Because it seems surprising that there would be so many awful things if our world really was created by an all-good loving God, people who believe in God have come up with all kinds of explanations for why they could co-exist.

One approach is to look at all the specific types of badness in the world and swat them down one by one. “God permits famine because of A” “God allows disease because of B” “God tolerates sadism because of C….”

Maybe these defenses are right or plausible but they’re certainly unaesthetic.

A cleaner approach is to think if there were a morally perfect God what would He do? Klaas Kraay says that if there were a perfect God he would create every world, that on net, was worth creating.

As soon as I read that I felt incredibly dumb. It seems impossible to disagree with. Would God create worlds he shouldn’t? Would God fail to create all the worlds he should?

This argument also predicts that a perfect God would create worlds that contain suffering. Obviously, a world can be worth creating even if there’s some suffering. The fact that I get migraines doesn’t mean a universe full of blissful angel choirs above is on net bad. And if, as many do, you think suffering can be offset by other goods such as pleasure or happiness, God could be morally obligated to create many worlds with immense suffering.

Must God create Hell?

Should God create a world that lasts for one second where one person is moderately unhappy, and trillions are joyous. Probably! Should he create a world just like that, but it lasts for one minute? One year? One eternity? Is eternal unhappiness Hell?

If so, it seems God should create at least some worlds with Hell. Actual Hell with actual suffering, not the optimistic empty Hells some hope for.

A very emotionally (and perhaps intellectually?) powerful against at least some forms of Christianity is that Hell is so awful, the doctrine discredits the whole idea of the Gospel.

Standard Calvinism which claims that Jesus only died to save a lucky fraction of humanity and the rest were predestined for eternal suffering comes in for a particular beating. The famous evangelical-to-Episcopal convert, Rachel Held Evans said:

“It means that God does not love the world; he hates it. If Calvinism is true, it means that if that dying little girl that you held in your arms in India was not among the elect, then God did not love her. He never had any intention of loving her. She was nothing to Him. In fact, he would delight and find glory in her eternal torture in hell.”

That sounds horrific. But can I agree with the line about hating the world? If suffering can be offset and if God is obligated to create every world that on net is worth making, might God make Hell directly out of perfect love?

Maybe if God were humanly squeamish, he might shy away from making this choice, but could the Divine Optimizer really refuse to make a world that all things considered is quite good just because it involves some people suffering eternally (but commensurably)? Can God really abandon 99 of His sheep to non-existence just to spare one sheep from Hell?

If God read Peter Singer, if God is an effective altruist, some souls seem to be in for a very bad time.

Is God-centered morality nicer?

A snarky attack on religion is that maybe it makes God seem a bit narcissistic. God made us all for His glory and the best case outcome is that if we’re saved we’re off to “a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea” in the words of Christopher Hitchens?

But if we’re scared of Hell, we should hope that God bases his morality a bit more around Himself and His glory and a bit less around the overall conditions of his creations. If God loves created beings impartially, it seems very likely that He must make some worlds with Hell since they can always be offset by creating a more populous or more experientially rich Heaven in that same world.

But if morality, from God’s POV is about the kind of world He wants to exist in or the kind of actions He wants to take maybe Hell is empty. Maybe we might hope that God simply doesn’t want to live in a multiverse where some people are eternally separate from Him? Maybe God has strong (and perfectly righteous!) aesthetic priorities such that a story where Hell goes on and on is incomplete with his total and complete victory. Maybe a single soul stuck in Hell simply mars all of creation, the whole multiverse, no matter how many happy angels He creates?