So all infants and children who have ever lived and died as non-Christians are sentenced by God to suffer eternally in hell? That's kind and 'all-loving'.

This is the sharpest form of the problem of hell, because it is not an abstraction — it is a child, and anyone who answers it with a system and no grief has answered badly. But the position being attacked is not quite the position Christians hold.

1. Judgment is proportionate, not uniform. Jesus says the servant who knew his master's will and did not do it “will receive a severe beating,” while the one who did not know “will receive a light beating” (Luke 12:47-48). Degrees of knowledge produce degrees of accountability. That single sentence rules out the picture of an automatic, uniform sentence.

2. Scripture treats the unaccountable differently. Israel's little ones, “who this day have no knowledge of good or evil,” were not counted with the rebellious generation that died in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 1:39). God spares Nineveh partly out of concern for “more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11).

3. Jesus placed children inside the kingdom. “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). He does not say the kingdom is available to them if they grow up well. He says it belongs to such as these.

4. David expected to see his son again. When his infant died, David said, “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). It is a modest text and should not be overread — it is about David's own hope of reunion. But it is the one place Scripture records a father's expectation about a dead infant, and it is not despair.

5. Any hope rests on the cross, not innocence. Scripture does not say children are safe because they are sinless; it says “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). If a child is saved, it is because Christ is “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2), applied by grace and not earned.

6. Christians genuinely disagree here. This is not a settled question and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. Many hold that all who die before moral accountability are saved by God's mercy; some Reformed thinkers restrict that hope to covenant children; others say Scripture is simply silent and we trust God's character without filling in the blank. All three are defended by people who take the text seriously.

7. The alternative is worse for the child. On the objection's own naturalism, a dead child has simply ceased. There is no one left to be unjust to, and no reunion. The objection borrows the Christian scale of value — that a child's life has infinite worth and its loss is a scandal — in order to indict the Christian God. It is worth asking where that scale comes from if matter is all there is.

8. The objection targets a doctrine nobody teaches. The claim being rejected is that God consigns the ignorant to exactly the same fate as the informed, on no other basis than never having heard. That is a real position in some popular preaching. It is not the position of the texts cited above, and it should be argued against in its strongest form.

9. God's justice is the right place to stand. Abraham asks the question the objection is really asking: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25). The Bible does not scold him for it. “The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9) is the character against which the details get weighed.

10. Some things are simply not revealed. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Paul ends his longest argument on this note, exclaiming over the unsearchable judgments of God (Romans 11:33-34). Saying “I don't know” is not a dodge when the text is actually silent; it is the honest reading of a silent text.

The objection lands hard against a caricature. What Scripture actually gives is narrower and better: a God who judges by the light a person had, who welcomed children and said the kingdom belongs to them, and who has not told us everything. Where he has not spoken, the reasonable move is trust in a character already revealed, not confident detail.

Sources: R.C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith; Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics; C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

Related challenges:
• My Grandma was a sincerely nice person who happened to NOT be a Christian. Let me get this right...your "all-loving" God is going to punish her in hell for eternity because she didn't "accept" Jesus?
• Can God make a rock so heavy that even HE can't lift it?
• Is it fair that a North Korean woman who never heard 'boo' about Jesus, let alone the Gospel, is going to burn in hell for eternity because she didn't choose the right set of parents, geographically?