Though it is not a very common argument, some annihilationists state God would be unloving to torment someone forever. They say that since God is love (1 John 4:8), it cannot be that God would allow such a horrible thing.

First, this argument is a subjective appeal to emotion. This is so because love is itself a personal experience. Since people can love, and since we do not love perfectly as God does, the argument must then rest in a person’s subjective experience, and opinion about love is and then project that opinion upon God.

Second, this weak argument ignores the fact that God is also just and holy. He must punish the sinner for his rebellion against him. If he does not do that, then God is approving of sin. Furthermore, God’s holiness means that the filth of sin, which goes against God’s nature, cannot be tolerated. God will deal with the sinner and repay him for his rebellion against him.

Third, when someone takes a single attribute of God, isolates it from his other attributes, and bases an argument on that single attribute (i.e., love), he is committing a logical fallacy, the fallacy of composition. This fallacy of thinking asserts that what is true of the part is true of the whole. An example of this would be, “The engine is blue; therefore the car is blue.” This is, of course, not necessarily true. When we apply this to the issue at hand, we see that to say that God is love and therefore he will not judge someone to eternal torment is to commit this error because it takes a single attribute of love, and identifies the whole of God with it. In so doing, it ignores the other attributes of his character such as holiness and justice, and the conclusion cannot be trusted.

Return to Annihilationism Page