Lawrence Krauss on The problem of hell
Krauss treats hell as a doctrine that collapses under ordinary moral reasoning and illustrates religion's willingness to assert what cannot be evidenced.
Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist, not a philosopher of religion, and his engagement with the doctrine of hell has typically come through debates and public conversations — including long exchanges with Christian apologists and with Richard Dawkins in the film The Unbelievers (2013). His stance is that hell is one of the clearest cases of a religious claim for which no evidence could conceivably be produced, yet which is affirmed with confidence anyway.
Krauss often stresses the asymmetry between scientific and theological epistemics. A physicist who asserted the existence of a particle she could not detect, predict, or observationally constrain would be dismissed. A theologian can assert an eternal post-mortem state with no comparable evidence and still have his claim taken seriously. Krauss treats hell as a paradigm case — a claim whose confidence is inversely proportional to its evidence.
On the moral question, Krauss is succinct. He treats eternal conscious punishment as plainly disproportionate and notes that a cosmos governed by such a principle would be morally far worse than the cosmos as revealed by physics, which is indifferent but not cruel. He has argued that many believers quietly share this judgement, which is why the doctrine tends to be spoken of less and less in public preaching, even where it remains on the books.
“If the best evidence for a claim of eternal torture is that an old book says so, then the claim is not serious. It is serious in its consequences, but not in its grounding.”