The “Celestial Dictator” Argument Still Holds Up

Contra Alex O’Connor

I like Alex O’Connor. In many ways we share a parallel journey of leaving Christianity, retaining a curiosity about theology and scripture, at least a brief openness to reconversion, while currently being a relatively open (yet hopefully not annoying) non-believer.

Having said that, the difference between us is that he has millions of social media followers, while I have (far) fewer than a thousand. Part of the reason he is so successful is because he will give more charity to arguments than they deserve. He will throw some good non-theistic arguments under the bus for the sake of having a good conversation with a Christian.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the problem is that, given his platform, many people will repeat or agree with his arguments, even if they are bad.¹

He did this a few years ago with one of Christopher Hitchens’s arguments against God.

I don’t think this is a good rebuttal by O’Connor, and in this post I’ll explain why.

O’Connor’s Argument

Tyranny Vs. Benevolence

O’Connor asserts that the dictatorship argument is wrong because it’s a metaphor, and if we can prove that the metaphor is disanalogous, we can defeat the argument.

Specifically, he believes that what makes dictators bad is not that they are dictators, but that they are tyrants. Though God himself may technically be a dictator, that doesn’t mean he is a tyrant. In this way, O’Connor asserts not all dictators are tyrants, and therefore a dictatorial God could plausibly not be a tyrant.

Tyrants are bad for two primary reasons: They have the capacity to be wrong about facts (and often are), and they are not benevolent (or outright malevolent). This, in contrast with God, as a perfect being, who is all-knowing and omnibenevolent.

Freedom

Hitchens and other anti-theists believe that freedom and liberty are incompatible with worshipping a celestial dictator. The existence of Hell makes this incompatibility more salient. If people are truly sent to Hell for not abiding God’s commands or merely not believing in him, God is a tyrant unworthy of worship.

O’Connor answers this argument by pointing out that, just because there’s a God, doesn’t mean you’re forced to act in a particular way. Though the existence of Hell (and the reality of eternal conscious torment for not believing in God or following God’s commandments) would plausibly make God a tyrant, there are many theists who don’t believe in Hell as it’s traditionally defined.

For instance, many theists believe in annihilationism, that there isn’t everlasting suffering for those who don’t believe in God. Others don’t see Hell as a place of torture, but as separation from God. Others see Hell as the natural result of sin.

The Counter-Narrative:

O’Connor, in tandem with Bishop Robert Baron, then reframes understanding God’s absolute sovereignty. God is an omniscient guide to the best possible outcome for yourself. Sometimes, restricting someone’s freedom makes them more free.

A smoker, for instance, may see prohibition on smoking as a limitation of their freedom, but in reality, smoking makes them sick and less free. To the Theist/Christian, telling a sinner not to sin is like telling a smoker not to smoke.

In this way, God’s limitations on freedom shouldn’t be understood as “Do this, or else,” but rather “Do this, so that the world becomes clearer to you, so that you may become more free.”

Let’s call this the counter-narrative: Humans have distorted perception of the world, and this makes them unfree and unhappy. God commands Christians to act and believe in specific ways to allow them to see the world undistorted and be more happy. Hell is simply the consequence of living a life and making decisions from that distorted perception.

Concessions and Disagreements

I agree that:

• A dictator that was omnibenevolent and omniscient would be better than one who wasn’t.

• It’s logically possible for a dictator to not be a tyrant.

• Worshipping a God is not inherently incompatible with human freedom.

• Some restrictions on freedom make humans more safe and free relative to no restrictions.

• Human misery is often a product of human error.

• Accepting an idea or worldview (such as theism or Christianity) on faith could lead to one believing more true things and less false things. It could also make one happier.

O’Connor’s rebuttal to the celestial dictator hinges on a few points:

1. That not all dictators are tyrants

2. That Hell as eternal conscious torment is not real, or that the belief in Hell is not a fundamental part of the Christian religion

3. That the restrictions of the Christian religion predictably make everyone more happy, or give them a clearer perspective of the world.

I hope to show all of these points fail.

Yes, Dictators Are Tyrants

Where’s the Nice Dictator?

As I conceded above, it is logically possible for a dictator to not be a tyrant. The problem is that, historically, benevolent dictators are seemingly nonexistent.

When a single individual has the monopoly of force of a country or region, all power (economic, political, militarily) goes through them. They usually don’t like to give up that power, while others want to take it, and so the dictator will do tyrannical things to keep their power. The consequence is that dictatorships are simultaneously violent and unstable.

Sometimes that means the dictator suppresses a minority group, other times he robs or extracts rents from innovative and profitable industries, and at other times still, he brutally puts down pesky peaceful protests. Sometimes, he does silly things that appear as self-sabotage, like not developing his country’s road network.

All of this is to say that there’s no such thing as a peaceful, benevolent, or non-tyrannical dictator.

Empirical Possibility And Language

If we have no example of a non-tyrannical dictator, we cannot say it’s empirically possible to have a non-tyrannical dictator, much as we cannot say it’s empirically possible for a flying unicorn to exist. In this way, language is constrained by the real things it refers to in the world, and possibility should be grounded in what is actually observed to happen.

If I say “all metals have a melting point” and you say “vibranium is a metal without a melting point” and there’s nothing in the world that the word “vibranium” refers to, you haven’t said anything true about the world. Further, absent the existence of vibranium, we aren’t justified in thinking adamantium (which is defined as vibranium but better!) is also a real metal.

When we’re talking about vibranium and adamantium, which are defined as metals that are not experienced in the real world and don’t share properties that metals we observe have, we aren’t talking about metals anymore. We’re creating new words and pretending we’re talking about the real world. So too is the case with dictators who aren’t tyrants.

What does this have to do with God? Isn’t it the point that God is omnibenevolent and omniscient and wholly not like us? Well yes, but I would point out how metaphors such as this break down because of an inconsistent use of language.

You can’t say a metaphor fails without empirical evidence proving its failure. If I make an argument that “x is like metal because it has a melting point” it’s not a proper response to say “x is not like a metal because it has a melting point, as the (non-evidenced) metal vibranium does not have a melting point.” That’s not how disproving metaphors work.

No One Disagrees That God Has Dictatorial Powers

Baron and O’Connor do not reframe the charge of God as dictator as false, which implies that they agree God has all the negative powers Hitchens assumes He has. I would imagine that they conceive of God more as a king than dictator, as the king would probably behave differently than a dictator (respecting the dignity of citizens, for instance).

When Hitchens calls God a dictator and Christians call God a king, they are arguing over language that refers to something similar: a single individual who controls the power of state (or in this case, reality). We’ll call this person a “sovereign.”

Denying God is a dictator and that his sovereignty is more like a king doesn’t solve the problem, as kings have acted like dictators throughout history. To the extent that kings have respected the rights of their citizenry, it wasn’t out of benevolence, but because countervailing political forces held them accountable, whether it be nobility or democratic governance. Kings and heads of state today respect the rights and dignities of their citizens because they as heads of state lack absolute power.

This is the subtle assumption of Christopher Hitchens’s anti-theism, and an assumption many axiological anti-theists would agree with: A happy life worth living is one where you are in control of your life, not subject to the whims of an all powerful sovereign leader.

To create the conditions of autonomy, we need free, autonomous people “generating” countervailing power centers throughout society. Hitchens and anti-theists oppose the idea of God because the existence of an omnipotent sovereign necessarily robs humans of these powers, and thus the ability to project power and to protect their freedoms and self-determination.

Disagreeing over whether the sovereign is a king or a dictator or an omnibenevolent, omniscient intelligence misses the point. For the Hitchensonian anti-theist, the existence of an absolute sovereign would necessarily entail the denial of personal autonomy, self-determination, and other goods as a consequence of individuals lacking countervailing power.

O’Connor fails to prove the metaphor wrong because he misunderstands the metaphor. God isn’t dis-preferred because he lacks information and isn’t benevolent, but because such an arrangement necessarily corrodes individual rights, power, self-determination, and dignity. A blunt way of saying this is that I don’t want there to be a dictator ruling me, even if the dictator agrees with me on everything.

To disprove Hitchens, the Christian has to prove that God’s existence somehow doesn’t undermine these various goods. As O’Connor and Baron didn’t do that with this video, and so the metaphor still stands,as does Hitchens’s argument.

Hell Is Fundamental To Mainstream Christian Theology

Just Look At The Stats And History

This is a point I wish were not true, but it nevertheless is. The belief that Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment is the mainstream position throughout most of Christian history. It’s certainly mainstream in American Christianity. Here’s a survey of some data:

• About 80 percent of American Christians belief in Hell, including 91 percent of Evangelicals and 75 percent of Catholics

• More than half of Americans think that people in Hell experience physical or psychological suffering.

• About 44 percent of Christians, including 71 percent of Evangelicals, believe that those who do not believe in God cannot go to Heaven.

• About one-third of American Christians, and 50 percent of Evangelicals believe their faith is the only path to eternal life in Heaven.

• According to Lifeway Research, about 56 percent of Americans believed that “hell is a real place where certain people will be punished forever,” and about one quarter of Americans believed that “even the smallest sin deserved eternal damnation.”²

And here are some Church doctrines, in different denominations.

• The Westminster Confessions of Faith, one of the most influential documents in Reformed and Presbyterian churches says in its 32nd chapter that: “the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness.” The Westminister Larger catechism also teaches that “most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hellfire forever.”

• As recent as 2010, the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed “belief in the biblical teaching on eternal, conscious punishment of the unregenerate in hell”

• According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.”³

Now, it’s true that many Christians actively disbelieve in Hell and that there are theologians and philosophers who write persuasively against Hell. I’m not here to say these people aren’t Christians, that that their arguments aren’t compelling,⁴ or that they’re even wrong in their interpretation.

Rather, the weight of tradition is something to take seriously here. Disbelieving in Hell as a Christian is kind of like affirming homosexuality or the permissibility of abortion. There’s so much tradition against it, that this tradition becomes its own Problem of Evil if the doctrine is wrong: Why would God allow this to become a mainstream belief if it weren’t true?

This is the one point that many philosophers of religion contradict mainstream Christians and their institutions. There’s nothing wrong with that by itself; it would be good for religion if we had less fire and brimstone, and people converted to a faith for its positive benefits, not out of fear. But I can’t stand it when people whitewash mainstream Christian theology and what most Christians believe.

Stop claiming that serious Christians don’t believe things they demonstratively do believe!

Why The Argument Against Hell Is Compelling

When an atheist or anti-theist uses the doctrine of Hell as a reason to disbelieve in Christianity, they are not saying all Christians believe in Hell, or that everyone who believes in Christianity because of Hell is a bad person. They are not even saying that Christians must believe in Hell.

Rather, they are saying that there is compelling evidence that the doctrine of Hell is inseparable from Christianity. Indeed, many Christians themselves argue this.

Many of atheists disbelieved in Hell and then lost their faith because they no longer saw the point of being Christian. Or, they experienced the Problem of Evil that comes from disbelieving Hell: Why did God make this doctrine so widely accepted throughout Christianity history? Why did he do this when the doctrine increases the stakes of disagreement, causing many Christians to resort to violence over seemingly minute doctrinal disagreement?

Atheists Are Villainized Merely For Pointing This Out

A (somewhat facetiously) way of framing the issue is that a solid majority or plurality of traditional Christians and Churches worship the God of a Celestial North Korea. They have an army of pastors, priests, bishops, and theologians who will defend this viewpoint and are serious and sophisticated in their faith. Meanwhile, atheists and anti-theists agree that Hell is an important part of Christian theology, but maintain that it’s a good reason to disbelieve in Christianity.

In response to this, a contingent of universalists ignore the traditionalists, and focus their derision on the atheists/anti-theists as the bad guys. They mock and condescend the anti-theists for supposedly not engaging with sophisticated or serious Christians, as if the more abundant traditionalists don’t exist!

I think one of the main differences between the anti-theists and universalists is that the latter isn’t troubled by the problem of evil that comes from Hell being a false doctrine. For the anti-theist, it’s a huge problem, and that’s why they are insistent on bringing it up. But the universalists either don’t see this is a problem or would rather not think about this problem, and so they stomp their feet and bully the non-believers.

All of this is quite odd, and non-conducive to good discourse. Regardless, I’ve not heard a good answer to the Problem of Evil that arises if Eternal Conscious Torment Hell is not real.

Christianity Creates Confusion, Unhappiness And Limits Freedom (At least for some people)

O’Connor and Baron’s final rebuttal sounds wooey. The truth will set you free, man.

In all seriousness though, some of the most compelling arguments for any philosophy is that it will have you:

1. Believe more true things,

2. Believe fewer false things,

3. Feel better or happier.

The counternarrative borrows from all three arguments: By accepting Christianity, you’ll see the world more clearly (believe more true/fewer false things) and feel better/happier.

But there are a few problems with this.

Dogma Makes It Harder To Believe More True Things and Fewer False things

The first problem with this is that Christianity is a doctrinal religion with dogmas and orthodox teachings. I’ve written before about why that’s a problem:

The Problem of Dogma

Many of those teachings cannot be revised, no matter what disconfirming information is discovered. Thus, Christians and their institutions will deny scientifically established facts and spread countervailing misinformation among other Christians, creating a sense of confusion at best, and denying the truth at worst.

The cumulative effect is skepticism toward science and a stagnation of scientific progress. We see this in polling data:

• 44 percent of Christians believe science does more harm than good, and only 46 percent say it does more good than harm. These statistics are by the more pessimistic about science among religious groups.

• About 37 percent of Americans, including 52 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics believe God created humans in the present form, which is scientifically wrong.

• There’s reason to think that stronger Christian belief leads to more science denial, at least in certain subjects. For instance, according to a 2012 survey of 1,000 protestant pastors conducted by Lifeway, 50 percent of pastors agreed that the earth is 6,000 years old, 74 percent strongly agreed that Adam and Eve were real people, and 72 percent disagreed that “God used evolution to create people.”

Please note, my point here is not that Christianity is incompatible with science, but that many Christians have stalled scientific progress. Though every religion may have biases against certain fields of inquiry, if Christianity was a superior truth-tracking religion, it wouldn’t have such a bad record of denying scientific truths.

In this way, we can’t say for sure that Christianity will have you seeing the world clearer because a critical mass of Christians do not see the world clearly.

An apologist may say that the problem here is humanity, not Christianity, but this is an unsatisfactory answer. Christianity being no better than any other ideology is not a point in favor of Christianity, but a point against it. If Christianity were untrue, we’d expect its influence on truth-seeking to be roughly the same as other ideologies.

Does Christianity Make You Happier?

The second problem is that Christian theology makes some people less happy.

The lowest hanging fruit demonstrating this is traditional Christian teachings on sexuality. Whether it’s asserting that homosexuality is unnatural and bad or teachings against divorce, there are abundant examples of Christian theology making people less happy. When I assert this, my argument isn’t that Christianity suppresses happiness because it has sexual or gendered norms, but because many of those sexual and gendered norms are unsubstantiated by evidence and cause harm.

This question is nuanced in the Christian tradition, and I don’t want to gloss that over. Christian teachings on divorce have varied throughout history, but what’s important is that most denominations discourage it in most circumstances due to teachings of marriage as a covenant and Jesus’s own words on divorce.

But this is complicated by the fact that legalized divorce has been an unequivocal good for women and children. According to research by Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, states that adopted no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s found decreased rates of suicide, domestic violence, and spousal homicide for women. To be clear, the dynamics here are complicated, and I’m certain that all Christian denominations universally condemn spousal abuse, homicide, etc. The key point is that there is a social/policy solution to those problems, and Christian denominations are reflexively against it, for doctrinal reasons.

When it comes to homosexuality, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being gay, whether you define that as having sexual partners of the same sex, being in committed relationships with people of the same sex, or otherwise being attracted to members of the same sex. Certainly, there are homosexual behaviors that are bad, but I’m not listing any because what makes those behaviors bad isn’t homosexuality, but other considerations; it’s bad when heterosexual people do those behaviors too.

What’s more, the harms and negative sociological externalities associated with homosexuality are always factors that are secondary to how gay people are treated, not from the fact that gay people are gay.⁵

For a wise person following the evidence, this is obviously the case, but not for many committed Christians. As they must primarily affirm doctrine and dogma, they cannot allow themselves to see the counterevidence.

Christian Institutions Have Restricted Freedom

Finally, there have been many instances throughout history where Christian institutions have restricted freedom.

Though some may argue whether Christians were better or worse on slavery issues than other societies, the reality is that many of Christian institutions supported slavery well into the 19th century.

Beyond their support of slavery in the 19th century in the United States, southern Christian institutions also supported segregation and opposed integration well into the 20th century. In 2026, we look back at the people who acted violently toward civil rights protestors as cartoon villains. In some ways they were (segregationists are confirmed bad!), but this analysis overlooks the moral motivations of segregationists. They believed that black people were morally inferior to whites and allowing the races to intermix would degrade the virtue of white people. They saw themselves as safeguarding “white civilization,” and these views were often endorsed from the pulpit.

For the specific point, I don’t really care that much about minor details because I concede that many Christians have supported liberatory causes throughout history. If it’s the case that Christians have supported both liberatory and repressive policies and political movements throughout history, then the causal variable for whether someone supports liberatory policies is not Christianity!

This Counter-Narrative Is Watered Down Pyrrhonianism.

The more substantive criticism of the counter-narrative is that it’s unoriginal yet inferior to the idea that inspired it. It was Pyrrho of Elis, more than 300 years before Christ’s crucifixion, who taught that suspending judgment on beliefs was the key to ataraxia (serene calmness).

Pyrrho and his philosophy are obviously much different than Christianity and other ancient schools; Pyrrhonism is a skeptical school, while Christianity believes truth claims about the world. Still, the idea that we have cognitive faculties that distort our perception of the world, and that misperception leads to unhappiness is a flavor of Pyrrhonianism. It’s unoriginal to Christianity.

To make matters worse, Christianity’s cure to the problem of dogma is inferior to Pyrrhonianism because it doubles down on the problems of dogma that Pyrrho was trying to solve in the first place. It creates more dogmas and doctrines that adherents must believe, regardless of the psychological costs or what the evidence supports.

To be clear, I agree with David’s Hume’s criticism of skepticism and Pyrrhonianism; it’s likely unfeasible that one can live life fully as a skeptic without beliefs. So, if we agree with the Pyrrhonian and the Christian that cognitive distortions lead us to be misinformed about the world and unhappy, the solution is not to give up on having beliefs in the first place or to accept unjustified dogmas uncritically. Rather, we should form beliefs apportioned to the evidence.

In this way, even if we agree with Christians that our cognitive distortions misinform us of reality and make us unhappy and unfree, Christianity appears as a less credible explanation of how the world works because it requires us to alter how we use reliable tools of cognition, such as language and empirical reasoning. Because of this, the counternarrative is not a good answer to Hitchens’s argument.

God Just May Be A Tyrant

Wrapping up, I don’t believe O’Connor and Baron’s response to Hitchens is a good one.

We don’t have good evidence of the empirical possibility of non-tyrannical dictators, and relying on this evidence of mere logical possibility seems like a word game. Hell as eternal conscious torment is so substantiated as a Christian teaching that its falsehood creates a Problem of Evil. Christianity doesn’t promote truth, demote falsehood, or create happiness more than any other ideology. Philosophers going back to Pyrrho agreed having a false perception of the world led to unhappiness, but Christian solutions to this problem create more problems and raise more questions. Among them: For what reason should we assume Christian dogma is better evidenced or different from any other dogma?

So is God, if real, a tyrant? To lean into the Pyrrhonian bit: I don’t know.

But if God has dictatorial powers (which necessarily disempowers individual people and removes their autonomy), uses Hell for coercive purposes, all while his ideology promotes a distorted view of reality (with His followers asserting this is the Best Possible News, like a bunch of Orwell characters), He probably is.

1. Contrary to my previous post on C.S. Lewis, I don’t think this warrants polemics. Lewis’s misrepresentations of someone else’s work is popularized bad scholarship and worth ridicule. O’Connor’s/Bishop Baron’s argument is just bad. There’s a difference. I don’t believe in shaming wrong people, just wrong people who are smug, lazy, and harmful to public education.

2. This belief is still crazy to me, I’m sorry! Had to add this comment!

3. Please note, I’m using google and AI summaries here . If these mischaracterize the church teachings, let me know, and I will correct them. It’s hard to do research on this via google because the AI summaries often use minority church positions in their summaries. For instance, apparently there’s not much written from Methodists about Hell (as a cradle Methodist, this checks out!), but there is a strong statement by a small, conservative Methodist denomination. I found the same problem with Presbyterians, which is why I used the Westminster confessions and catechism. Someone responding will point out that there are denominations who do not affirm ECT. I can concede that! My argument here is merely that Hell is mainstream and a serious Christian doctrine.

4. I find them compelling!

5. For example, suicidality.