202 What May Be Believed
cance. And I certainly cannot believe what I find intrinsically
unbelievable. I have never had much respect for the notion of
the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the di-
rection of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly can-
not respect it when it is made in the direction of something
intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this
is precisely what the infernalist position, no matter what form
it takes, necessarily involves. I have tried to make an honest
effort to find an exception to this rule. Over the years, I have
dutifully explored all the arguments for hell's eternity from
Christian antiquity to the present, philosophical and theologi-
cal, and I continue to find them all manifestly absurd. Even
the gentlest, the most morally delicate, the most judiciously
reluctant all start, I believe, on the far side of a prior existential
decision to accept an obviously ludicrous premise, and then to
proceed as if that premise were not only doctrinally manda-
tory, but rationally inoffensive. God forbid, then, that we ever
return to, or even so much as allow ourselves to recall, that ini-
tial moment, before rationalization began, and before that leap
of faith was made.
In my introduction to this volume, I noted that I found
it a strange experience to be writing a book that I expect will
convince nearly no one. The truth is that I find it even more
unsettling to have written a book that I believe ought never to
have needed to be written in the first place. I honestly, perhaps
guilelessly believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima fa-
cie nonsensical, for the simple reason that it cannot even be
stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into
equivocity so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying
gibberish remains. To say that, on the one hand, God is infi-
nitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that,
on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige