William Lane Craig on The problem of hell
Craig defends a modified traditional view of hell grounded in human free will and what he calls 'transworld damnation.'
William Lane Craig is one of the most influential contemporary defenders of a traditional doctrine of hell, though his version is carefully modified. In essays such as 'No Other Name: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ' (Faith and Philosophy, 1989) and in his book Hard Questions, Real Answers (2003), Craig draws on Molinist middle knowledge to argue that those who end up separated from God are precisely those who, given any feasible set of circumstances, would have freely rejected him.
Craig argues that hell is the consequence of persistent, freely chosen rejection of God, not an arbitrary decree. God, on his view, does not send anyone to hell — people exclude themselves by rejecting the grace that would have drawn them into relationship with him. The damned are, in his phrase, those who would have rejected God in any world God could have created with them in it.
On the proportionality objection, Craig argues that hell's duration reflects the ongoing, persistent rejection of God by the damned rather than a finite set of earthly actions. He also endorses the idea that offences against an infinite being carry a weight that finite offences do not, though he typically emphasises the free-will framing more than the 'infinite offence' framing. Craig grants that the doctrine is difficult but maintains it is not morally incoherent.
“People in hell want nothing to do with God, and it is their free rejection of him that preserves them in that state.”
“God desires the salvation of every person he has created. Those who are lost are lost because they have freely rejected God's every effort to save them.”