Tag Archives: Christianity

Polemics

Why doesn’t God gives us more evidence that he exists?

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Welcome, Please Convince Me listeners! This post was mentioned in Please Convince Me Podcast #190.

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”.

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.

You may hear have heard this argument before, when talking to atheists, as in William Lane Craig’s debate with Theodore Drange, (audio, video).

Basically, 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 when our eternal destination depends on our knowledge of his existence.

What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

Dr. Michael Murray, a brilliant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, 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.

People choose to separate themselves from God for many reasons. Maybe they are professors in academia and didn’t want to be thought of as weird by their colleagues. Maybe they didn’t want to be burdened with traditional morality when tempted by some sin, especially sexual sin. Maybe their fundamentalist parents ordered them around too much without providing any reasons. Maybe the brittle fundamentalist beliefs of their childhood were exploded by evidence for micro-evolution or New Testament manuscript variants. Maybe they wanted something really bad, that God did not give them. How could a good God allow them to suffer like that?

The point is that there a lot of people who don’t want to know God, and God chooses not to violate their freedom by forcing himself on them. God wants a relationship – he wants you to respond to him. (See Matthew 7:7-8) For those people who don’t want to know him, he allows them to speculate about unobservable entities like the multiverse. He allows them to think that all religions are the same and that there is nothing special about Christianity. He allows them to believe that God has no plan for those who never hear about Jesus. He allows them to be so disappointed because of some instance of suffering that they reject him. God doesn’t force people to love him. If they don’t want to look into these things because they want to avoid having to care what he thinks, then he lets them think anything they want that “works for them”. What they think is false, but so long as they don’t investigate anything, then they can keep doing what they want and thinking it’s fine.

Michael Murray’s work

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). The book chapter from the Cambridge book is here. The book chapter from the Routledge book is here.

Michael Murray’s papers are really fun to read, because he uses hilarious examples. (But I disagree with his view that God’s work of introducing biological information in living creatures has to be front-loaded).

Here’s more terrific stuff from Dr. Murray:

News

Christian business owners found guilty for disagreeing with homosexuality

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From Life Site News. (H/T Mary’s friend Eleanor)

Excerpt:

Just a week after Christian guesthouse owners in Cornwall were ordered to pay compensation to two homosexual men turned away over a married-couples-only rule, two more homosexuals are suing the owners of an upscale bed and breakfast on the Thames.

Emboldened by the recent win for the homosexualist lobby, Michael Black, 63, and John Morgan, 58, are claiming sexual discrimination by owner Susanne Wilkinson after they were turned away from the Swiss B&B in Cookham, Berkshire, last March.

[…]The Daily Mail reports that the two men booked their room online but when they arrived Mrs. Wilkinson told them “it is against my convictions for two men to share a bed’, adding ‘this is my private home.” Wilkinson returned their deposit and asked them, politely, to leave.

“She said she was sorry and she was polite in a cold way and she was not abusive, so we asked our money back and she gave it to us,” Black told the Mail.

Black implied that the solution is for people with traditional British Christian moral values to stay out of any business or employment that would bring them into contact with the public.

“If anyone thinks that providing a public service may conflict with their religious beliefs they should question whether that is a suitable business for them.”

The first institutions to disappear under the recently passed Sexual Orientation Regulations of the Equality Act, installed under Tony Blair’s Labour government, were the nation’s Catholic adoption agencies. All of them were forced either to close or sever their ties with the Catholic Church upon being instructed that they must consider homosexual partners as prospective adoptees.

In debates in the House, some British parliamentarians had also warned that the Equalities laws would create legal conflicts between homosexuals and conscientious Christian hoteliers like Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the owners of the Cornwall guesthouse who were ordered by a judge last week to pay £3,600 to Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, homosexuals in a registered civil partnership.

The Bulls appear to have been set up as a test case by the homosexualist activist group Stonewall. The two men, according to court testimony, attempted to book a room in the Penzance guesthouse by registering as “Mr. and Mrs. Preddy” a month after the Bulls received a threatening letter from Stonewall.

The Bulls, who are appealing last week’s ruling, say they are being driven out of business by a “hate campaign,” and have received abusive phone calls and bogus negative reviews of their hotel have been posted to a travel website. Several homosexual men have called and demanded rooms, threatening legal action if they are refused. Mrs. Bull told the Daily Telegraph, “One told me I was an abomination and would go straight to hell. These people know nothing about my lifestyle, and I’ve been astounded by their cruelty.”

Is there a right not to be offended? If so, then does it trump the right to religious liberty?

Please read this article on same-sex marriage by Dennis Prager to find out how the gay agenda will change society.

In fact, you can see it right now in the UK education system.

Related posts

News

Over 99 percent of people in southern Sudan vote for succession

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Map of Africa
Map of Africa

Great news in Sudan. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

More than 99 percent of Southern Sudanese voted to secede from the north, a referendum official said Sunday in the first official preliminary result announcement.

“The vote for separation was 99.57 percent,” said Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission that organized the referendum, to a crowd in the South’s capital of Juba, according to Reuters.

Voter turnout in the South was 99 percent, Madut said. And over 60 percent of Southern Sudanese living in the north turned out to vote, with 58 percent voting to secede, he stated.

Mohamed Ibrahim Khalil, chairman of the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission, said 99 percent of the Southern Sudanese diaspora in eight nations also voted to secede.

After decades of civil war and ongoing tension between the northern and southern governments, it looks like the south will finally become its own country. The weeklong referendum, which began on Jan. 9, is called for by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended more than two decades of civil war.

[…]Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir, who is expected to lead the independent South, has called for Southern Sudanese to forgive the North for the years of violence during the civil war. Some 1.9 million people died during the war between the North and South and more than 500 churches were destroyed in the South.

“For our deceased brothers and sisters, particularly those who have fallen during the time of struggle, may God bless them with eternal peace,” said Kiir at Catholic Cathedral in Juba on Jan. 16.

“And,” he continued, “may we, like Jesus Christ on the cross, forgive those who have forcefully caused their deaths.”

Southern Sudan is the more Christian part of Sudan, so this is good news for Sudanese Christians.

Here’s a close up of southern Sudan:

Map of Southern Sudan
Map of Southern Sudan

Muddling linked to an interesting post providing more historical context for the referendum.

I’m still very worried about what is going on in Egypt and Pakistan. I am still trying to catch up on Egypt but the two posts linked by Gateway Pundit are the two best that I’ve seen.