Why doesn’t God make his existence more obvious to people?

Have you ever heard someone say that if God existed, he would give us more evidence? This is called the “hiddenness of God” argument. It’s also known as the argument from “rational non-belief”. You have have seen Dr. Theodore Drange use the argument in his debate with Dr. William Lane Craig.

Basically the argument is something like this:

  1. God is all powerful
  2. God is all loving
  3. God wants all people to know about him
  4. Some people don’t know about him
  5. Therefore, there is no God.

In this argument, the atheist is saying that he’s looked for God real hard and that if God were there, he should have found him by now. After all, God can do anything he wants that’s logically possible, and he wants us to know that he exists. To defeat the argument we need to find a possible explanation of why God would want to remain hidden.

What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

Christian scholar Dr. Michael Murray has found a reason for God to remain hidden.

His paper on divine hiddenness is here:
Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993.

He argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.

But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.

(Note: I think that we don’t seek God on our own, and that he must take the initiative to reach out to us and draw us to him. But I do think that we are free to resist his revelation, at which point God stops himself short of coercing our will. We are therefore responsible for our own fate).

The atheist’s argument is a logical/deductive argument. It aims to show that there is a contradiction between God’s will for us and his hiding from us. In order to derive a contradiction, God MUST NOT have any possible reason to remain hidden. If he has a reason for remaining hidden that is consistent with his goodness, then the argument will not go through.

When Murray offers a possible reason for God to remain hidden in order to allow people to freely respond to him, then the argument is defeated. God wants people to respond to him freely so that there is a genuine love relationship – not coercion by overt threat of damnation. To rescue the argument, the atheist has to be able to prove that God could provide more evidence of his existence without interfering with the free choice of his creatures to reject him.

Murray has defended the argument in works published by prestigious academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, (ISBN: 0521006104, 2001) and Routledge (ISBN: 0415380383, 2007).

Positive arguments for Christian theism

Racist Joe Biden filibustered black female court of appeals nominee Janice Rogers Brown

Democrat Joe Biden likes to talk a lot about how tolerant he is, but according to his actions, he is a racist, white supremacist. I remember when he tried to block a well-qualified black nominee to the 2nd District Court of Appeals. Janice Rogers Brown had an amazing story of achieving the American dream through hard work. She loves the Constitution. But Joe Biden hated her.

Here’s the story from far-left Newsweek:

President Joe Biden on Thursday reiterated his campaign promise of nominating a Black woman to the Supreme Court, leading some conservative pundits to bring up his past opposition to Janice Rogers Brown.

[…]Senator Biden opposed and then filibustered the nomination of Brown to the federal bench in 2003 and 2005.

Then-President George W. Bush had nominated Brown both times for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but many Democrats tried to block her from the position for her perceived libertarian views.

Brown was born to Alabama sharecroppers and grew up in the segregated South. During her college years, Brown was a single mother with views so left-wing that she later said they were almost Maoist.

Her views grew decidedly more conservative over the years, and she has defended using electric stun guns on criminals who act inappropriately in courtrooms. Brown also wrote opinions that opposed affirmative action and supported a state law that required girls younger than 18 to notify their parents before getting an abortion.

I believe that Biden blocked Janice Rogers Brown because he is a racist and a sexist. He wanted to keep black women down. It’s only now that he is tanking in the polls that he has to use a SCOTUS pick to try to save his poll numbers. In his heart, he’s racist.

More:

In 2005, The Washington Post reported that Brown was considered as a possible nominee to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. However, Bush chose Samuel Alito.

My choices for the Supreme Court at that time were my beloved Edith Hollan Jones and also Janice Rogers Brown. Either of these fine women would have been perfect nominees for those of us who love the Constitution and prefer judicial restraint. I didn’t like any of the male candidates, they were not conservative enough for me.

But that’s not the only time that racist Democrat Joe Biden went after a qualified judicial nominee for the crime of being black.

The Daily Caller explains:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas criticizes former Vice President Joe Biden’s stewardship of his 1991 confirmation hearings in a forthcoming documentary from Manifold Productions called “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words.”

At one juncture of the film, Thomas was asked about a colloquy with Biden over natural law philosophy and the Constitution. Though he did not cite Biden by name, Thomas lamented that lawmakers do not seem to have full command of the subject matter during judicial confirmation hearings.

[…]“I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as the people who would be problematic toward me,” Thomas said of such statements. “We were told that ‘Oh it’s going to be the bigot in the pickup truck. It’s going be the Klansman. It’s going to be the rural sheriff.’”

“The biggest impediment was the modern day liberal,” he added.

I think we should learn about Democrats from their actions, not their words. They only like to care about race for minorities who agree with them. Conservative minirities get treated very badly.

Playboy bunnies shocked that their own free decisions did not make them happy

I’m seeing a lot of stories in the news lately about how women are unhappy after being given exactly what they asked for. Feminists who wanted to abolish sex differences are mad that biological men are in their spaces. Feminists who demanded preferential treatment in colleges and workplaces are mad that men don’t earn more than they do. And now… the Playboy bunnies are mad.

Story from the New York Post:

“He was a predator,” Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Sondra Theodore, 65, told The Post. “I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard.”

The former Sunday school teacher-turned-1977 Playboy magazine centerfold model began dating Hefner after meeting him at one of his many lascivious mansion parties.

Former Sunday school teacher. Got that? Former Sunday school teacher.

She says that she’s a victim:

“He groomed me and twisted my mind into thinking his way was normal,” she said of Hef… “He introduced me to drugs. I’d never had a drink or a drug before going up to the Playboy Mansion. And my first night there I was handed champagne and the drugs came later, and I was underage.”

So, I have two points about this. I think that Hugh Hefner was a big hero to the secular left, because he helped them to throw off the shackles of sobriety and chastity that were part of America’s Christian past. The secular left wanted freedom from Christianity’s “repressive” rules on dating, relationships, marriage and sexuality, and Hefner gave them what they wanted. I hope we learn a lesson about trusting atheists to tell us what is moral.

Second point is about the women. Did everyone see that post from earlier in the week about the woman who ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, then demanded a bailout from taxpayers? What I would like to see is women make better decisions. It would probably help that they rely more on evidence than on feelings, and call for advisors if they don’t feel comfortable.

We’re not helping women by telling them to “follow their hearts”. People don’t make good decisions when they “follow their hearts”. Even worse is to follow the crowd. Hugh Hefner was in high demand by women when he was young. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s morally permissive and non-judgmental. A lot of young women wanted all that he had to offer. But just because a lot of women wanted all that, doesn’t mean that Sondra Theodore was right to wish for what what many women desired.

Another thing about the women – I don’t like how they blame men for their own free will decisions. They don’t take responsibility the way that I expect them to take responsibility. They’re saying “It was the man’s fault” instead of asking “why did I choose that man?” I’d like to see women ask themselves these hard questions. Just because these questions feel bad, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be asked. The only way to learn is to take responsibility. If everything is someone else’s fault, then you never change yourself. And you are the one you need to fear the most.

Finally, I don’t think it’s a good message to send our young men that tall, hot, rich bad boys get all the best looking young women. When a young woman chooses a bad man, it’s a signal to all the young men about what is working – what is in demand. Women need to understand that their decisions are being watched, and they are making the world a worse place when they choose to reward secular left psychopaths like Hugh Hefner. He should have been shunned by women – that would have made sure that no men imitated him.