Are Christians Evil?

One of my favorite philosophers is David Lewis. Lewis, who died in 2001, was a professor at Princeton renowned for defending strange and unconventional positions in metaphysics such as his belief that our world is but one of many worlds, all of which are equally real. He exemplified the playful cleverness that I admire in philosophers.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that the December 2007 issue of the magazine Harper's has an excerpt from an essay entitled "Divine Evil" based on an outline Lewis wrote shortly before his death. The essay has been published in the book Philosophers without Gods (Oxford University Press, 2007).

The excerpt presents an argument that tries to show that most, if not all, of us are evil. It seems to go something like this:

(1) Anyone who admires someone who is evil is evil.
(2) It is evil to torment people for insubordination.
(3) The greater the torment prescribed for insubordination, the greater is the evil of the one prescribing the torment.
(4) God prescribes infinite torment for insubordination.
(5) Therefore, God is the most evil being. (follows from 2, 3, and 4)
(6) Anyone who admires God is evil. (follows from 1 and 5)
(7) All Christians admire God.
(8) Therefore, all Christians are evil. (follows from 6 and 7)
(9) All who admire people who admire evil beings are themselves evil.
(10) Almost everyone admires some Christian.
(11) Almost everyone is evil. (follows from 9 and 10)

Lewis uses the example of Fritz, the nice Nazi who admires Hitler. Clearly, Hitler is evil, and presumably we would judge people who admire Hitler, even if they themselves do not torment anyone, to be evil as well. But Hitler never sent anyone to eternal damnation in hell, so God is even worse than Hitler and anyone who follows God is worse than Fritz.

This argument seems to fail on a number of grounds, but I'll present one possible response right now and leave the rest to you.

Leaving aside universalists (who believe that everyone is saved), most Christians do believe that at least some people are eternally damned. But does that necessarily make God evil? Lewis seems to assume that we should assess the morality of a being based on the quantity or quality of the pain and suffering they inflict or allow. But that ignores the fact that people like Hitler and Stalin are limited in their ability to inflict suffering not by moral considerations but by their practical inability to inflict all the suffering they want to inflict. The question we need to ask is how much would such evil men do if they had the power of God? Compared to them, God is probably amazingly merciful. Any human in God's role would probably be much more petty and vindictive. So perhaps what is admirable about God is that given His infinite power, His mercy is beyond anything that humans are capable of.