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Thesis The argument from divine hiddenness is stronger than the argument from evil

Ethan Mercer Contributor
· 5 replies · 214 views
God & the argumentsAnalyticIslamicJewishBlaise Pascal#divine-hiddenness#nonresistant-nonbelief#problem-of-evil#schellenberg
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Where it stands

I'm a second-year undergraduate and the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, so I'm used to being outnumbered. Here's a thesis I want tested.

The argument from evil gets all the attention, but theists have well-developed replies: free will, soul-making, goods we cannot see. Whatever you think of them, they at least make sense of suffering as part of a relationship with God.

J. L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument seems harder to answer. Roughly: a perfectly loving God would always be open to a relationship with any creature capable of one. Such a relationship requires believing God exists. So if God existed, there would be no one who sincerely wants to believe, isn't resisting, and still can't. But there are such people. So God does not exist.

Why I think it's stronger: the standard replies to evil appeal to goods that require the relationship. Hiddenness denies the relationship to people who are not resisting it. The free-will reply doesn't apply, because nonresistant nonbelievers aren't misusing their freedom. And soul-making through doubt seems an odd gift to give someone who would gladly accept the relationship itself.

Show me where this goes wrong.

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5 replies

For the thesis 1

No replies on this side yet.

Against the thesis 3

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Against Fellow

    Against. The free-will reply returns in a different form: a relationship of love needs room for the other to respond freely, and overwhelming evidence could coerce rather than invite. John Hick called it "epistemic distance". A God who was as obvious as the sun might get assent but not love. I admit this explains why God isn't overwhelming. It doesn't obviously explain why God is invisible to people who are looking.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Rabbi Eliana Gutman

    Against Fellow

    The Hebrew Bible has a phrase for this, hester panim, the hiding of the face, in Deuteronomy where God says "I will surely hide my face". Jewish tradition has never assumed God's presence is constant or evident, and after the Shoah the theme became unbearable and central. That doesn't refute Schellenberg, but it shows the premise that a loving God would always be available isn't drawn from any scripture I know. It's a philosopher's idea of love.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Imam Bilal Hussain

    Against Fellow

    In Islamic terms, the very first description of the believers in the Qurʾān is that they believe in the unseen, al-ghayb. Hiddenness is built into the meaning of faith. The world is full of signs, āyāt, to be read, not proofs that compel. Of course, Ethan will say: then what of the person who sincerely reads and sees nothing? I'd answer that none of us is in a position to judge another's sincerity all the way down, including our own.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Pieter de Jong

      For Fellow

      For. Bilal's last move is the weak point of every reply: it questions whether nonresistant nonbelievers really exist. But they obviously do. I was raised without religion, tried honestly for some years as a teenager, and nothing came. Telling me I must secretly have been resisting is unfalsifiable. Schellenberg's premise is just an empirical observation, and it is plainly true of many people.

Other replies

  1. Ethan Mercer

    Contributor

    Thanks. Pascal saw some of this coming: a God who hides himself, enough light for those who want to see. But I notice the strongest replies (Eliana, Bilal) do the same thing: they deny that a loving God must always make himself available. That's a substantive claim about love, and Schellenberg's whole argument depends on denying it.

    So I'll revise: hiddenness is stronger than evil if you accept Schellenberg's picture of divine love as always open. If you don't, it loses its edge. That makes the real dispute a question about what love requires, which I didn't expect.

    Helpful · 1