u/yoddleforavalanche

Help me work through this.

This occurred to me in my other post where the topic of identity depending on reality of other people is said to be necessary for meaningful concept of me.

If that is so, we need all past, present, and future souls to be saved in order to have completeness.

But "all future souls" come from infinite pool of existence. There is never an end to them, and if God makes a cut-off and all up to that point are saved, we run into the same problem frequently mentioned here, that is, someone dying is an arbitrary cutoff point for them to be saved. In the same fashion, someone not being born/conceived is an arbitrary cutoff point for them, pre-existence of souls must be implied here. So the end can never happen, otherwise those unrealized souls never got the chance to be saved.

If God can decide to bring about the judgment and salvation of all at some point, thereby cutting off those not conceived from existing, he can do the same with those who were born. In any case, someone is left out.

The alternative is that there is a pre-fixed number of souls and we are waiting for them to be realized, but that doesn't sound right to me metaphysically.

I have yet to read All Shall Be Saved, but I did listen to a lecture by David Bentley Hart where he argues that a person is not a person in a vacuum, a person is defined by other persons in their life and if anything but universalism is true one cannot be complete in the afterlife. I have seen similar arguments here.

I think this is a weak argument.

First of all, we do not cease to exist if our friends and family disappear, and we can be happy again even in this life if that happens. Imagine a shipwreck and you are stuck on an island but you have everything to survive. Eventually you find enjoyment and move on. Or if your friends or family abandon you for whatever reason. People come and go from your life, you meet new people, you move on. You are not stuck with a specific group of people forever. If that were so, meeting new people would be just as horrifying as losing people.

Secondly, it requires a weird assumption that after resurrection there will be room for such feelings, as if God cannot heal us or make us understand that it was necessarily so. We have no clue what post resurrection is. Jesus was not sad after his resurrection.

I am not saying universalism has no case, but this argument is not good.