The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Hiddenness of God 147
bed, of course) and receives an appropriate reward in the afterlife. He
begs Abraham to be allowed, after the fashion of Marley’s ghost, 11 to
be allowed to appear to his living brother (who is, let us say, the general
whose forces carried out the distribution of the ‘‘toys’’ in the Afghan
countryside) and warn him of what awaits him. In this case the petition
is granted. He appears to his brother and says to him, ‘‘Listen, brother,
we were wrong. There is a God and there is a judgment. I am in Hell
because of the terrible things I did. Repent and change your life and
avoid my unhappy fate.’’ What would the result be?
I would suppose that the best result one could hope for would be
this—and remember, we’re talking about someone who distributed
anti-personnel bombs disguised as toys. This is a man who, in the
words of the Wisdom of Solomon, had made a covenant with death:
that is, who had, in his own mind, traded eternal extinction after death
for the privilege of behaving any way he liked, with impunity, during
life. 12 Such a man could only regard what his brother told him as bad
news—as a bad child who was told that Santa Claus would bring him
no toys if he behaved according to his normal inclinations would regard
this information as bad news. The general’s reaction would, or so it
seems to me, be articulable along these lines: ‘‘All right, it seems I was
badly out in my calculations. The nature of the universe is entirely
different from what I thought it was. It has a personal creator, a being
of such great power that it is hopeless to oppose his will. This being has
some rules, and the penalty for disobeying them is terrible, and it seems
that these rules are, are to put it mildly, inconsistent with the kind of
life I want to live. It seems that if I kill and maim Afghan children and
their families in order to curry favor with my political bosses, I’ll be
subjected to eternal torment. This is the worst news of my life; all my
plans have to be rethought. Well, I’d better get on with it. What I have
to do is to figure out how to obey these damned rules in a way that will
require a minimum modification of my goals in life.’’ (Or, at least, that’s
one way the general might react. Another possibility would be simple
rebellion. The infernal debate in Pandaemonium in Book II of Paradise
Lost, which is a debate about the best way to conduct a rebellion against
an authority whose power is immeasurably greater than one’s own, lays
out various possibilities that the general might want to consider.) If the
general resolves to modify his behavior and his goals in response to be
the bad news he has received from his dead brother, it is far from clear
that even this resolution could be expected to last very long. The effect
of hell-fire sermons—on those who are affected by them at all—is