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Divine Hiddenness: New Essays
In this new collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist, and agnostic. There is coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness.
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First published February 6, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 21, 2023
This was a good look at a variety of opinions and perspectives. The introduction has a nice overview of each essay.
May 12, 2025
Inwagen
Peter van Inwagen's essay successfully demonstrates how Divine Hiddenness differs from the Problem of Evil.
Schellenberg
Schellenberg creates a dialogue and brings up additional objections. Frustratingly for me, the primary objection I had was raised by the interlocutor at the end—and left unanswered.
I believe Divine Hiddenness is a decent argument against the existence of a personal, maximally great, and loving deity—one whose love is similar to that of a parent for a child. Divine hiddenness challenges the view that every individual is personally loved by God--that God has a human-shaped hole that only that person can fill, and each person has a God-shaped hole that only God can fill.
However, I think Schellenberg is wrong to claim his argument proves atheism. Rather, it disproves a concept of God that many might hope exists. There are numerous alternatives, such as those proposed by Thomas J. Oord, who argues against the idea that God is all-powerful. It is possible that a theistic God exists, but cannot act (for Oord, due to the nature of God), and for others, due to a choice to wholly delegate authority and to step aside for a time.
There is also the possibility of abandoning the idea that God is love. Interestingly, some do this without acknowledging it—Calvinism, for instance.
In light of Divine Hiddenness, it is no surprise that Calvinists present a God who, before the foundation of the world, predetermined most of humanity to be damned and tortured for eternity simply for his own pleasure, saving only a few. The obvious implications of their view (rarely acknowledged) are that God is selfish and has a pathological, sadistic side that manifests toward the majority of people, while, again, for selfish reasons—he extends grace to a select few. We could very well have a Calvinist God who is evil and intentionally hides himself from most, having created them solely for the pleasure of watching them suffer for all eternity.
Still, there are less extreme alternatives than Calvinism that would entail that God is not "loving" according to the model of personal human love. We could propose a transcendence, which means that God's love is like that of a distant, supreme, and unapproachable sovereign for his subjects. Humans will not have a personal relationship with this deity, this deity won't answer your call, visit you when you are ill, or help you out. But in some way, this grand and mighty emperor can be thought to love his subjects--but not as individuals, but in general ways of governing. This God dwells in unapproachable light, and no one has seen Him at any time. A being completely other and like a consuming fire, lethal for creatures like us.
I just wish Schellenberg had engaged more with these possibilities. From early on, it seems he assumes that only a loving, all-powerful, personal God would be worth worshipping. He appears quite set on his conception of God. I believe there are other arguments that make it probable that a God exists, and that Divine Hiddenness and inculpable non-belief are matters theologians must take seriously as we speculate about what this God may—or may not—be like. While Schellenberg doesn’t go deeply into this, he seems to point in that direction.
Murrey
While reading Murrey's essay, where he defends the soul-making justification. I found that I side with Schellenberg and found Murrey to not be persuasive.
Murry suggests that if people were truly aware of God, this awareness would override their free will—that they would refrain from wrongdoing out of fear of punishment or fear of missing out on the good. But just look at the medieval world—consider Rome and all the sin and debauchery committed by people raised from birth to believe in a Dante-style Inferno. Take the banker that Dante placed in the lowest levels of Hell: his son (taking up the same profession) commissioned a chapel to be built in honor of Mary, hoping it would offset his sins, but that didn’t stop him from continuing what was considered a damnable business.
So yes, people fully believed in God—believed that God would torture and burn them alive for misdeeds—and yet they still committed plenty of sins. Only if God immediately punished people—zapping them—would fear curb behavior. But mere awareness of God’s existence, even when paired with belief in a brutal, retributive deity, does little to overpower human desire.
For most of my life, I took God’s existence for granted—it was the world I grew up in. Yet that did little to help me resist my own temptations.
Now, perhaps we might say God is hidden from everyone. As most people know, men generally won’t masturbate if their mother is in the room. But the Invisible Father, Son, and Holy Ghost simply aren't real enough to inspire that level of inhibition. There is that odd manner in that people truly believe in God and punishment and the rest, yet God cannot be seen--it still feels like make-believe, and damnit, often it is just not enough.
Murrey’s examples throughout his essay that he uses to prove his point are problematic—many hinge on the threat of being robbed. For example: "Give me your money, or I’ll hunt you down and kill you later." Yes, while the threat is not immediate, such threats are still coercive as it will likely cause the man to give the money to the robber. Likely, the known threat of hell, even though delayed, would deter if God made himself obvious, robbing people of the freedom to do otherwise. But consider something like sexual desire. Think about how many pastors have been caught up in sexual scandals. Despite the very real threat of losing reputation, career, and family, all that gets overridden in a moment of passion.
Or think about children with abusive parents—parents who slam their faces against walls for minor infractions and beat them within an inch of their lives—yet the child still acts out and will occasionally defy the tyrant.
Anyhow, Murrey clearly embraces the repugnant and evil notion of eternal conscious torment. He seems to say: if God made himself known and people knew he would sadistically torture them forever—while keeping them supernaturally awake to continually suffer agony—then people wouldn’t have free will and soul-making would be impossible. So, according to this logic, a God who plans to torture most people for eternity leaves them in the dark... for the sake of soul-making?
For Murrey, is is like this, a dad knows if he loves his children and is there for them, his presence and love, might "cause" the children to love him, or for Murrey, his being there and making threats to sadistically torture for an infraction, might "cause" them to obey--thus eliminating freewill.
So what does this dad do? He abandons his kids, because only in this context is there any chance for them to "act freely", so in his absence, they are supposed to somehow conclude this dad loves them and wants a relationship with them, and that this dad expects absolute fidilty and love from them (though they don't even know if he is alive), or else, when he returns, he will strap them to the rack and practice ways of burning them alive, without killing them, for the rest of their existence. Somehow, God decides to be absent and leave people in the dark, so they, by chance, "freely" choose to believe in such a hideous, sadistic, and retributive monster.
Wainwright
Wainwright's essay addressed Jonathan Edwards on Hiddenness. Edward's Calvinist theology means that God (the ultimate control freak) determined Adam to sin, decided to pass his guilt to all humanity (to justify having all them eternally tortured), and to make everyone totally depraved (I guess because he wants people to be evil?) and then assert that they are culpable for unbelief and without excuse (even though God determined every evil desire and made sure they couldn't have done otherwise), and then declares those who don't believe in God suppress the obvious truth, but of course, God purposefully keeps them blind because he wants to damn most to hell, for his good twisted pleasure. All of this is implied by Edward's theology, yet he and all his fellow Calvinists somehow think this god (who is truly the worst, ugly, and most morally repugnant deity that is imaginable) is maximally great, worthy of worship and love. We have a conglomeration of qualities from the most evil dictators in existence, blown up to a cosmic scale, and then called good, holy, and loving. Talking about a god that everyone should want to remain forever hidden! Thank God this god of the Calvinist doesn't exist. That said, if there was such a god, Schellenberg's argument wouldn't role out such monster.
Moser
Moser's essay on cognitive idolatry begs the question by presuming the obviousness of its core claim: that the tribal warrior deity—originally equated with El and significantly developed after the Babylonian exile and even more so in the Christian tradition—is the one true God, and that the Bible provides us with an infallible revelation of this God. All other proposals are labeled as cognitive idolatry. From this premise, Moser insists that we must take seriously the personality and intentions of this supreme being and approach the deity on His terms, not our own.
He does raise an important question: what, realistically, could God do to convince skeptics? After all, every sign and wonder is open to interpretation—any experience that does not align with philosophical naturalism can easily be dismissed as a hallucination or psychological event. Outside of God directly altering the skeptic’s brain, there may be little that could count as definitive. And yet, mystical experiences and near-death experiences (NDEs) have often been sufficient to shake the default materialism secularists have absorbed.
Moser doesn’t believe God is in the business of handing out signs and wonders, and he cites numerous biblical references to support this claim. Instead, he argues that all who truly seek God—humbly, with repentance and good works—will find Him. God’s spirit will be poured into their hearts. God’s reality, he says, will be revealed in transformed lives—people conformed to the image of Christ. But in affirming the New Testament's claims, Moser seems to ignore the evidence that plenty of committed Christians have sought God with all their hearts—begging, pleading, crying out—and received nothing.
In my own experience, this kind of hiddenness undermines belief in the promises of the New Testament. When younger, I wanted to be radical and all-in. I became a missionary and devoted myself completely. I wasn’t just seeking signs and wonders—I longed for the fruit of the Spirit. I yearned for the Holy Spirit, for the life of Christ within me, for something substantial. But nothing came. Not for me, and not for many others I knew. After 20 years of what increasingly felt like make-believe, and after years of feeling desperate and dependent on a seemingly undependable (or non-existent) God, full of continuous disappointment and deferred hope, I had to revise my expectations. It didn't destroy a belief in God, but it caused me to doubt that God is like the one portrayed by the New Testament authors.
My experience—and the experiences of countless others who grew up in Christian contexts, entered full-time ministry, and gave everything, only to end in disillusionment and despair—underminds Moser’s proposal.
Sure, I suppose Moser could claim that I didn’t seek in the right way, or that something was wrong with my heart. That all my desperation and longing for a relationship with God—for the experience of His life transforming mine, was somehow a lie. Maybe I was supposed to be perfect before receiving the Holy Spirit, but of course, I needed to Spirit to be perfect. Maybe I should have fasted longer, prayed harder. Maybe I failed to give 100% effort, 100% of the time. I watched a football game instead of reading my Bible. A few times, I didn’t share the Four Spiritual Laws with a stranger. Still, I thought the point of the new covenant was that God would write His laws on our hearts, that it would be Christ in us, the hope of glory. That, rather than me trying and failing in my own strength, God would reach out and offer a helping hand. But in the realm of sanctification, God's absence is deafening.
If God requires more than what I gave—if His standard for seeking is so high, that indeed, narrow is the way. Only a handful of people with the fanatical zeal and self-discipline of St. Paul will ever find this merit the attention of this elusive God who forever plays hard to get.
If we use the analogy of a child and father, and the father says, “I will only talk to you or feed you if you seek me humbly, and with all your heart. Those are my terms.” But imagine this poor child spends months talking to his father, only to be ignored. He asks for food and receives nothing. Eventually, the hungry child goes next door to ask the neighbors for help and finally stops speaking to the father, who never acknowledged him. It really seems effed up to say it’s the child’s fault. If God is like Moser claims, it seems we must say the child didn’t beg hard enough or long enough or in the right way, all the while being left in the dark on the particular requirements of the dad. .
Kvanvig
Kvanvig's essay argues that there is no problem. It was hard for me to follow.
Maybe he is suggesting that whatever someone feels about the evidence of X proves little about whether X is. Kvanvig does not mention the logical fallacy, but he may be implying that Schellengberg is appealing to ignorance. Schellengberg seems to think people must subjectively feel something is true for there to be evidence for its existence. Lack of a personal sense of something's probability or reality should serve as proof of its lack of existence.
If I follow, I can concur with Kvanvig's contention. I have a friend who is a philosophical idealist, he doesn't find arguments for the existence of matter to have weight. He shows me the degrees that people have different plausibility structures. For many of us, nothing seems more obvious than matter, and yet some philosophers truly think there is no good evidence at all for matter. For those of us who do believe in matter, it would seem odd to suggest that some philosopher's finding no good evidence for the existence of matter could count against the existence of matter.
It would seem Schellenberg presumes that God would have to override whatever cognitive process affects an argument's plausibility in an individual's brain. Based on the way our brains work, there is little, nothing, no matter how overwhelmingly obvious to most people, that will not seem plausible to someone. I guess for Schellenberg, for God to exist (meaning everyone finds its is obvious that God exists) would mean God would have had a more direct hand in the creation of man. He would have had to redesign the brain, so everyone would find his existence subjectively probable. In light of how the brain is, there is little or nothing God could do externally that couldn't be simply explained away or seem improbable as evidence for the existence of God, even to honest seekers.
Ross
Ross, who comes from a Jewish perspective, rightfully points out the problem of Schellenberg's concept of theism. For Ross, and many in the Jewish tradition, God is not "perfectly loving" in the sense Schellenberg describes; also, some Jews wholly reject the anthropocentric view of God. So Schellenberg's deduction is unsound and not relevant except for a few models of Christian monotheism. It also appears Schellenberg could be engaging in a classic category error, treating God as a thing among things and trying to determine whether it exists, when God, instead of merely a being, could be Being--an entirely different order of existence.
The nature of this God is a core question.
While musing on Ross's essay, some analogies came to mind. If someone thought oxygen was a visible thing, then they concluded that oxygen doesn't exist, even though they were surrounded by it and it filled their lungs.
Next, not only does there need to be a correct perception of the nature of God, but there may also need to be the proper development of the ability to recognize and appreciate. Take written language, if someone did not think such existed, then they would just see meaningless swiggles, and if told they contained meaning, they would be like no they don't and the fact that people exist who cannot make meaning, put it is doubt whether there is such thing as meaningful texts. With this skepticism, they will have no interest in actually learning how to read and write. But their belief--based on experience, that there is no evidence of meaning in written texts--wouldn't be proof of there not being such. It just demonstrates a misunderstanding and never acquiring the training to read. Similarly, Schellenberg seems to form a conclusion on the nature of God that is likely faulty, and thus has evidence from his subjective experience for the non-existence of this deity, and is unlikely to learn how to recognize God.
Draper
Draper argued for the Agnostic perspective, and he disagrees that the Hiddenness problem should push him to atheism. What I like is that Draper brings up the challenge of assigning weight to arguments. He finds some evidence for naturalism compelling and some evidence for theism compelling, but he doesn't have grounds for certitude either way.
Wolterstorff
Wolterstorff's essay was interesting, but my word, this review is way, way too long.
Peter van Inwagen's essay successfully demonstrates how Divine Hiddenness differs from the Problem of Evil.
Schellenberg
Schellenberg creates a dialogue and brings up additional objections. Frustratingly for me, the primary objection I had was raised by the interlocutor at the end—and left unanswered.
I believe Divine Hiddenness is a decent argument against the existence of a personal, maximally great, and loving deity—one whose love is similar to that of a parent for a child. Divine hiddenness challenges the view that every individual is personally loved by God--that God has a human-shaped hole that only that person can fill, and each person has a God-shaped hole that only God can fill.
However, I think Schellenberg is wrong to claim his argument proves atheism. Rather, it disproves a concept of God that many might hope exists. There are numerous alternatives, such as those proposed by Thomas J. Oord, who argues against the idea that God is all-powerful. It is possible that a theistic God exists, but cannot act (for Oord, due to the nature of God), and for others, due to a choice to wholly delegate authority and to step aside for a time.
There is also the possibility of abandoning the idea that God is love. Interestingly, some do this without acknowledging it—Calvinism, for instance.
In light of Divine Hiddenness, it is no surprise that Calvinists present a God who, before the foundation of the world, predetermined most of humanity to be damned and tortured for eternity simply for his own pleasure, saving only a few. The obvious implications of their view (rarely acknowledged) are that God is selfish and has a pathological, sadistic side that manifests toward the majority of people, while, again, for selfish reasons—he extends grace to a select few. We could very well have a Calvinist God who is evil and intentionally hides himself from most, having created them solely for the pleasure of watching them suffer for all eternity.
Still, there are less extreme alternatives than Calvinism that would entail that God is not "loving" according to the model of personal human love. We could propose a transcendence, which means that God's love is like that of a distant, supreme, and unapproachable sovereign for his subjects. Humans will not have a personal relationship with this deity, this deity won't answer your call, visit you when you are ill, or help you out. But in some way, this grand and mighty emperor can be thought to love his subjects--but not as individuals, but in general ways of governing. This God dwells in unapproachable light, and no one has seen Him at any time. A being completely other and like a consuming fire, lethal for creatures like us.
I just wish Schellenberg had engaged more with these possibilities. From early on, it seems he assumes that only a loving, all-powerful, personal God would be worth worshipping. He appears quite set on his conception of God. I believe there are other arguments that make it probable that a God exists, and that Divine Hiddenness and inculpable non-belief are matters theologians must take seriously as we speculate about what this God may—or may not—be like. While Schellenberg doesn’t go deeply into this, he seems to point in that direction.
Murrey
While reading Murrey's essay, where he defends the soul-making justification. I found that I side with Schellenberg and found Murrey to not be persuasive.
Murry suggests that if people were truly aware of God, this awareness would override their free will—that they would refrain from wrongdoing out of fear of punishment or fear of missing out on the good. But just look at the medieval world—consider Rome and all the sin and debauchery committed by people raised from birth to believe in a Dante-style Inferno. Take the banker that Dante placed in the lowest levels of Hell: his son (taking up the same profession) commissioned a chapel to be built in honor of Mary, hoping it would offset his sins, but that didn’t stop him from continuing what was considered a damnable business.
So yes, people fully believed in God—believed that God would torture and burn them alive for misdeeds—and yet they still committed plenty of sins. Only if God immediately punished people—zapping them—would fear curb behavior. But mere awareness of God’s existence, even when paired with belief in a brutal, retributive deity, does little to overpower human desire.
For most of my life, I took God’s existence for granted—it was the world I grew up in. Yet that did little to help me resist my own temptations.
Now, perhaps we might say God is hidden from everyone. As most people know, men generally won’t masturbate if their mother is in the room. But the Invisible Father, Son, and Holy Ghost simply aren't real enough to inspire that level of inhibition. There is that odd manner in that people truly believe in God and punishment and the rest, yet God cannot be seen--it still feels like make-believe, and damnit, often it is just not enough.
Murrey’s examples throughout his essay that he uses to prove his point are problematic—many hinge on the threat of being robbed. For example: "Give me your money, or I’ll hunt you down and kill you later." Yes, while the threat is not immediate, such threats are still coercive as it will likely cause the man to give the money to the robber. Likely, the known threat of hell, even though delayed, would deter if God made himself obvious, robbing people of the freedom to do otherwise. But consider something like sexual desire. Think about how many pastors have been caught up in sexual scandals. Despite the very real threat of losing reputation, career, and family, all that gets overridden in a moment of passion.
Or think about children with abusive parents—parents who slam their faces against walls for minor infractions and beat them within an inch of their lives—yet the child still acts out and will occasionally defy the tyrant.
Anyhow, Murrey clearly embraces the repugnant and evil notion of eternal conscious torment. He seems to say: if God made himself known and people knew he would sadistically torture them forever—while keeping them supernaturally awake to continually suffer agony—then people wouldn’t have free will and soul-making would be impossible. So, according to this logic, a God who plans to torture most people for eternity leaves them in the dark... for the sake of soul-making?
For Murrey, is is like this, a dad knows if he loves his children and is there for them, his presence and love, might "cause" the children to love him, or for Murrey, his being there and making threats to sadistically torture for an infraction, might "cause" them to obey--thus eliminating freewill.
So what does this dad do? He abandons his kids, because only in this context is there any chance for them to "act freely", so in his absence, they are supposed to somehow conclude this dad loves them and wants a relationship with them, and that this dad expects absolute fidilty and love from them (though they don't even know if he is alive), or else, when he returns, he will strap them to the rack and practice ways of burning them alive, without killing them, for the rest of their existence. Somehow, God decides to be absent and leave people in the dark, so they, by chance, "freely" choose to believe in such a hideous, sadistic, and retributive monster.
Wainwright
Wainwright's essay addressed Jonathan Edwards on Hiddenness. Edward's Calvinist theology means that God (the ultimate control freak) determined Adam to sin, decided to pass his guilt to all humanity (to justify having all them eternally tortured), and to make everyone totally depraved (I guess because he wants people to be evil?) and then assert that they are culpable for unbelief and without excuse (even though God determined every evil desire and made sure they couldn't have done otherwise), and then declares those who don't believe in God suppress the obvious truth, but of course, God purposefully keeps them blind because he wants to damn most to hell, for his good twisted pleasure. All of this is implied by Edward's theology, yet he and all his fellow Calvinists somehow think this god (who is truly the worst, ugly, and most morally repugnant deity that is imaginable) is maximally great, worthy of worship and love. We have a conglomeration of qualities from the most evil dictators in existence, blown up to a cosmic scale, and then called good, holy, and loving. Talking about a god that everyone should want to remain forever hidden! Thank God this god of the Calvinist doesn't exist. That said, if there was such a god, Schellenberg's argument wouldn't role out such monster.
Moser
Moser's essay on cognitive idolatry begs the question by presuming the obviousness of its core claim: that the tribal warrior deity—originally equated with El and significantly developed after the Babylonian exile and even more so in the Christian tradition—is the one true God, and that the Bible provides us with an infallible revelation of this God. All other proposals are labeled as cognitive idolatry. From this premise, Moser insists that we must take seriously the personality and intentions of this supreme being and approach the deity on His terms, not our own.
He does raise an important question: what, realistically, could God do to convince skeptics? After all, every sign and wonder is open to interpretation—any experience that does not align with philosophical naturalism can easily be dismissed as a hallucination or psychological event. Outside of God directly altering the skeptic’s brain, there may be little that could count as definitive. And yet, mystical experiences and near-death experiences (NDEs) have often been sufficient to shake the default materialism secularists have absorbed.
Moser doesn’t believe God is in the business of handing out signs and wonders, and he cites numerous biblical references to support this claim. Instead, he argues that all who truly seek God—humbly, with repentance and good works—will find Him. God’s spirit will be poured into their hearts. God’s reality, he says, will be revealed in transformed lives—people conformed to the image of Christ. But in affirming the New Testament's claims, Moser seems to ignore the evidence that plenty of committed Christians have sought God with all their hearts—begging, pleading, crying out—and received nothing.
In my own experience, this kind of hiddenness undermines belief in the promises of the New Testament. When younger, I wanted to be radical and all-in. I became a missionary and devoted myself completely. I wasn’t just seeking signs and wonders—I longed for the fruit of the Spirit. I yearned for the Holy Spirit, for the life of Christ within me, for something substantial. But nothing came. Not for me, and not for many others I knew. After 20 years of what increasingly felt like make-believe, and after years of feeling desperate and dependent on a seemingly undependable (or non-existent) God, full of continuous disappointment and deferred hope, I had to revise my expectations. It didn't destroy a belief in God, but it caused me to doubt that God is like the one portrayed by the New Testament authors.
My experience—and the experiences of countless others who grew up in Christian contexts, entered full-time ministry, and gave everything, only to end in disillusionment and despair—underminds Moser’s proposal.
Sure, I suppose Moser could claim that I didn’t seek in the right way, or that something was wrong with my heart. That all my desperation and longing for a relationship with God—for the experience of His life transforming mine, was somehow a lie. Maybe I was supposed to be perfect before receiving the Holy Spirit, but of course, I needed to Spirit to be perfect. Maybe I should have fasted longer, prayed harder. Maybe I failed to give 100% effort, 100% of the time. I watched a football game instead of reading my Bible. A few times, I didn’t share the Four Spiritual Laws with a stranger. Still, I thought the point of the new covenant was that God would write His laws on our hearts, that it would be Christ in us, the hope of glory. That, rather than me trying and failing in my own strength, God would reach out and offer a helping hand. But in the realm of sanctification, God's absence is deafening.
If God requires more than what I gave—if His standard for seeking is so high, that indeed, narrow is the way. Only a handful of people with the fanatical zeal and self-discipline of St. Paul will ever find this merit the attention of this elusive God who forever plays hard to get.
If we use the analogy of a child and father, and the father says, “I will only talk to you or feed you if you seek me humbly, and with all your heart. Those are my terms.” But imagine this poor child spends months talking to his father, only to be ignored. He asks for food and receives nothing. Eventually, the hungry child goes next door to ask the neighbors for help and finally stops speaking to the father, who never acknowledged him. It really seems effed up to say it’s the child’s fault. If God is like Moser claims, it seems we must say the child didn’t beg hard enough or long enough or in the right way, all the while being left in the dark on the particular requirements of the dad. .
Kvanvig
Kvanvig's essay argues that there is no problem. It was hard for me to follow.
Maybe he is suggesting that whatever someone feels about the evidence of X proves little about whether X is. Kvanvig does not mention the logical fallacy, but he may be implying that Schellengberg is appealing to ignorance. Schellengberg seems to think people must subjectively feel something is true for there to be evidence for its existence. Lack of a personal sense of something's probability or reality should serve as proof of its lack of existence.
If I follow, I can concur with Kvanvig's contention. I have a friend who is a philosophical idealist, he doesn't find arguments for the existence of matter to have weight. He shows me the degrees that people have different plausibility structures. For many of us, nothing seems more obvious than matter, and yet some philosophers truly think there is no good evidence at all for matter. For those of us who do believe in matter, it would seem odd to suggest that some philosopher's finding no good evidence for the existence of matter could count against the existence of matter.
It would seem Schellenberg presumes that God would have to override whatever cognitive process affects an argument's plausibility in an individual's brain. Based on the way our brains work, there is little, nothing, no matter how overwhelmingly obvious to most people, that will not seem plausible to someone. I guess for Schellenberg, for God to exist (meaning everyone finds its is obvious that God exists) would mean God would have had a more direct hand in the creation of man. He would have had to redesign the brain, so everyone would find his existence subjectively probable. In light of how the brain is, there is little or nothing God could do externally that couldn't be simply explained away or seem improbable as evidence for the existence of God, even to honest seekers.
Ross
Ross, who comes from a Jewish perspective, rightfully points out the problem of Schellenberg's concept of theism. For Ross, and many in the Jewish tradition, God is not "perfectly loving" in the sense Schellenberg describes; also, some Jews wholly reject the anthropocentric view of God. So Schellenberg's deduction is unsound and not relevant except for a few models of Christian monotheism. It also appears Schellenberg could be engaging in a classic category error, treating God as a thing among things and trying to determine whether it exists, when God, instead of merely a being, could be Being--an entirely different order of existence.
The nature of this God is a core question.
While musing on Ross's essay, some analogies came to mind. If someone thought oxygen was a visible thing, then they concluded that oxygen doesn't exist, even though they were surrounded by it and it filled their lungs.
Next, not only does there need to be a correct perception of the nature of God, but there may also need to be the proper development of the ability to recognize and appreciate. Take written language, if someone did not think such existed, then they would just see meaningless swiggles, and if told they contained meaning, they would be like no they don't and the fact that people exist who cannot make meaning, put it is doubt whether there is such thing as meaningful texts. With this skepticism, they will have no interest in actually learning how to read and write. But their belief--based on experience, that there is no evidence of meaning in written texts--wouldn't be proof of there not being such. It just demonstrates a misunderstanding and never acquiring the training to read. Similarly, Schellenberg seems to form a conclusion on the nature of God that is likely faulty, and thus has evidence from his subjective experience for the non-existence of this deity, and is unlikely to learn how to recognize God.
Draper
Draper argued for the Agnostic perspective, and he disagrees that the Hiddenness problem should push him to atheism. What I like is that Draper brings up the challenge of assigning weight to arguments. He finds some evidence for naturalism compelling and some evidence for theism compelling, but he doesn't have grounds for certitude either way.
Wolterstorff
Wolterstorff's essay was interesting, but my word, this review is way, way too long.
June 18, 2019
This work is a response and reflection on Schellenberg's Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason - written about 9 years prior. Schellenberg contributes one of the essays - which is a dialogue that summarizes his position the divine hiddenness is a defeater for belief in God (I didn't find it to be a particularly interesting or powerful dialogue).
The other writers consist of Christians and one Jewish writer as well as one skeptic who each engage and critique Schellenberg's views. The articles approach the problem from different angles and therefore there is some unevenness in quality.
Standout articles were Michael Murray's Deus Abscondus, Paul Moser's Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiding, and Nicholas Wolterstorff's The Silence of the God Who Speaks.
Overall this is a worthy book to have in the library of anyone interested in this topic. It is probably not the best starting point for a layman who is unfamiliar with the subject.
The other writers consist of Christians and one Jewish writer as well as one skeptic who each engage and critique Schellenberg's views. The articles approach the problem from different angles and therefore there is some unevenness in quality.
Standout articles were Michael Murray's Deus Abscondus, Paul Moser's Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiding, and Nicholas Wolterstorff's The Silence of the God Who Speaks.
Overall this is a worthy book to have in the library of anyone interested in this topic. It is probably not the best starting point for a layman who is unfamiliar with the subject.
December 19, 2022
This is a great synopsis of several facets of the divine hiddenness conversation from different perspectives (Agnostic, Atheist, Christian, Jewish, etc.) as well as historical understandings of the subject (Edwards, Kierkegaard, St. John of the Cross). Broad enough to cover the main concepts and specific enough to engage various readers; there isn’t another book on the subject like it!
September 9, 2016
A response to the argument from divine Hiddenness
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