1 to 2 percent minority even if all 30,000-plus denominations of believers actually made it in.”

It should also be noted that as religion teaches us, the world doesn’t behave according to natural processes and impersonal laws, the world behaves according to an army of invisible minds with one big mind to rule them all. Which is why Sam Harris wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, “If god exists, he is the most prolific abortionist of all.” Who knows, maybe god agrees with me about sending them straight to heaven.

So if we’re being extremely generous, we can say that almost 1% of heaven’s occupants are people who accepted the gift of salvation using their free will that god granted them on earth. Some apologists, like Alvin Plantinga, bite the bullet and say there is no free will in heaven. God granted it to us for a short time, which was his plan all along; He has his reasons. But the age of accountability and the “all zygotes go to heaven” doctrine happen to conflict with the Christian understanding of free will. The vast, overwhelming majority of heaven’s inhabitants didn’t freely or voluntarily choose god at all. I might’ve forgiven a believer for waiving this all away as ultimately insignificant if it weren’t for the fact that we’re talking about either the vast majority of those in heaven or the vast majority of those in hell. We’re not talking about a tiny fraction of souls here — we’re talking about pretty much everyone.

Think about the standard Christian theodicies: Free will is an outstanding good; Moral freedom is critically important; Suffering is an important part of growth. Or even consider a central part of the Christian narrative where god dies for our sins so we could go to heaven. Well, if the unborn go the paradise, despite original sin, most of the people in heaven got there without any help from Jesus’ death on the cross. Not some of them, most of them. They never had free will, they never grew from suffering, they never chose to accept or reject salvation.

So what’s the point of this earth, again? If heaven is any better than earth, then this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, so that eliminates the delusional, Panglossian answer that god couldn’t have done any better. If we have no free will in heaven, allowing paradise to have less suffering than earth, then what was the point of ever having it? The majority of heaven’s inhabitants never had free will and didn’t choose to be there. It’s almost like this theology was crafted haphazardly, piece by piece, over time, by primates. None of this makes sense and it seems like solving one problem only creates ten more.

Epistemology and the Afterlife

In nearly any religious discussion, the question of “How do you know that?” is always right under the surface and is never really answered. For me, the epistemology of religion is where it all falls apart. I’ve elaborated on flawed religious “ways of knowing” probably a dozen times, but it was my primary exit route. Faith, revelation, consulting ancient texts, prophecy, intuition, dreams, some personal experience, or your subjective certainty cannot justify a claim you’re making about reality.

If you take those away, there is absolutely no reason to believe — really in any afterlife, but certainly not the versions of the afterlife that have been presented by religion. I brought this up because there is a vision of heaven that most Christians seem to subscribe to. The mainstream conception of heaven comes to us from disparate, contradictory texts, written at different times that were eventually incorporated into what we now call the New Testament. The common imagery associated with heaven actually is based on the Bible in large part; as opposed to hell, where many of the most iconic elements come from extra-Biblical sources like Dante’s Inferno or the Apocalypse of Peter, which was a part of the Bible at one point but eventually lost its status. But heaven, with the pearly gates, streets of gold, and singing angels, eternally praising god on his throne is based on scripture, mostly from Revelation.

In I Corinthians 2:9, Paul claims that no one can conceive of heaven. The authors of Revelation and John’s Gospel went on to contradict that in spectacular form, along with pretty much every Christian since then. Pastors, New Testament authors, Church fathers, artists, crusaders, inquisitors, reformers, missionaries, and authors of popular books claim that they know heaven is for real, and they can tell you what it’s like and even how to get there. The fact is that no one knows for sure what’s coming after until they go themselves.

The Gospel of John claims that we get mansions in heaven, which is consistent with other Biblical descriptions of gaudy heavenly opulence. In Revelation 21, the author writes, “And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony [cal-ced-dony]; the fourth, an emerald . . . And the twelve gates were twelve pearls . . . and the street of the city was pure gold . . .”

God sits on a big, garish throne, matching the design sensibilities of the rest of heaven. Everyone is wearing white for some reason and even wears crowns. And as a child, I was told that I got a new gem in my crown for every person I brought to THE LORD. As Valorie Tarico observed, “Our desperate, goat-herding Iron Age ancestors may have yearned for the trappings of royalty. They may have heard rumors of the gold and jewels amassed by Pharaohs or kings or tribal warlords and wished the same for themselves. Both greed and inequality are timeless . . . so, the fascination of the Bible writers with gold and precious stones is understandable. But let’s be honest. Their gem-encrusted paradise is the product of limited imagination, an inability to dream beyond the arts, technologies, and mythologies of their own culture.”

A Natural Death

I think the subject of death and thinking about it as a naturalist probably deserves it’s own episode. There’s obviously more to say than I could ever hope to on death, the human desire to evade it, and the fantasy that we might. But for now, I just wanted to very briefly share a couple insights from great thinkers that have affected me.

Epicurus said, “Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” So while dying is probably not pleasant (though there’s evidence that you trip like crazy as your brain shuts down), death itself is nothing to be feared, by definition. As Mark Twain put it, expressing a similar sentiment, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

The afterlife fantasy isn’t just a harmless illusion that comforts the grief-stricken. It’s absolutely counter-productive to any project of improving this world or of appreciating this life as much as you could. I have an episode coming up where we touch on Marx and Nietzsche’s view that the religious concern with otherworldly matters is absolutely poisonous and detrimental to this life — the only one we have. It prevents you from getting or even recognizing the things you want or need, but it also prevents you from fully experiencing how wonderful and beautiful our universe is, keeping you at arm’s length from this world. The philosopher Albert Camus said, “If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

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