Concerning Divine Hiddenness

The argument is simple and I shall present it syllogistically although it has more than two premises. I am quoting Wikipedia here but, never fear, the rest of this essay will be my own work with no more thieving from Wikipedia and without any help from Google's AI, an AI I cannot access from this computer anyway. It runs as follows.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.
2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.
3.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
4.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.
6.) No perfectly loving God exists (from 4 and 5).
7.) Therefore, God does not exist (from 1 and 6).

This argument, first proposed in this form by  J. L. Schellenberg as recently as 1993 in his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, has a beautiful simplicity and a kind of human dimension to it that other arguments for and against the existence of God lack. The purpose of this essay is to find some of the loopholes in this argument, to show that non-belief is compatible with the existence of a perfectly loving God. I have been thinking about this for several months and I believe my discussion of this argument will be both interesting and original, an argument you can't get via a colloquy with Chat GPT. I found yesterday a video essay by Gavin Ortlund called "Divine Hiddenness: My Response to Alex O'Conner", uploaded two years ago and so before AI began thinking for us, and although there will be some overlap in my own argument and his, there is less than you may expect or, to put it another way, I will be approaching his answer from a different direction. I recommend you watch this video either before or after reading this essay.

First, though, I need to steel-man Schellenberg's argument because it has a gap in it that he may not have been aware that he had allowed in. Suppose there is a janitor in St Petersburg who believes Putin's rhetoric absolutely and loves Donald Trump with all his heart. However, this janitor's love of Trump is not sufficient for them to enter into an open personal relationship with each other. The janitor lacks the power to make Trump aware that he exists. Similarly God might want to enter into a personal relationship with Alex O'Conner but lack the puissance to do so. To steel-man Schellenberg's argument, and in doing so I am being completely consistent with the history of Christian apologetics, we need to add a couple of premises. I shall set the argument forth again in its steel-manned form.

1.) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.

2.) If no omnipotent and omniscient God exists, then God does not exist.

3.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person.

4.) If a perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists, then it is within His power to establish such a relationship.

5.) If there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person and has the power and knowledge needed to establish such a relationship, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

6.) If a perfectly loving, perfectly powerful and perfectly knowledgable God exists, then no human person is ever non-resistantly unaware that God exists (from 3, 4 and 5).

7. ) Some human persons are non-resistantly unaware that God exists.

8.) No perfectly loving or perfectly powerful and knowledgeable God exists (from 6 and 7).

Therefore, God does not exist (from 1, 2 and 8).

In discussing and challenging this argument, we need first, of course, to acknowledge that some human people believe in God and some do not. These two groups, theists and atheists, seldom see eye to eye and sometimes deny that the other group exists at all. Richard Dawkins famously regards all religiosity as delusional while a lot of theists think the atheists have "hardened their hearts" against a God the theists regard as self-evident. Atheists are happy with science, with physics, with the voluminous tracts produced by sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, with Darwinian evolution and the Standard Model. They often feel no hankering for some figure behind the scenes pulling strings. Theists, however, claim to have a clear and distinct idea of God.  If I could go back in time and pose some difficult questions to Rene Descartes, for instance, I might ask him God's eye colour and what he wears. Perhaps Descartes might answer that he conceives of God the same way that Michelangelo did when he painted the Sistine Chapel. More likely, however, I suspect that as much as theists like to say that they have a clear and distinct idea of God, in reality their conception of Him is much more diffuse. I myself used to be a militant atheist but now am on the fence – but even in those moments when I think of God existing I don't really regard him as a person with flip-flops,  muttonchop sideburns, Received Pronunciation, or with any other characteristic that I might clearly and distinctly conceive of him possessing. 

The first criticism I would like to make concerning Schellenberg's argument is that all non-believers must be to some degree resistant. Non-resistant non-belief is not a thing unless the non-believer never encounters believers at all. Let us suppose that you, the reader, are an atheist. Should you be pestered by a missionary or proselytiser on the street with a pamphlet talking about how all sinners who refuse to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and saviour are destined for hell, of course you are going to resist his arguments, argue back. I used to meet such people a lot although they were outnumbered by devotees of Krishna. Similarly, all theists are resistant. When Daniel Lane Craig debated Christopher Hitchens, he too was resistant. If he weren't, otherwise he would have ended the debate by saying, "Of course, you're right. Christianity is evil and I forswear it." To have a firm belief of any sort is to resist the claims of those who have conflicting beliefs. The only truly non-resistant people are the agnostics who change their mind as a result of every passing influence and/or the people who never encounter opposing beliefs concerning God at all. It is because I am on the fence myself that I am someone most qualified to discuss this argument – because sometimes I have a conception of God and sometimes do not. I can speak to the fact that both belief and non-belief are real and justifiable.

What theists and atheists have in common though is that both believe in something I shall call Reality with a capital R. The Reality Principle is that the world runs according to simple rules. If I walk up the road to the cafe at the top of the hill, I expect that if I ask for a coffee and pay six dollars I will be given a flat white. When I cross the road, I look both ways because otherwise there is a slim possibility I might be hit by a car. When the fire alarm goes off, although I know that usually it is just a drill, I vacate my apartment block on the off-chance that there might be a conflagration somewhere. These are rules related to causation, rules that resemble the types of conclusions we draw from inferential reasoning even though most of these rules we pick up on in other ways, often from hearsay. There is a rule that swans in the Northern Hemisphere are white although they may be black in Australia and New Zealand. There is a rule that the people we call 'bachelors' are unmarried men. This first rule is synthetic a posteriori and the second analytic a priori to use Kant's terminology. Many of the rules are derived from the laws of physics – if I hold out my copy of The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake and drop it, I expect it to fall to the floor. If I kick the door, I might expect to break or at least bruise my toes. Rules exist at multiple different levels, the level of subatomic physics at one end of the scale and the level of human behaviour at the other. There is a question of whether some rules are emergent or all can all ultimately be reduced to particle physics but this is not a question I intend to tackle in this essay.

However, what will be important to this essay is a claim that the rules, even the laws of physics, allow for occurrences that might seem impossible. A person might be able to walk on the Sea of Galilee if every time he puts down his foot, the water molecules are rushing up towards him at that very moment. Because a subatomic particle can quantum tunnel through a wall, there is always the tiniest possibility that a person can do it too. Even the images on photographs can conceivable change in peculiar ways depending on unlikely combinations of heat, moisture, and other chemical reactions. The thing about miracles is not that they are impossible but rather that they are just very, very unlikely. So the rules by which we live our lives and base our predictions and decisions on are not iron-clad but, rather, just very very likely, so likely we tend to regard them as absolute. Both the atheist and the theist believe in these rules. The atheist thinks these rules are all there are but typical theists somehow believe both in divine control and in the Reality Principle. Suppose an ordinary theist prays to win Lotto and then does. I assert that such a theist still believes in the Newtonian mechanics underlying the ball drop but also believes that God has ordained that he or she win. God is the the God of the Gaps – when He intervenes in the world He does so in ways that the rules permit. There is a rule that it is possible for cancer to go into remission sometimes and so a theist who has cancer may pray to God to be cured, recover, and, should this happen, may believe both in divine intervention and in the medical finding that sometimes a person's body can fight off cancer on its own. For the theist, the rules we entertain as beliefs concerning how the world operates have God as their foundation. I believe some such idea animated Descartes, Newton, and, even more so, Spinoza. The theist sees God in the workings of the world, in the interstices – all events, situations, display the handiwork of the Divine. The theist thinks this while also thinking that they also occur as the consequence of causal laws. 

The atheist, as I have said, believes that these rules completely explain the world we live in. He or she does not worry about why these rules exist to any degree. When something unlikely occurs, something the rules would ordinarily loosely rule out, the atheist rationalises such an event as being a consequence of blind chance. Atheism is not just possible but plausible. Schellenberg's argument is so strong because he is suggesting that if there is a single non-believer, only one, this proves that God does not exist – in fact, he argues that even if a person adheres to atheism just for a period in his or her life and otherwise is a theist, this is sufficient to dispose of God. So if a single person believes that the rules require no first cause, no ultimate legislator, this is sufficient to negate the existence of the God of the theologians. However, Schellenberg does not argue, as I understand his argument, that believers might not imagine that they are in an open relationship with God. And so we can wonder: what might it mean, feel like, to be in open relationship with an omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent being? I have a suspicion that the people who actually think they can have conversations with God, conversations where God talks back, are people we should be wary of. It is these people who might say that God told them to burn down the orphanage. The ordinary theist, as I have said, though, just has a vague sense of the existence of a being who loves him or her and who wants the best for him or her, a being who acts indirectly through the world. How might a typical theist react if diagnosed with an incurable and inevitably fatal disease? It might shake his or her faith but, if he or she does indeed have open relationship with God, it might be that the afflicted one will simply say, "God moves in mysterious ways", chalk it up as a plot point in God's divine plan, or take comfort in the belief that he or she will reunite with the loved ones who predeceased him or her upon arrival in Heaven. The perennial question of the Problem of Evil which this essay is indirectly tackling is obviously more a problem for theists than atheists. Nevertheless, and setting aside the ways in which the presence of Evil may cause a believer to toy with atheism, it seems that, really, the only way to parse Schellenberg's key notion of "open relationship with God" is to suppose that all it means is for the person to have some sense that God exists and loves him or her.

When atheists and theists debate God's existence (usually within the Christian framework), it is often acknowledged by both sides that the only real way for an atheist to change his or her mind and become a theist is to have a "religious experience". For some people, the religious experience might seem insignificant. At a low point in her life, Sally was approached by a Jehovah's Witness, told that God loved her, and given the latest edition of the Watchtower. In this way God might be seen as displaying His desire for open relationship with Sally by acting through the Jehovah's Witness who had shown up at her door. For more resistant non-believers a more visceral miracle might be required. When atheists who haven't thought deeply about the question of Divine Hiddenness react to Schellenberg's argument, they often ask why, if God exists, wants us to love Him, and wants us to know that He loves us back, He doesn't just write "I EXIST" in the cirrus clouds over their suburb of the city. Surely, the naive atheist asks, wouldn't this immediately bring about proper communion with God? First, it needs to be said, such a miracle could still be ascribed to dumb luck. An apparent message in the sky could still be a random meteorological fluke. Or a hallucination. Richard Dawkins has said that nothing whatsoever could ever persuade him of the existence of God and, of course, resorting to 'hallucination' is the perfect get-out-of-jail card because then no sensory experience at all could ever prove the existence of God. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once put in Sherlock Holmes's mouth the atheist slogan, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Because the atheist has decided that God is impossible in advance, any alternative is better. (It should be remembered that Doyle himself believed in ghosts and seances.)

However, let us suppose that when God writes his message in the sky, it is convincing. Perhaps all the atheists in Auckland see it and decide that it is indeed proof that God exists. All New Zealand, then all the world, have irrefutable evidence that God is real, that the one who was once hidden has now revealed Himself. Would this make the world a better place? I shall argue, perhaps surprisingly, that it would make it worse.

My original contribution to this debate involves the Reality Principle. In order to function successfully and effectively in the world, in order to survive and hopefully flourish, people require some sense that the world runs according to rules that they can understand and exploit if necessary. A miracle is quite obviously a violation of these rules, regardless of whether the phenomenon that could be deemed a miracle is impossible or simply very, very unlikely. If God were to suddenly start performing miracles as a way of proving His existence, violating the rules we thought we knew governed the world, we would afterwards be able to predict nothing at all with confidence. We would always for ever after be unsure of the causes of the phenomena we observe. They could be the result of rules the knowledge of which has either been learnt by humans through inference or through being transmitted verbally or otherwise from one human to another, or they could be the result of divine intervention. This is why I argued that theists believe simultaneously in God and the Reality Principle – because otherwise they would simply sit around all day doing nothing, waiting for God to help them, make them happy, satisfy their desires. They would live in something like the Garden of Eden. I discussed the Garden of Eden in a recent post and this essay should be regarded as a companion piece to that one. If you haven't read it yet, have a quick look through it when you've finished this essay.

There is an argument, attributed to the eleventh century monk Peter Damian, that God's omnipotence enables Him to even change the past. Damian argued that God can restore the virginity of a woman who has lost it. Damian's argument is effectively that the moral stain of having had sex can be laundered away by God and the God can also restore the woman's hymen. However he was taken to mean that God can literally alter the past, make it so something that has been was not. Even in Damian's day there was debate about whether God's omnipotence enabled Him to break the law (the rule) of non-contradiction. According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Damian argued that God is capable of changing the past, breaking the law of non-contradiction, but chooses not to because God only chooses to do good things and violating the law of non-contradiction would be an evil thing. One might wonder if a God who can change the past but chooses not to is also a God who knows the future but refuses to change it. These are ideas I encountered in a paper on Medieval Philosophy I took in 2022 and there is an essay in this blog which was the essay I wrote for this paper if readers want to look at it.

I would like to proffer the following incredible suggestion. Perhaps if God wanted to perform a miracle to convince someone that He exists, he might do so by changing the past. This would after all constitute a miracle of sorts. In order to explore this idea, I need to say something about the past. Suppose I want to talk about the famous Existentialist Albert Camus. To whom, to what, am I referring? Am I referring to the corpse buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris? It seems, if I am to avoid falling into the trap of mereological nihilism,  I must be referring to a man who came into existence in 1913 and went out of existence in 1960. The problem with the past, with people, things, and events that are of yesteryear, is that the past no longer exists in the present. So how can we know about the past if it no longer exists? To what, when asserting claims about the past, are we referring? It seems we know about the past in two ways, via memory and via various kinds of documentary evidence. It seems to me that God could change the past by simultaneously altering the memories of those alive now who think they can remember the people, things, and events of yesteryear and by miraculously altering all the documentary evidence. Perhaps Peter Damian had never existed until last week. Perhaps all the documents that seem to prove he existed are divine forgeries and all the people who can remember reading about Peter Damian before last week are the victims of False Memory Syndrome. Such a miracle would not violate the law of non-contradiction. If God were to indeed perform a miracle of this sort, there would be no way for us to know that such a miracle has occurred. However, suppose that God performs the miracle of past-changing by leaving the memories of a person intact, the same as they had been in the past, but changing all the documentary evidence – poems, photographs, letters, etc. If the person is alone in thinking there is a discrepancy between his memories and the material evidence, others may think that there is a problem with the memory of the person. However the person himself, the victim of God's miracle, may remain so convinced of the infallibility of his memory that he would rather believe that God has miraculously changed all the material evidence, perhaps as a way of arousing holy terror in the newly god-fearing convert.

Something like this happened to me last year. A number of poems, photographs, and messages seemed to communicate different things early in the year than they did later in the year. To give one example, late in 2024 I quoted a Janet Frame poem in this blog. In around July 2025 I reread it, both in my blog and in editions of the book I found in the University Library. It was subtly different, not so different as to make for a different interpretation of it but enough to make it a slightly inferior poem. Early in the year I read, online, the Philip Larkin poem "The Whitsun Weddings". This poem is Larkin's description of being on a train and seeing at every station he stops at wedding parties boarding the train. I had read this poem many years ago and thought it a cynical bitter bit of verse that you might imagine being written by a confirmed bachelor. Last year, in the midst of an experience that some might call psychosis and some might say was something like a religious experience, I reread the poem and this time it seemed something celebratory, a joyful Christian song of praise in honour of the sacrament of marriage, a union of two people that Larkin knew he was never going to enjoy himself. The poem is called "The Whitsun Weddings" not only because Larkin's train trip occurred on Whitsunday but because Whitsun is the festival commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost on the disciples of Jesus seven weeks after Easter. It might be that when I reread this poem I interpreted it this later time as something profoundly spiritual because the Holy 'Ghost had descended on me. Some months later I reread the poem again and realised that both interpretations were true of it. Perhaps atheists read it one way and theists another. Readers of this blog may want to read Larkin's poem online and see what meanings they themselves find in it. Similarly, last year I read Ibsen's play Ghosts and derived from it an interpretation quite different to the orthodox interpretation. In the case of both "The Whitsun Weddings" and Ghosts, the text, I believe, is stable – it is whether or not one has received the Gnosis that is the determinate concerning how these works are to be interpreted. However, there were a number of occasions in which the actual texts of things I have in my possession or have access to seemed to have changed.

If God wanted to perform a miracle to prove that He exists and did so by changing the past, it might prove utterly incapacitating to the one who witnesses or receives the miracle. If we can have no confidence in our memories of the past, how can we plan for the future? I really want to sue the Mental Health Service for medical misconduct and libel and, if I had proof and financial resources, would like to sue my faggot older brother as well. But to do so, I need to feel confident that the past is settled. I have left a paper trail starting in 2014, not only in the form of this blog but in the form of emails, and I would like some surety that what I have supposedly written is the same as what I remember writing. I really want God, having displayed his omnipotence, to direct a little of his omni-benevolence in my direction.

Let us get back to the example of the message written in the clouds. A God who can do this is a God who can do anything. Should God throw perfect rainbows into the sky at decisive moments in a person's life, the formerly Doubting Thomas might start to feel that there are no rules whatsoever. If God were to start to announce his existence over and over again overwhelmingly, the person who is the witness to these miracles might start to wonder if anyone apart from him and God exist in the world. I think it likely that free will is illusory but I also still feel it is a necessary illusion. Even if in our most coldly rational and logical moments we doubt the existence of free will, emotionally and viscerally we need to believe that we have some control over out lives. It would be pointless thinking one had free will if there were no solid rules enabling one to predict the outcomes of one's actions. Observing multiple miracles might have severely deleterious effects on a person's sense that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy in the world and over the world. This could be at least a part of the reason God seeks to remain hidden.

We can present the argument syllogistically as follows.

1. God is all loving.

2. God is all knowing and all powerful.

3. If God is all knowing and all powerful, He is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being.

4. At the very least, to be in personal relationship with God is to feel sure that God exists.

5. The only way for God to make resistant non-believers sure that He exists is to perform miracles.

6. If God were to perform miracles and in this way prove that He exists, this might undermine the feeling the witness to these miracles had that he or she had some control over his or her world – the feeling the person had that he or she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy.

7. If the person's feeling that she has agency, autonomy, and efficacy is undermined, this is a harm perpetrated against the person.

8. Therefore, for God to enter into personal relationship with resistant non-believers may be to cause harm to them (from 4, 5, 6, and 7).

9. If God is all loving, he will not want to cause harm to resistant non-believers.

10. Therefore, although God is capable of entering into personal relationship with each human being, He will not try to enter into personal relationship with some human beings (from 1, 8 and 9).

I want now not so much to present an argument as to make an observation and then propose a hypothesis concerning the Divine Plan. For many thousands of years, non-belief was very uncommon. Plato, as I understand it, was the first known philosopher to make an argument known as the consensus gentium. Plato, and then more famously Cicero much later, argued that because belief in the gods (plural) is universal and innate among all peoples, the gods must exist. In the days of Peter Damian, faith in Christianity was ubiquitous among all Europeans. There might have been the occasional village cynic who refused to go to church on Sunday but on a whole belief in the Christian God was common to everyone, perhaps even to the uneducated peasants with the flimsiest notion of such core Catholic tenets as the existence of the Trinity. If, at the very least, to be in relationship with God is to believe that God exists, almost all people were in such a relationship. God wasn't hidden at all – he was present in the minds of almost everyone. It was only starting, I believe, in the nineteenth century, around the time that Darwin's magnum opus was published, that not only did atheism become a thing but it became permissible for people to state publicly that they were atheists. Richard Dawkins, in our contemporary world, still regards atheists as a persecuted minority. This has always seemed really fucking stupid to me but this might be because I live in New Zealand where most of the population are non-believers. It is the fact that atheism had to spread through all the Western world for Schellenberg's argument to make sense that might explain why we had to wait until 1993 for an argument of this sort to appear. It is, after all, also known as "The Argument from Non-Belief."

The rise in atheism coincided with the rise in science. Through innovations such as indoor plumbing, the germ theory of disease and disinfectant, the discovery of antibiotics, organ transplants, and so on, we were able to vastly increase the average lifespan of humans throughout the world. The Haber-Bosch process has enabled us to ensure the vast population of the world can be fed, won't starve. Electrical lighting allows us to walk safely around the city at night. Computers and cell phones enable us to contact love ones at whim at once. Science has vastly improved the happiness and well being of humans everywhere. Belief in science, and the scientific method, follows on from our faith that understandable rules govern the world. It is as though God stepped back to enable us to investigate the world, that he has allowed us the presumption that we cannot rely on God for everything, or in fact anything, but must rely on ourselves. 

In the recent essay "Concerning the Garden of Eden" I argued that Good cannot exist without Evil. I argued that we find meaning in our lives through taking steps to improve the lives sometimes of ourselves and sometimes of others. I would like to suggest, now, that God deliberately removed himself from the picture for a couple of centuries so that we could investigate and utilise the magical rules that we collectively call 'science' in order as far as possible to help each other rather than hoping and praying that some supernatural force will do it instead.

In the introduction to this essay I said that I would expose the loophole in Schellenberg's argument and I will conclude the essay by pinpointing it. The second premise is "2.) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there is a God who is always open to personal relationship with each human person." There is equivocation in the way this premise is stated. If God is always open to personal relationship with each human person, is it God or is it the person upon whom the onus lies to initiate, establish, the relationship? In this essay, I have argued that God has to take the initiative. The only real way to turn an atheist into a theist is via a religious experience and such an experience must have God as its author, whether it is through a Jehovah's Witness at the door, a message scrawled in the clouds, or through alterations to several poems. The alternative is for the non-believer to suddenly, for no reason at all, start to believe in God. I would ask the reader if in his or her imagination he or she can envisage a scenario in which a militant atheist such as Richard Dawkins or Alex O'Conner suddenly finds faith. It might be that a perfectly loving God wants Dawkins to remain a staunch non-believer for his own sake and for the sake of his fans. God moves in mysterious ways indeed.