Doubting the Answers
IFor me, the first problem is that I find myself entirely unable to
discover an intelligible grammar within which to make sense
of the proposition that something like a hell of eternal torment
truly exists, or could exist. I simply do not know how to forge
any sort of durable conceptual connections among the various
principal terms that have to be not merely juxtaposed, but ulti-
mately reconciled with one another, in order to construct the
standard infernalist arguments: "justice," "hell," "love," "free-
dom," "eternity," and so on. A sound definition of any of these
words, it seems clear to me, including any adequate apprecia-
tion of the inevitable logical ramifications of that definition,
will make it ever more difficult to integrate it into any kind of
stable unity with all the other terms. The more any one of these
words comes to be associated with a clear and distinct idea,
the more subversive it becomes of the harmony of the whole.
And, in this regard, no version of the standard arguments is
conspicuously better than any other, as far as I can tell. As I
have already noted, the most popular defense of the infernalist
orthodoxy today is also, touchingly enough, the most tender-
hearted: the argument, that is, from the rational freedom of