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WillowOne's Positions

Divine Hiddenness

My Positions

  1. A god who wants to be known, and who could make himself known at no cost to anyone's freedom, has not done so. The best explanation is that there is no such god.
  2. The standard replies (he hides to preserve free will, to test faith, so that the relationship can be freely chosen) describe a god who values the game more than the people playing it.
  3. The argument is not that God owes me a demonstration. It is that a loving god would not leave people who sincerely seek him with nothing, and the evidence is that he does.

Notes

  1. The form. J. L. Schellenberg stated it in 1993. If a perfectly loving god exists, he would make it possible for anyone open to a relationship with him to have one, and belief in his existence is a precondition of that. So if such a god exists, there are no non-resistant non-believers: no one who has looked honestly and failed to find him. But there are such people. Therefore no perfectly loving god exists.
  2. Non-resistant non-believers exist. The former believer who lost her faith in tears and would have it back if she could. The seeker who spent years in prayer and heard nothing. Every human being in the Americas for fifteen thousand years before 1492, and every child who has ever died before hearing of any god. The believer must either say these people did not really seek, which is a claim about the inner lives of strangers that nobody can support, or admit that the god who wants to be found has left a great many sincere people unable to find him.
  3. The free-will reply fails on the texts. The claim is that clear evidence would compel belief and so remove the freedom to choose God. But knowledge does not compel love: Satan knew, and rebelled; the Israelites walked behind a pillar of fire and built a golden calf; the disciples saw the risen Jesus and "some doubted" (Matthew 28:17). The Bible's own god was not hidden at all. He walked in gardens, spoke from bushes, parted seas and dictated laws, and the believers of that era are not supposed to have lost anything by it. Hiddenness is not a principle; it is a condition that set in exactly when records began to be kept.
  4. The test reply makes the test dishonest. If belief without evidence is the test, then the test is failed by exactly the people who were careful, and passed by the credulous. That is not a test of character; it is a test of epistemic standards with the scoring reversed, and under the doctrine of Hell the penalty for honesty is eternal. A god who set such a test would not be the loving one the argument is about.
  5. "He is not hidden; look at creation." Then why do sincere people, including most of the world's scientists, look at creation and not see him? The reply requires that they are lying or culpably blind, which is unkind and is not an argument. Pascal's version, that there is enough light for those who wish to see and enough darkness for those who do not, concedes the point: belief tracks wanting, and a belief that tracks wanting is motivated reasoning, not perception.
  6. The relation to evil. Hiddenness is a species of the problem of evil: the suffering of the person who searched and was answered with silence, and the suffering of everyone condemned for a belief they could not form. The theodicies do not reach it. The evidence I would accept is set out under God, and it is not demanding. A god who wanted to be found by me knows exactly what it would take.

Sources

  • Schellenberg, J. L., Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993), and The Hiddenness Argument (2015)
  • Howard-Snyder, D. and Moser, P. K. (eds), Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (2002), for the replies
  • Drange, T., Nonbelief and Evil (1998)

Also see