Why Would a Loving God Create Hell? Wrestling with the Problem of Evil and Eternal Punishment

J. Neil Daniels

Nota Bene: The following is a summary of chapter 6 of my current work in progress, The Darkness Outside: A Cumulative-Case Apologetic for the Doctrine of Eternal Conscious Punishment, being a reworking of my graduate dissertation.

Introduction 

Every serious conversation about God eventually runs headlong into the problem of evil. It’s not just an academic puzzle—though philosophers have spilled barrels of ink over it—it’s the cry of the heart when tragedy hits, when injustice festers, when death snatches someone we love. If God is good, if He’s powerful, why all this? And more pointedly, why hell? It’s one thing to try and make sense of wars and earthquakes and disease; it’s another to stare at Jesus’ words about outer darkness, where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, and admit that He wasn’t being metaphorical or exaggerating for effect. The idea of eternal punishment sharpens the blade of the problem of evil. It feels, to many, like cruelty dressed up as justice.

Bertrand Russell once called Christ’s teaching on hell “the defect” in His moral character. You can almost hear the disdain in his voice. Russell thought no truly humane person could believe in everlasting punishment. And he’s hardly alone. Modern readers often wince at the thought that God would sustain a place of torment forever. Isn’t that wildly disproportionate? Isn’t that, well, sadistic?

It’s not hard to see why the objection bites. Ordinary suffering at least admits of some explanation—growth, discipline, the rough but instructive hand of providence. But hell, by definition, doesn’t end. No parole hearings. No fresh starts. Just forever. At that point, some Christians begin to quietly lean toward softer doctrines: maybe the wicked are simply annihilated, snuffed out of existence. Or maybe, eventually, everyone gets in. These alternatives have an emotional pull because they seem to relieve the pressure of theodicy. But do they really?

Let’s back up and look at how the church has tried to grapple with this.

Augustine, Aquinas, and the Long Tradition

Augustine was one of the first to wrestle seriously with the problem of evil. He framed it not as some stubborn force in competition with God but as a privation, a hole where goodness ought to be. Evil, in his account, doesn’t have substance—it’s parasitic. It only exists because good creatures twist away from their Creator. In that sense, God isn’t the author of evil; we are, by our misuse of freedom. And if evil is a willful corruption, then hell is simply the final shape of that corruption. Augustine put it bluntly: the punishment of sin is sin. Hell is not an arbitrary lightning bolt from heaven; rather, it’s the natural outcome of a life turned inward, away from the supreme Good.

Aquinas added his meticulous reasoning to the discussion. For him, God’s providence orders everything toward its proper end. Sin is a misordering, a deviation from the divine blueprint. Punishment, then, is not God “losing His temper” but the necessary rectification of disorder. To allow wickedness to flourish unchecked would actually contradict God’s goodness. As Aquinas saw it, eternal punishment matches the eternal weight of sin—not because God is vindictive but because His justice cannot be mocked.

Fast forward to Calvin, and the tone sharpens. He had little patience for hand-wringing about whether God’s decrees were fair. “Whatever God wills,” he argued, “is righteous by the very fact that He wills it.” To modern ears, that sounds almost tyrannical. But Calvin wasn’t trying to erase God’s love or paint Him as arbitrary. He was grounding comfort in the truth that there is no higher standard of justice above God to which He must appeal. For Calvin, the mystery of why God allows evil or ordains hell rests, in the end, with God’s sovereign wisdom.

These voices may sound austere compared to today’s sensibilities. Yet they all circle the same basic truth: hell is not a blemish on God’s character but, paradoxically, one of its necessary expressions. If we flinch, maybe that says more about our dulled sense of sin than about divine cruelty.

The Modern Standoff: Evil as Evidence Against God

Jump to the twentieth century and you find philosophers like J. L. Mackie charging that God and evil are logically incompatible. If God is omnipotent, He can eliminate evil. If He is good, He wants to. Yet evil exists. Contradiction. The famous trilemma. Alvin Plantinga’s “free will defense” more or less defused that strict logical problem by pointing out that even an all-powerful God can’t force free creatures to always choose good without undermining their freedom. Still, the so-called evidential problem lingers: even if evil is logically compatible with God, the sheer volume and intensity of it seems improbable under a God of love.

That’s where hell starts to look like an especially ugly appendix to the story. It doesn’t just allow evil; it guarantees a place where suffering never ends. At first blush, that seems to increase the sum total of evil in the universe. But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Classical theology has often pictured hell less as a blemish and more as a quarantine. It’s the boundary line beyond which evil can no longer spill into God’s renewed creation. It’s not evil triumphant; it’s evil contained and judged. The very existence of heaven, pure and uncorrupted, requires such a firewall. Without it, the contagion of sin would spread forever.

The Question of Proportion

Still, the emotional objection persists: isn’t it wildly disproportionate to punish finite sins with infinite torment? If my life on earth spans seventy years, do I deserve to suffer seventy trillion? John Stott himself admitted he found this line of reasoning compelling, which is why he leaned toward annihilationism.

But here’s where Anselm’s old reasoning remains relevant: the seriousness of sin isn’t about the time it takes to commit it. A murder may take seconds, but its weight is enormous. What magnifies guilt is the dignity of the one offended. Steal from a neighbor, it’s bad. Betray your mother, it’s worse. Betray God—the infinitely holy and merciful One—and you’ve committed an offense of infinite weight. That’s why Jonathan Edwards could argue, without blinking, that one sin deserves hell. It’s not exaggeration; it’s logic rooted in the worth of the One sinned against.

Add to that another wrinkle: the damned do not stop sinning. Revelation depicts them cursing God even under judgment. Hell is eternal not only because of the offense already committed but because rebellion itself persists eternally. In that sense, the punishment is not disproportionate at all; it is the mirror of unending defiance.

The Hiddenness of God

Then there’s another tack critics take: if hell is real, why doesn’t God make Himself more obvious? Isn’t it unjust to condemn people who never had a clear shot at belief? This is the so-called problem of divine hiddenness. And it’s a thorny one.

Yet the biblical witness insists the problem isn’t lack of evidence but suppression of it. Paul tells us in Romans 1 that God’s attributes are “clearly seen” in creation, so that people are without excuse. The trouble is not that God hides but that humans avert their gaze. There’s also something to the argument that God’s revelation must be personal rather than coercive. If He overwhelmed us with blazing displays at every moment, would that foster genuine love or merely forced compliance? As philosopher Eleonore Stump puts it, God’s way of showing Himself is sufficient but not irresistible—clear to those who seek, but veiled enough that the proud can ignore Him if they insist.

Jesus’ words ring in our ears here: “He who seeks finds.” The problem, if we’re honest, is that many don’t seek. They prefer autonomy to truth. And so the door of hell, to borrow Sartre’s phrase, is locked from the inside.

Alternative Doctrines and Their Pitfalls

Faced with these tensions, some evangelicals have explored alternatives. Conditional immortality (or annihilationism) suggests the wicked are eventually extinguished. Universalism suggests all are eventually reconciled. Both aim to relieve the theodical pressure, but both create new problems.

Annihilationism may sound compassionate, but it cheapens the seriousness of sin and undermines the biblical warnings of eternal fire where the smoke of torment rises “forever and ever” (Rev 14:11). Nonexistence isn’t punishment; it’s escape. Augustine was right: ceasing to be is not the same as suffering justice.

Universalism, meanwhile, feels emotionally appealing—who wouldn’t want it to be true?—but it collides head-on with Jesus’ own stark words about the narrow gate and the outer darkness. It also flattens the moral seriousness of our choices, effectively making human freedom an illusion. If all are saved regardless, then sin is a charade and judgment an empty threat. Compassion at the cost of truth turns out to be counterfeit.

The Cross as the Center of Theodicy

All these arguments, intricate as they are, can leave us dizzy. The problem of evil isn’t solved by syllogisms alone. It presses too close for that. Which is why Christians have always returned to the cross as the ultimate theodicy. If God were aloof, untouched by our suffering, then eternal punishment would feel like cosmic sadism. But the God who warns us about hell is the same God who descended into it. On the cross, Christ bore the weight of wrath, tasted the abandonment, drank the cup to the dregs.

John Stott once confessed he could not believe in God if it weren’t for the cross. And I think he put his finger on it. The only way hell makes sense is when we see that God Himself endured its fury for us. The warnings of judgment, then, aren’t threats barked by a tyrant but the desperate pleas of a Father who has already gone to the furthest length to rescue us.

Pastoral Dimensions

It’s easy to get abstract, but for most people this discussion isn’t theoretical. It’s about family members who died outside of Christ, friends who mock the gospel, neighbors who seem so decent and kind but show no interest in God. When we ask, “How can hell be just?” it’s often because we’re thinking of faces and names we love.

In those moments, tidy answers don’t help. What helps is remembering God’s character—that His judgments are righteous altogether, that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, that He desires all to come to repentance. We can lament, plead, and pray, but we cannot charge God with injustice. The Judge of all the earth will do right. That assurance is sometimes all we have, and it’s enough.

At the same time, we dare not soften the truth. To minimize hell in the name of compassion is to deprive people of the very warning that might drive them to grace. Jerry Walls said it well: the doctrine of hell is not mainly about punishment but about the seriousness of moral choices and the depth of God's love. To preach hell is not cruelty; it is urgency.

Evil Defeated, Love Vindicated

Theodicy is, at bottom, an exercise in hope. It affirms that evil will not get the last word. That God is not passive in the face of wickedness. That even hell itself is part of His victory over sin. Without judgment, the universe would tilt into absurdity, as if the Hitlers and Stalins could simply vanish into nonexistence unscathed. With judgment, the moral order holds firm.

Randy Alcorn once put it this way: if God is holier than we think and we are more sinful than we admit, then of course His punishment will be decisive and eternal. Anything less would be unworthy of Him.

Hell, strange as it sounds, is not the defeat of love but its vindication. It shows that God takes human dignity seriously enough to let us reject Him, and human depravity seriously enough to judge it. Only when evil is finally quarantined can the promise be true: no more tears, no more death, no more crying or pain. The new creation requires the old rebellion to be shut out forever.