Hell and Numbers of Births

Summary. If hell exists, one way to prevent souls from going there is to reduce the number of souls that are born. In addition to promoting reproductive-health services, one might try to reduce the number of births that take place by promoting female education, reducing poverty, and extending lifespans. (Mind simulations with vast computational power and lab universes might lead to the creation of enormous finite or even infinite numbers of souls that could go to hell.) However, it may in fact not be a good idea to try and reduce the number of births that occur because God may very well oppose such efforts (especially if done using conventional birth-control techniques).

Note: This piece is intended to be an honest exploration of an issue that I consider highly important but have not heard many other people mention. I'm genuinely curious to hear any responses that readers--whether religious or atheist--may have: <webmaster [put "at" here] utilitarian-essays.com>.

Thought Experiments

Example 1. Suppose it's known with certainty that a version of Christianity is true in which humans go to an infinite hell if and only if they reject Jesus's offer to forgive their sins, otherwise they go to heaven. You're standing in a doorway between exactly two rooms, A and B. The door will shut in five minutes, so you must choose to go into one of the two rooms before then. If you go into room A, you'll cause one person who wouldn't otherwise have existed to be born, live a normal, finite life on earth, and then go to hell for eternity. If you go into room B, that person will never come into existence. (See the table below for a summary of this and the following examples.)

It seems obvious to me that you ought to choose room B. Only the staunchest advocate of "painful existence is better than no existence" would choose room A.

Example 2. The scenario is identical to that in Example 1, except that now room A corresponds to having nothing happen, and room B corresponds to preventing the existence of someone who would otherwise have been born and would have gone to hell with 100% probability.

Again, I think it's obvious that you should go to room B. The only difference from Example 1 is that, if you choose room B this time, you're "actively" preventing someone's existence, rather than "passively" doing so. I see no moral difference from Example 1, because an "active" action differs only from a "passive" one in its relation to an arbitrarily chosen state of the world that we call the "status quo." Still, others might see a morally relevant distinction.

Example 3. Repeat the set-up of Example 2, with the modification that, if you enter room B, the person whose birth you prevent would have had a 95% chance (determined by a random-number generator) of going to hell and a 5% chance of going to heaven.

The choice here depends on one's view of the relative goodness of heaven vs. badness of hell, but I think many people would again choose room B. (Personally, I would choose room B for much smaller probabilities of hell. In fact, if given the choice between a 0.001% chance of hell and a 99.999% chance of heaven for myself, I would still prefer not to exist than to take such a gamble.)

Example 4. You perform an extensive statistical analysis of religiosity among various segments of the population. You find that, on average, 95% of children born to atheist parents of a particular socioeconomic class remain staunch atheists throughout their lives; the other 5% become devoted Christians.^[1] The set-up is the same as in Example 2 except that now room B corresponds to causing a particular atheist couple with the aforesaid characteristics to have one less child. Assume that this would neither cause nor prevent other births elsewhere on the planet at other times.

The only difference from Example 3 is that whether the person whose existence you prevent would have gone to hell is not determined by a random-number generator but by "his own free will," to the extent the latter exists. One might say that we're not morally obligated to choose room B in this case because, if the extra child had been born, he would simply have chosen his own fate. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that we can predict remarkably well whether people will grow up to be Christians or atheists based merely on the religion of their parents. So even if the choice to go to hell is a free one, we might still prefer that people didn't make it. People freely choose to destroy their lives with drugs, but this doesn't mean we have no moral responsibility to prevent them from trying drugs in the first place.

I should note that, even if Christianity is true, things are not so simple as saying that "all atheists go to hell and all Christians go to heaven." Only God can decide on matters of salvation (1 Corinthians 4:4-5). But it seems plausible, assuming traditional versions of Christianity, that many Christians avoid hell and most atheists do not.

Example 5. The set-up is the same as in Example 4 except that room B corresponds to (magically) causing the distribution of family-planning services among a population of atheists whose children have a 95% chance, according to your statistical model, of rejecting Christianity. The difference from Example 4 is only the in the means of preventing birth (which might, quite plausibly, be objectionable for Christians).

Even if you agree that room B is the better choice in Example 5, it doesn't necessarily follow that you ought to go about promoting birth control. In reality, doing so requires time and resources that could be devoted elsewhere. For instance, if you knew that Christianity was correct, you could instead help to fund missionary efforts. Presumably the latter would be more consistent with God's wishes as revealed in the Bible than the former (though it's plausible that promoting birth reduction would prevent far more people from going to hell per dollar than would evangelism).

What If the Correct Religion is Uncertain?

Example 6. Suppose there are exactly 10 religions that might be true. Six of these involve jealous gods who punish exactly those people who didn't worship them exclusively. Two of the other religions involve gods who send everyone to heaven, and the last two religions involve lazy gods that haven't bothered creating an eternal afterlife. Give each religion equal probability mass. The best any person can do is to believe one of the jealous-god religions and have a 3/10 (= 2/10 + 1/10) probability of going to heaven. But this leaves her with a 5/10 (= 6/10 - 1/10) probability of hell. (Atheists are even worse off, with a 6/10 chance of hell.) So even children of the most devout believers have coin-flip odds of going to hell.

Is there an obligation, in this case, to avoid having children because of the harsh odds? I would say so. Indeed, it's harder in this situation to make the argument that people freely choose hell, because most of their risk is due to epistemic uncertainty, rather than deliberate rejection of a particular God. Furthermore, in this case, preventing someone from being born does far more than convincing them to become a member of a particular religion. The former wipes away a 5/10 probability of hell, while the former wipes away at most a 1/10 probability.

How is the real world different from Example 6? For one thing, it's possible that no God exists, in which case the above probabilities would be multiplied by factors corresponding to the probability that atheism is false. It's also plausible that we should use a different probability distribution over possible gods. For instance, maybe we should assign higher probability to gods who save everyone (though it might be hard to reconcile this possibility with the amount of suffering in the world, especially in nature). Or maybe we should assign higher weight to gods whose judgement doesn't depend on belief but on other factors, such as certain actions taken during life. In this case, it might be possible to gain favor with more than one god simultaneously, though if there's doubt about whether the true God judges a given action as right or wrong, one's risk of hell may still be significant.

Reducing Births

In light of Example 6, suppose we wanted to reduce the number of souls that come into existence. Assuming hell exists, it's not obvious when souls become damnable (at conception? at birth? after reaching a certain age of maturity?), though this question may be quite important. For instance, if souls are created at conception and can go to hell any time afterwards, then there's a big difference between preventing births by abstinence or condoms vs. contraceptives that prevent blastocyst implantation (see this article for details). 3/4 of all embryos never make it to maturity as fetuses. With in-vitro fertilization (IVF), the number of embryos created per baby is even higher (source). (Perhaps it would be cost-effective to encourage IVF facilities to reduce the number of excess embroys created.) If souls don't become damnable until after birth, the above concerns are less relevant.

Without having done an exhaustive cost-effectiveness analysis or review of existing charities, I would tentatively recommend Population Services International (PSI) as an organization to which one might donate. The charity-analysis group GiveWell awarded PSI first place in its ranking of charities with the purpose of "Saving Lives (focus on Africa)," noting that "across the organization, we estimate that it costs PSI about $650-$1000 to save a life. These estimates do not include other benefits of PSI's activities, such as preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing non-fatal malaria infections." PSI spends 50% of its budget on condoms and other safe-sex behavior against HIV/AIDS, and another 11% on general birth control. PSI claims that "In 2006, PSI programs provided 11.7 million couple years of protection against pregnancy, averting an estimated 6.7 million unintended pregnancies and 12,900 maternal deaths."

Unfortunately, not all of PSI's reproductive-health methods are ideal. For instance, the organization promotes emergency contraception and intrauterine devices, as well as other hormonal methods that carry some risk of destroying fertilized embryos. Perhaps donors could request to have PSI target their donations to specific areas, explicitly letting the organization know their preferences regarding family-planning techniques. Or perhaps there are other highly cost-effective organizations with more Christian-friendly approaches? I suppose promoting abstinence would be ideal, though I'm not aware of how successful such efforts are.

One should give some weight to the view that intentional artificial contraception in general is immoral. (From a preventing-embryo-deaths perspective, natural contraception may or may not be better.) But perhaps it wouldn't be immoral if improved family planning were a forseen side effect of a well-meaning action. For instance, one might promote the general status of women, perhaps through expanded female education. Additionally, it's plausible that increasing worldwide life expectancy (such as by controlling infectious disease, reducing infant mortality, and alleviating poverty) would reduce the number of births that take place, because families would need to have fewer total children in order to make sure that some of them survive to support the parents. (It's still important, from the consequentialist side of things, to think about exactly how these reductions in family size would occur: e.g., abstinence is much better than abortions.)

Under the transhumanist scenario where lifespans become indefinitely long, one would expect the number of new births to fall near zero. Of course, if uploads are possible and would still have damnable souls, the numbers of them that might be created--on the order of 10^38 by one estimate--could drastically exceed the number of natural biological souls that could ever exist on earth, which we might roughly bound above as ~4 * 10^17 = (4 embroys per person born) * (~10 billion people born) / (~100 years) * (~1 billion years of life left on earth).

Of course, creating infinitely many universes in a lab might create infinitely many souls that would eventually go to hell. Though highly implausible, it's also conceivable that our universe (or a universe simulating ours) contains infinite computational power (see, e.g., source), in which case infinitely many virtual souls might be simulated.

Qualification

The idea of preventing people from going to hell through fewer births has no Biblical basis. If this approach were really God's will, presumably He would have said so explicitly. Given that there are lots of things Jesus did exhort explicitly, there seems little religious justification for spending resources to reduce births, at least not for this reason.

This is a serious objection. One might imagine that God would obstruct efforts taken to reduce the number of births because they oppose his wishes, in which case such efforts would be futile (Psalm 127:1). Moreover, if God is both benevolent and infinitely wise, it follows trivially that we ought to do what He commands (assuming we can figure out what that is), even if we can't comprehend how it could possibly be the right thing.

As far as what the Bible actually recommends about the number of births in the world, the evidence seems mixed. Here are a few passages that appear to support having children (please let me know if there are others that I haven't included):

• "Be fruitful and increase in number [...]." (Genesis 1:28)
• "Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them." (Psalm 127:3-5)

It should be pointed out that these passages presumably speak about people who, at the time, were "in God's favor" to some extent. (Genesis 1:28 came before Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden.) In other portions of the Old Testament, God speaks about intentionally destroying wicked people to remove them from the face of the earth, as in the case of Noah's flood, or Joshua 11:19-20: "Except for the Hivites living in Gibeon, not one city made a treaty of peace with the Israelites, who took them all in battle. For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses." (Surely preventing births is more innocuous than comitting genocide...?) The force of this last point is much diminished, however, by the New Testament, where it appears that God would now prefer to "make disciples of all the nations" (Matthew 28:19) rather than destroy those opposed to him. So the Christian can argue that instead of promoting family planning, we ought to be spreading the Gospel, even if the latter effort would prevent fewer souls from going to hell per dollar.

What about passages opposing new births? Ecclesiastes 4:2-3 presents an interesting perspective: "And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun." Of course, Ecclesiastes is an unusual book, and its statements probably shouldn't be taken at face value. Indeed, the preceding statement is potentially contradicted by Ecclesiastes 9:4: "even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!"

More serious is Jesus's warning in Matthew 26:24: "But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born." Of course, this speaks specifically of Judas Iscariot (not necessarily all those who don't follow Christ) and includes the qualification "better for him," which isn't necessarily the same as "morally better overall," but the passage is worth pondering. Similarly, in Luke 23:28-29, Jesus warns about a period of distress (probably the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE) with the words: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, 'Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!'" Similar language appears in the (noncanonical) Gospel of Thomas, saying 79: "Blessed are those who have heard the word of the Father (and) have kept it in truth. For there will be days when you will say: 'Blessed is the womb which has not conceived, and the breasts which have not given suck.'" (Of course, what type of "distress" could be worse than that of hell...?)

[1] I haven't been able to find much data on the actual percentage of children of atheists who later become Christians. One somewhat-relevant study is "National Context, Parental Socialization, and Religious Belief: Results from 15 Nations" (JSTOR link) by Jonathan Kelley and Nan Dirk De Graaf. This table, adapted from one on p. 651, presents average religiosity (on a scale of 0 to 100) for individuals depending on national religiosity and parental church attendance:

As one might expect, a regression of child religiosity against parental religiosity revealed a strong positive correlation, even after controlling for age, sex, education, country, and other variables (p. 651).