.... and while it's legitimate to focus on something else, it is NOT legitimate or wise to make up a falsity and shove it into the place of the true but incomprehensible thing. That's just asking for problems.
Any deity or metaphysical entity that exists in the same conceptual space as God is another attempt to describe the reality that our God is an attempt to describe.
For sure. But logically, where attempts to describe that reality are mutually incompatible then only one such attempt can actually be correct. Unless, I suppose, you posit a “blind men describing an elephant” situation, in which case all attempts are inaccurate due to being incomplete.
I've been thinking about this some more for a few days.
It seems to me that this is effectively saying something like this:
1. There is an ultimate reality
2. There are various explanations of reality, some contradictory
3. One therefore has to chose one of the explanations and reject the others.
I think the contrast is with an alternative series of thoughts
1. There [probably] is an ultimate reality but there are all kinds of difficulties with even defining the ideas and words we mean when trying to think about ultimate realities
2. Humans have come up with explanations which attempt to explain stuff. They're all necessarily either wildly oversimplified or wrong.
3. Importantly, there is no way to rank these ideas anyway, so one is making choices based on other factors
4. That doesn't mean these ideas are useless, as they speak to something deep about human psyche and motivations
I think ideas are a completely separate category of thing to ultimate realities. The concept of hell, and what that does or doesn't do to people who believe in it is a whole other thing than whether it exists.
Quite. But it's the second question which matters to me.
If you can't persuade yourself that it exists then isn't it just better to assume it doesn't?
In this life, maybe.
But in the next life? Ah, there’s the rub.
Not really. If going to hell is as arbitrary and stupid as you are all discussing here then it seems like you are chasing your tails trying to understand what you need to do to avoid it.
The simplest explanation is that it's a stupid idea created and expanded to keep believers in line.
Simplest ≠ Truest
If something is complex and incomprehensible that is not really much different to being impossible to understand. At some point a thing that is too complicated to understand is a pointless waste of thinking space even if it is true, one is better focussing on something else.
That's quantum physics out then.
Quantum physics allows for testable (falsifiable) hypotheses. Theism does not.
Any deity or metaphysical entity that exists in the same conceptual space as God is another attempt to describe the reality that our God is an attempt to describe.
For sure. But logically, where attempts to describe that reality are mutually incompatible then only one such attempt can actually be correct. Unless, I suppose, you posit a “blind men describing an elephant” situation, in which case all attempts are inaccurate due to being incomplete.
I've been thinking about this some more for a few days.
It seems to me that this is effectively saying something like this:
1. There is an ultimate reality
2. There are various explanations of reality, some contradictory
3. One therefore has to chose one of the explanations and reject the others.
I think the contrast is with an alternative series of thoughts
1. There [probably] is an ultimate reality but there are all kinds of difficulties with even defining the ideas and words we mean when trying to think about ultimate realities
2. Humans have come up with explanations which attempt to explain stuff. They're all necessarily either wildly oversimplified or wrong.
3. Importantly, there is no way to rank these ideas anyway, so one is making choices based on other factors
4. That doesn't mean these ideas are useless, as they speak to something deep about human psyche and motivations
I think ideas are a completely separate category of thing to ultimate realities. The concept of hell, and what that does or doesn't do to people who believe in it is a whole other thing than whether it exists.
Quite. But it's the second question which matters to me.
Any deity or metaphysical entity that exists in the same conceptual space as God is another attempt to describe the reality that our God is an attempt to describe.
For sure. But logically, where attempts to describe that reality are mutually incompatible then only one such attempt can actually be correct. Unless, I suppose, you posit a “blind men describing an elephant” situation, in which case all attempts are inaccurate due to being incomplete.
I've been thinking about this some more for a few days.
It seems to me that this is effectively saying something like this:
1. There is an ultimate reality
2. There are various explanations of reality, some contradictory
3. One therefore has to chose one of the explanations and reject the others.
I think the contrast is with an alternative series of thoughts
1. There [probably] is an ultimate reality but there are all kinds of difficulties with even defining the ideas and words we mean when trying to think about ultimate realities
2. Humans have come up with explanations which attempt to explain stuff. They're all necessarily either wildly oversimplified or wrong.
3. Importantly, there is no way to rank these ideas anyway, so one is making choices based on other factors
4. That doesn't mean these ideas are useless, as they speak to something deep about human psyche and motivations
I think ideas are a completely separate category of thing to ultimate realities. The concept of hell, and what that does or doesn't do to people who believe in it is a whole other thing than whether it exists.
Quite. But it's the second question which matters to me.
If you can't persuade yourself that it exists then isn't it just better to assume it doesn't?
In this life, maybe.
But in the next life? Ah, there’s the rub.
Not really. If going to hell is as arbitrary and stupid as you are all discussing here then it seems like you are chasing your tails trying to understand what you need to do to avoid it.
The simplest explanation is that it's a stupid idea created and expanded to keep believers in line.
Simplest ≠ Truest
If something is complex and incomprehensible that is not really much different to being impossible to understand. At some point a thing that is too complicated to understand is a pointless waste of thinking space even if it is true, one is better focussing on something else.
That's quantum physics out then.
Quantum physics allows for testable (falsifiable) hypotheses. Theism does not.
Science is a series of testable hypotheses. So even quantum physics makes sense to someone.
I accept my wording might have been sloppy but I'm saying that difficult science is a different thing to theological concepts that nobody understands and accepts without qualification, sticking plasters or ignoring uncomfortable parts.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
If I remember my Philosophy of Science correctly, this also happens in science. Take the time when Darwin came out with his Origin of Species. There were several alternative theories of evolution already out there, Lamarckism being the most prominent. The biggest difference with scientific premises, though, is they can be tested and adaptive to new information.
To the comment that simplicity is not equal to facts. I think that is also an axiom of science. It tries to explain reality in the simplest terms possible. But as time goes on, accepted theories will be adapted until they reach a point, where a simpler theory fits existing data better. Take astronomy. It was Ptolemy who first came up with a mathematical model to predict planetary motion, though he assumed the earth was the center of the universe, and for a long while his model worked. But as astronomers developed more data, the existing math models became much more complicated. Then people like Newton developed a simpler model through calculus, and now we have instruments like the James Webb Telescope helping to rewrite what we know of the universe. And it is very complicated; but, mark my words, someone or a group of someones are trying to boil it down to the simplest of terms.
I had an uncle who was an astronomer. A believer, but an astronomer too. He had a plaque on his wall that said:
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
— Psalm 8:3–4
"Religion" is a rather squishy category until you get into particular religions, I think. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity are very different animals doing different things, even if all three of them can coexist in Japan.
Oftentimes it's just a shorthand for "Christianity," but I think that's a bit eurocentric of us, no? Even this fixation on the word "beliefs" is fairly Christian, since that itself is a word of primary importance to the Apostle Paul. Other religions don't put nearly so much weight on it, and some religions would regard it as a terrible notion.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
How do you see religious truth claims?
I think "claim" is the wrong concept of word when talking about philosophical or religious ideas. When Plato talked about the Forms, I don't take this to be a right/wrong claim about the state of reality, but a way of understanding it. Something that one either accepts as a useful axiom to hang your thoughts around or garbage.
When I was in NZ I visited an extinct volcano which has a complex Māori story about gods and goddesses. It also happens to be a place with good views across Auckland, so the Māori people lived there for centuries.
One could ask whether the Māori stories are reflecting real events. I can't remember the details so it isn't for me to recite them here, but I think we can probably both accept that we don't believe in gods who live in volcano craters.
Or one can think about what role those stories have in Māori culture, what this says about that community in the past and today.
For me, being interested and attempting to listen for these things is more important than assessing if they are true/false.
Yeah, some things you can see that way and to the extent I believe in Christianity I see much of the Bible as mythological. But there comes a point where the question of whether there's some reality behind it becomes important - if there's not in some objective sense a risen ascended Christ then I don't see the point of acting as if there is.
One cannot look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting if there's not an objectively existing God to actually do the resurrecting. Religions do make and depend on truth claims.
It feels to me like you're describing studying the phenomenon of religion, which is all good and well and fascinating in its own right, whilst I'm talking about actual belief.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
How do you see religious truth claims?
I feel a million miles away from your approach. I meditate every day, and some days reality seems material and that's that, and on other days reality seems non-material and creative. So I wrestle with all that.
Well that's true, but even if that specific thing is true there's no obligation to accept all the other baggage that's built up around it. As other people have explained in this thread, it is possible to believe in one thing like the resurrection without needing to believe in a literal hell.
Well that's true, but even if that specific thing is true there's no obligation to accept all the other baggage that's built up around it. As other people have explained in this thread, it is possible to believe in one thing like the resurrection without needing to believe in a literal hell.
Quite so. The number of things I definitely don't believe in horrifies the more conservative types.
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
How do you see religious truth claims?
I think "claim" is the wrong concept of word when talking about philosophical or religious ideas. When Plato talked about the Forms, I don't take this to be a right/wrong claim about the state of reality, but a way of understanding it. Something that one either accepts as a useful axiom to hang your thoughts around or garbage.<snip>
Are you suggesting Plato was putting forth the Forms as a metaphor, and didn't really believe in their existence? That seems a mighty big claim given 2600 years of philosophical inquiry telling the opposite.
For me, being interested and attempting to listen for these things is more important than assessing if they are true/false.
Yes but was it more im portant for Plato? Or are you just projecting a 21st century attitude (Reality isn't as important as feelings) back two and a half millenia?
I don't know why people compare religion and science in any case. I suppose if you portray religion as a series of hypotheses, it kind of works, but that's poisoning the well, isn't it? I mean, you're starting with premises that suit you.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
How do you see religious truth claims?
I think "claim" is the wrong concept of word when talking about philosophical or religious ideas. When Plato talked about the Forms, I don't take this to be a right/wrong claim about the state of reality, but a way of understanding it. Something that one either accepts as a useful axiom to hang your thoughts around or garbage.<snip>
Are you suggesting Plato was putting forth the Forms as a metaphor, and didn't really believe in their existence? That seems a mighty big claim given 2600 years of philosophical inquiry telling the opposite.
For me, being interested and attempting to listen for these things is more important than assessing if they are true/false.
Yes but was it more im portant for Plato? Or are you just projecting a 21st century attitude (Reality isn't as important as feelings) back two and a half millenia?
I'm not making any statement about what Plato believed. I'm just describing how I engage with things I don't believe in, which isn't a 21st century attitude to anything.
There are many beliefs I don't believe in. I don't have to second guess whether people "really believed" in the thing, because it seems more important to me to consider the impact of those things.
Platonism historically led to x y and z beliefs and behaviours.
There's also something of an irony implicit in Plato's Forms. If the parable of the cave suggests that humans perceive shadows on the cave as being the actual thing, and therefore imperfectly understand these eternal but external realities that exist out there in the ether, how then does Plato understand it enough to write it down? How can we be sure that his theory of Forms isn't just a more complex shadow on the cave wall?
Yeah, some things you can see that way and to the extent I believe in Christianity I see much of the Bible as mythological. But there comes a point where the question of whether there's some reality behind it becomes important - if there's not in some objective sense a risen ascended Christ then I don't see the point of acting as if there is.
One cannot look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting if there's not an objectively existing God to actually do the resurrecting. Religions do make and depend on truth claims.
It feels to me like you're describing studying the phenomenon of religion, which is all good and well and fascinating in its own right, whilst I'm talking about actual belief.
This leads me to wonder what the status is of truth claims that will never be resolved, or proven, one way or the other.
As far as we living human beings are concerned, I think that the chances are vanishingly small of any questions about hell being resolved during our lifetimes.
Our own fleeting lifetimes might not be the same as "never", but I think they are functionally equivalent for all the difference that it makes to our discussions and our lives.
I'm sure these questions won't be resolved. That doesn't mean it's impossible to be right or wrong about them - it just means that we won't know for certain whether we're right or wrong.
What's the difference between it being impossible for us to be be right or wrong, and us not knowing whether we're right or wrong?
Are there any ways in which this difference impacts our lives?
Two hedgehogs are waiting on the side of the road. They're having a conversation about passing cars.
I think we can be fairly sure that neither would have a decent guess about what a car was, who the humans are and where they were going.
Now imagine a billion hedgehogs. One out of the billion somehow guesses that there's a human in the car wearing a pink shirt.
That one-in-a-billion guess is factually correct. But also is possibly the least important thing about that particular car, and says nothing about cars in general.
Reality is obviously far more complex than the hedgehog could ever understand.
As far as we living human beings are concerned, I think that the chances are vanishingly small of any questions about hell being resolved during our lifetimes.
Our own fleeting lifetimes might not be the same as "never", but I think they are functionally equivalent for all the difference that it makes to our discussions and our lives.
That is, the question is about our lives, ie up to the point of our deaths, not after.
What's the difference between it being impossible for us to be be right or wrong, and us not knowing whether we're right or wrong?
Are there any ways in which this difference impacts our lives?
It matters if you will be condemned to endless suffering at some point, as the afterlife is then effectively a continuation of your lived experience.
That is, the question is about our lives, ie up to the point of our deaths, not after.
This appears to me to be begging the question - you're assuming your answer as a premise. If it matters what happens after death then it matters what happens after death regardless of whether it makes a difference in this life.
But there are it seems to me not differences but something more fundamental. To say there is impossible to be either right or wrong in our beliefs is, as I said, what Harry Frankfurt called bullshit. Bullshit is an instrumental attitude to our beliefs and assertions such that we adopt them to either project a particular image of ourself or to instil a particular emotional reaction in other people. An instrumental attitude to our beliefs goes along with - makes easier and enables - an instrumental attitude to other people. (I note that in philosophy there is a skeptical problem about other minds. The difference between the way we view people if we think we can't ever know beyond skeptical doubt what other people think and feel and how we view them if we think it's impossible for us to be right or wrong about what other people think and feel is huge.)
There is a fundamental difference between viewing the world and other people as something that is just there to be instrumentally useful in our ends and projects and viewing it as something that is there independently of our ends and projects and of what we happen to know or believe about it.
One other consideration is to ask just how far it's true that we cannot know. Not being able to know is not a binary on/off state: there may be things that are completely beyond our ability to talk about meaningfully, and there are things that we can easily talk about, but most things are somewhere in between. Aquinas argued that while God was fundamentally unknowable, we could still talk about God in that creaturely concepts like love, wisdom, and knowledge are images of God in so far as we can talk about them. Our creaturely concepts of justice are images of God's justice. That means that 'justice' does not suddenly lose its human meaning when applied to God. So that if we assert that something - eternal punishment - is just for God then we equally assert that the closest human approximation to that is just for humans.
The argument from justice against the eternity of Hell is that no close human approximation to eternal punishment could be considered just, and therefore as human justice is a participation in the divine justice, eternal punishment cannot be part of the divine justice.
I've read and thought about Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" quite a few times now. I recognise part of what you say here, but I'm not entirely clear how you think it relates to the conversation about hell.
Bullshit, I think, would be putting on a show of belief because it gave some incidental benefits. I'm a politician interested in the Sikh vote and suddenly I become photographed looking very Sikh.
I need to read it again now, but I don't think even doing things ironically would count as bullshit per Frankfurt.
As far as I can understand the point you are responding to, someone is saying that there's an issue that can't be resolved in this lifetime and so.. maybe it's not worth worrying about for other reasons.
To me this is a bit like a response to the conspiracy theory about a lizard race controlling the planet. Sure there are things we don't know about the planet and sure there could be some weirdness going on that means we are not perceiving the reality of things.
But for other reasons we dismiss this possibility as remote and instead focus on stuff that's more likely, such as the control of many aspects of life by the super-wealthy. Lizards might be a possibility but of all the things.
Comments
Quantum physics allows for testable (falsifiable) hypotheses. Theism does not.
What question? Those are all statements.
Science is a series of testable hypotheses. So even quantum physics makes sense to someone.
I accept my wording might have been sloppy but I'm saying that difficult science is a different thing to theological concepts that nobody understands and accepts without qualification, sticking plasters or ignoring uncomfortable parts.
If I remember my Philosophy of Science correctly, this also happens in science. Take the time when Darwin came out with his Origin of Species. There were several alternative theories of evolution already out there, Lamarckism being the most prominent. The biggest difference with scientific premises, though, is they can be tested and adaptive to new information.
To the comment that simplicity is not equal to facts. I think that is also an axiom of science. It tries to explain reality in the simplest terms possible. But as time goes on, accepted theories will be adapted until they reach a point, where a simpler theory fits existing data better. Take astronomy. It was Ptolemy who first came up with a mathematical model to predict planetary motion, though he assumed the earth was the center of the universe, and for a long while his model worked. But as astronomers developed more data, the existing math models became much more complicated. Then people like Newton developed a simpler model through calculus, and now we have instruments like the James Webb Telescope helping to rewrite what we know of the universe. And it is very complicated; but, mark my words, someone or a group of someones are trying to boil it down to the simplest of terms.
I had an uncle who was an astronomer. A believer, but an astronomer too. He had a plaque on his wall that said:
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
— Psalm 8:3–4
Oftentimes it's just a shorthand for "Christianity," but I think that's a bit eurocentric of us, no? Even this fixation on the word "beliefs" is fairly Christian, since that itself is a word of primary importance to the Apostle Paul. Other religions don't put nearly so much weight on it, and some religions would regard it as a terrible notion.
I can't really get my head around considering truth claims - be they scientific or religious - any other way. I want to believe things that are true. The premises "suit me" inasmuch as they're the only ones that make any sense to me.
Yeah, but which premises?
That religion makes truth claims about reality which may or may not be true. To that extent they are comparable to scientific hypotheses.
How do you see religious truth claims?
I think "claim" is the wrong concept of word when talking about philosophical or religious ideas. When Plato talked about the Forms, I don't take this to be a right/wrong claim about the state of reality, but a way of understanding it. Something that one either accepts as a useful axiom to hang your thoughts around or garbage.
When I was in NZ I visited an extinct volcano which has a complex Māori story about gods and goddesses. It also happens to be a place with good views across Auckland, so the Māori people lived there for centuries.
One could ask whether the Māori stories are reflecting real events. I can't remember the details so it isn't for me to recite them here, but I think we can probably both accept that we don't believe in gods who live in volcano craters.
Or one can think about what role those stories have in Māori culture, what this says about that community in the past and today.
For me, being interested and attempting to listen for these things is more important than assessing if they are true/false.
One cannot look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting if there's not an objectively existing God to actually do the resurrecting. Religions do make and depend on truth claims.
It feels to me like you're describing studying the phenomenon of religion, which is all good and well and fascinating in its own right, whilst I'm talking about actual belief.
I feel a million miles away from your approach. I meditate every day, and some days reality seems material and that's that, and on other days reality seems non-material and creative. So I wrestle with all that.
Quite so. The number of things I definitely don't believe in horrifies the more conservative types.
Perhaps they need to be horrified at times. Perhaps we all do ...
Did I say it was an issue?
Forgive me for interfering though.
Are you suggesting Plato was putting forth the Forms as a metaphor, and didn't really believe in their existence? That seems a mighty big claim given 2600 years of philosophical inquiry telling the opposite.
Yes but was it more im portant for Plato? Or are you just projecting a 21st century attitude (Reality isn't as important as feelings) back two and a half millenia?
I'm not making any statement about what Plato believed. I'm just describing how I engage with things I don't believe in, which isn't a 21st century attitude to anything.
There are many beliefs I don't believe in. I don't have to second guess whether people "really believed" in the thing, because it seems more important to me to consider the impact of those things.
Platonism historically led to x y and z beliefs and behaviours.
As far as we living human beings are concerned, I think that the chances are vanishingly small of any questions about hell being resolved during our lifetimes.
Our own fleeting lifetimes might not be the same as "never", but I think they are functionally equivalent for all the difference that it makes to our discussions and our lives.
This isn't very difficult, in my experience. It's kind of how conservative human mindsets work.
Are there any ways in which this difference impacts our lives?
Two hedgehogs are waiting on the side of the road. They're having a conversation about passing cars.
I think we can be fairly sure that neither would have a decent guess about what a car was, who the humans are and where they were going.
Now imagine a billion hedgehogs. One out of the billion somehow guesses that there's a human in the car wearing a pink shirt.
That one-in-a-billion guess is factually correct. But also is possibly the least important thing about that particular car, and says nothing about cars in general.
Reality is obviously far more complex than the hedgehog could ever understand.
It matters if you will be condemned to endless suffering at some point, as the afterlife is then effectively a continuation of your lived experience.
But there are it seems to me not differences but something more fundamental. To say there is impossible to be either right or wrong in our beliefs is, as I said, what Harry Frankfurt called bullshit. Bullshit is an instrumental attitude to our beliefs and assertions such that we adopt them to either project a particular image of ourself or to instil a particular emotional reaction in other people. An instrumental attitude to our beliefs goes along with - makes easier and enables - an instrumental attitude to other people. (I note that in philosophy there is a skeptical problem about other minds. The difference between the way we view people if we think we can't ever know beyond skeptical doubt what other people think and feel and how we view them if we think it's impossible for us to be right or wrong about what other people think and feel is huge.)
There is a fundamental difference between viewing the world and other people as something that is just there to be instrumentally useful in our ends and projects and viewing it as something that is there independently of our ends and projects and of what we happen to know or believe about it.
One other consideration is to ask just how far it's true that we cannot know. Not being able to know is not a binary on/off state: there may be things that are completely beyond our ability to talk about meaningfully, and there are things that we can easily talk about, but most things are somewhere in between. Aquinas argued that while God was fundamentally unknowable, we could still talk about God in that creaturely concepts like love, wisdom, and knowledge are images of God in so far as we can talk about them. Our creaturely concepts of justice are images of God's justice. That means that 'justice' does not suddenly lose its human meaning when applied to God. So that if we assert that something - eternal punishment - is just for God then we equally assert that the closest human approximation to that is just for humans.
The argument from justice against the eternity of Hell is that no close human approximation to eternal punishment could be considered just, and therefore as human justice is a participation in the divine justice, eternal punishment cannot be part of the divine justice.
Bullshit, I think, would be putting on a show of belief because it gave some incidental benefits. I'm a politician interested in the Sikh vote and suddenly I become photographed looking very Sikh.
I need to read it again now, but I don't think even doing things ironically would count as bullshit per Frankfurt.
As far as I can understand the point you are responding to, someone is saying that there's an issue that can't be resolved in this lifetime and so.. maybe it's not worth worrying about for other reasons.
To me this is a bit like a response to the conspiracy theory about a lizard race controlling the planet. Sure there are things we don't know about the planet and sure there could be some weirdness going on that means we are not perceiving the reality of things.
But for other reasons we dismiss this possibility as remote and instead focus on stuff that's more likely, such as the control of many aspects of life by the super-wealthy. Lizards might be a possibility but of all the things.