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WillowOne's Positions

Heaven

My Positions

  1. There is no evidence for the existence of heaven, and I do not hold that it exists.
  2. The concept is incoherent on inspection. Eternal bliss is offered to a being whose happiness depends on change, memory, effort, and the company of people who are, on the same doctrine, somewhere else.
  3. Heaven is the carrot to Hell's stick. It is the same instrument of control, held the other way up.

Notes

  1. Nobody agrees what it is. The Hebrew Bible has no heaven for people; the dead go to Sheol, good and bad alike. The idea of resurrection arrives late (Daniel 12), and the New Testament never settles whether the dead go somewhere at death or sleep until a judgement, whether they are disembodied souls or resurrected bodies, or whether the destination is "up there" or a "new earth" (Revelation 21). Christians have argued about this for two thousand years without any means of settling it, because there is nothing to check. The Islamic paradise is at least specific: gardens, rivers, couches, and companions, described with an attention to detail that tells you who was doing the imagining.
  2. Eternity is a problem, not a prize. Everything that makes a human life good, from curiosity to love to achievement, is structured by time and by the possibility of loss. A being who had done everything, learned everything and could lose nothing would have nothing left to want. Bernard Williams argued that any set of desires would eventually be exhausted, and that an endless life would end in boredom or in becoming someone else. The theological answer is that one will be changed so as not to mind, at which point it is not clear who is being rewarded. See the Ship of Theseus.
  3. Heaven breaks the free-will defence. The standard reply to the problem of evil is that God permits suffering because free will is worth it. But heaven, by every account, contains free beings who never sin and never suffer. If God can make a world of free beings without evil, he could have made this one that way, and the defence collapses. The believer must choose between a heaven with sin in it and a theodicy without an argument. See Theodicy.
  4. The view from the balcony. Thomas Aquinas held that the blessed will be able to see the sufferings of the damned, "in order that their bliss may be more delightful to them" (Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q94). This is the logical consequence of combining heaven with hell and omniscience, and it is to his credit that he said it plainly. The alternative, that the saved are made to forget the people they loved who did not make it, is not much better, and is again a change of person rather than a reward for one.
  5. The living do not believe it either. People who hold that their dead are in perfect happiness grieve exactly as the rest of us do, and fight death with every treatment available. At funerals everyone is in heaven; nobody acts as though they expect to join them soon. A belief that governs no behaviour is a belief in name only.
  6. The cost of a deferred reward. If this life is the waiting room, then injustice here can be tolerated, suffering here can be ennobled, and lives here can be spent, or ended, in exchange for a better one. I have said under Life After Death why I think a finite life is the more urgent one. The opposite view has had a long run and has not made the world kinder.

Sources

  • Williams, B., "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality", in Problems of the Self (1973)
  • Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Supplement to the Third Part, Question 94
  • Wright, N. T., Surprised by Hope (2007), a believer's account of how far popular ideas of heaven depart from the texts

Also see