Tag Archives: Divine Hiddenness

Podcasts

Shandon Guthrie lectures on the hiddenness of God

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About the speaker:

Guthrie is currently pursuing his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. He is currently visiting lecturer of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an affiliate faculty professor of philosophy at Regis University and co-leader and teacher for the local college ministry Converge (housed at Living Grace Church). He is a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, and the Golden Key International Honour Society in recognition of his academic achievements.

The lecture:

This guy is a very good speaker. The talk contains philosophical reasoning as well as references to the teachings of the Bible on the problem of divine hiddenness. What I like about this lecture is that it helps you to see the goals and alternatives that God has in trying to get people to freely respond to him out of love. It’s an interesting problem.

Polemics

If God wanted us to believe in him, why doesn’t he give us more evidence?

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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.

More of 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:

Is there any evidence of God’s existence?

Yes, just watch this lecture by Dr. William Lane Craig. It contains 5 reasons why God exists and 3 reasons why it matters.

Commentary

Is absence of evidence for God evidence of his absence?

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From Christopher Copan Scott. (H/T The Poached Egg)

Excerpt:

There is a central question that must be answered in the philosophy of religion: Is absence of evidence, evidence of absence? The answer is that it all depends on what the thingin question is.

Examine these two scenarios:

Suppose in S1 (scenario one) Bob is invited on a challenge to find one golden ant, the only golden ant, and it happens to be somewhere in the 1.7 billion acres known as the Amazon Rainforest. If you were to find this one golden ant in 24 hours you would be rewarded with a large sum of money. Furthermore, suppose Bob the contestant is unsuccessful in this challenge and as a result complains to the organizers of the event saying that because he could not find the golden ant, it therefore does not exist. The problem with his complaint is that in S1, the absence of evidence for this one golden ant, gives little to no justification for you to conclude the non-existence of it.

Let us go on to S2. Here Bob is confronted with a similar challenge, instead he is not trying to find an ant but an elephant, and the environment is not the Amazon Rainforest, but his small office room. In S2, one’s assertion that the lack of evidence of the elephant in his office is evidence of absence of the elephant would be warranted.

This demonstrates that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence for the existence of a particular entity, if and only if it meets the following two conditions:

1)      If the postulated entity were to exist, we should expect to have some evidence of its existence.

2)      We have thoroughly examined the area which we would expect to find the entity.

Now what does this mean when it comes to the existence of God? This means that those who assert that the lack of evidence for the existence of God provides sufficient grounds to assert that this is evidence of absence must take the burden of proving (1) and (2).

This debate has been taken up in what is called the hiddenness of God. So at the least, in order to assert that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence for God one is required to provide justification for this claim.

For a longer treatment of the question of the hiddenness of God, please see a paper by philosopher Michael Murray, which I discuss in this post. This is an important philosophical problem that rarely comes up in the formal academic debates that we all love to watch with William Lane Craig. On a related note, it’s worth taking a look at the concept of burden of proof as it relates to the problems of evil and suffering. There are lots of links to lectures and essays in that post.