Abstract
The Problem of Suffering (PoS) claims that there is tension between the existence of a perfect God and suffering. The Problem of Hell (PoH) is a version of PoS claiming that a perfect God would lack morally sufficient reasons to allow individuals to be damned to Hell eternally. A few traditional solutions have been developed to PoH, but each of them is problematic. As such, if there is a solution to PoH that is resilient to these problems, then it deserves our attention. In this paper, I develop such a solution. I call this the Unpopulated Hell View (UHV), which claims that Hell exists as a place where eternal damnation could take place, although it never does. First, I explain how UHV solves PoH. Next, I develop four objections against UHV and defend UHV against them. I argue that although some of these objections do more damage to UHV than others, UHV has satisfying responses to all of them. Ultimately I conclude that UHV merits consideration as a novel solution to PoH because it is less problematic than the traditional ones.
Highlights
The Problem of Hell (PoH) argues that the two following claims are incompatible: (1) a perfect God exists and (2) some individuals are eternally damned to Hell. 1 A handful of what I call traditional solutions to PoH has been developed in the secondary literature, but each of these faces deep problems
The main aim of this paper is to develop precisely such a solution: The Unpopulated Hell View (UHV)
A New Solution: Hell is Unpopulated The main objective of this paper is to develop a new solution to PoH: the Unpopulated Hell View (UHV)
Summary
The Problem of Hell (PoH) argues that the two following claims are incompatible: (1) a perfect God exists and (2) some individuals are eternally damned to Hell. 1 A handful of what I call traditional solutions to PoH has been developed in the secondary literature, but each of these faces deep problems. The Problem of Hell (PoH) argues that the two following claims are incompatible: (1) a perfect God exists and (2) some individuals are eternally damned to Hell. PoH claims that (1) a perfect God would not damn anyone to Hell eternally without morally sufficient reasons for doing so, i.e., without adequate justification. The Free Will Defense (FWD) and Retributivist View (RV) deny the truth of (2) and claim that a perfect God could have morally sufficient reasons to damn someone to Hell eternally. The third and fourth traditional solutions, Universalism and Annihilationism, agree that God could not have morally sufficient reasons to damn anyone to Hell eternally. My aim is to show that UHV is attractive as a new solution to PoH, and one of the reasons is that it does not face any of these problems in the first place
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