Daniel Dennett on The problem of hell
Dennett treats hell as a designed meme — a belief that survives because of its effects on believers, not because of any evidence for its truth.
Daniel Dennett's framework in Breaking the Spell (2006) is naturalistic and evolutionary: religious ideas, like other cultural artefacts, are subject to selection pressures. Doctrines that motivate adherence, suppress defection, and reward promulgation tend to persist, regardless of their truth. Hell is, on Dennett's analysis, almost a textbook case — a belief beautifully engineered to increase the cost of disbelief and the motivation to proselytise.
Dennett distinguishes between 'believing in' a doctrine and 'believing in believing in' it. Many modern Christians, he observes, no longer take hell literally but consider it important that others continue to, lest the moral fabric of society unravel. He treats this as revealing: the doctrine is being sustained not because its adherents find it credible but because they find it useful. That is an admission that its evidential grounding has quietly collapsed.
On the philosophical question, Dennett endorses the standard moral objections. He is not typically as polemical as Hitchens or Dawkins, but he argues clearly that a doctrine that takes finite creatures and assigns them infinite punishment fails ordinary tests of coherence and justice. The more sophisticated theological defences, he argues, succeed only by so softening the doctrine that what remains bears little resemblance to what most believers take themselves to be affirming.
“Many people believe in belief in God. What they do not have, and what they cannot give you, is a reason to think God exists — and the same is true, in spades, for hell.”