Why Doesn'T God Make His Existence More Obvious To Us?
WHY DOESN'T GOD MAKE HIS
EXISTENCE MORE OBVIOUS TO US?
Michael J. Murray
The Problem of Hiddenness
Whether you are a Christian or not, one thing seems clear: if there is a God, He could make His existence much more clear to us than He does. For Christians, God's apparent distance or, some might feel, absence, leads to profound anxiety and disappointment with God. We can sense such despair, for example, in the words of Job:
But if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
(Job 23:8-9 NIV)
Furthermore, the psalmist exclaims in apparent frustration, using words later uttered by Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer” (Ps 22:1-2 NIV).
But not only theists have complained about the hiddenness of God. The late Norwood Hanson, philosopher of science at Yale University, once argued that his reason for disbelieving in God is that God would make His existence known to us if He really exists; the fact that He doesn't do so is a good reason for disbelief. Hanson states his case vividly:
“God exists” could in principle be established for all factually—it just happens not to be, certainly not for everyone! Suppose, however, that next Tuesday morning, just after breakfast, all of us in this one world are knocked to our knees by a percussive and ear-shattering thunderclap. Snow swirls; leaves drop from the trees; the earth heaves and buckles; buildings topple and towers tumble; the sky is ablaze with an eerie, silvery light. Just then, as all the people of this world look up, the heavens open—the clouds pull apart—revealing an unbelievably immense and radiant-like Zeus figure, towering above us like a hundred Everests. He frowns darkly as lightening plays across the features of his Michelangeloid face. He then points down—at me!—and explains, for every man and child to hear: “I have had quite enough of your too-clever logic-chopping and word-watching in matters of theology. Be assured, N. R. Hanson, that I most certainly do exist.” …
Please do not dismiss this as a playful, irreverent Disneyoid contrivance. The conceptual point here is that if such a remarkable event were to occur, I for one should certainly be convinced that God does exist. That matter of fact would have been settled once and for all time. …That God exists would, through this encounter, have been confirmed for me and for everyone else in a manner every bit as direct as that involved in any non-controversial factual claim.1
More recent atheists have explicitly invoked the hiddenness of God as sufficient reason for rejecting the existence of God, and this argument has some initial force. Because of this, I expect that this argument, one of two fairly new arguments for atheism, will, in the next generation, be taken by many to be the most compelling reason to accept atheism. In this essay we will critically examine this argument to see if it is as powerful as many atheists believe.
Arguing for Atheism
Before we take a look at that argument, it is worth pausing briefly to think about the project of arguing for atheism. It is good to start here because many people seem to think that it makes no sense to talk about arguing for the nonexistence of something. We understand what it would mean to argue for the existence of something. But can we also construct arguments for the nonexistence of something? We can, in two ways.
One way we can argue for the nonexistence of something is by showing that the thing described is impossible. If I tell you I have a round square in my pocket, you would know that I am wrong. You know there is no round square in my pocket (or anywhere else) because you know there cannot be round squares. Round things necessarily lack corners while squares necessarily have corners. One thing can't both have and lack corners. So there can be no such thing as a round square.
Of course it is rare to find people believing in things that are as obviously impossible as round squares. Yet there are other cases of believing in the existence of impossible things where the impossibility is not as obvious. For example, let's imagine that you are training to be a hairstylist. One of your classes in cosmetology school is entitled: Famous Hairstylists in History. In the class your professor tells you of a famous barber who lived in the European region of Saxony. This barber was enormously famous and incredibly busy. In fact, he was so popular that in Saxony he cut the hair of every single person (except those who cut their own hair). That is one famous and prosperous barber! The professor goes on to give an inspiring lecture, telling you that if you study and work hard, you too can become as famous and prosperous as the ancient barber of Saxony.
Now what is the point of this example? It is this: I know that there was no barber of Saxony. How? Because he is as impossible as the round square. To see why, remember that everyone in Saxony fits into one of two categories: cuts his own hair or has his hair cut by the barber. Now consider this question: which category is our barber in? Any answer to this question leads to a paradox. If he does not cut his own hair, then he must cut his own hair (since he cuts the hair of every person who does not cut his own hair). But if he does cut his own hair, then he doesn't cut his own hair since our barber doesn't cut the hair of people who cut their own. As a result, something impossible follows whether we suppose he cuts his own hair or not. And so our imagined barber is impossible; he can't exist.
Some people argue for the impossibility of God in similar fashion, claiming that no being, God included, can be, for example, both all-powerful and unable to do evil, or free in choosing among worlds to create and yet compelled to do the best he can. This is one way to argue for atheism though not the way we will pursue here.
A second way we can argue for the nonexistence of something is to show that certain telltale signs are absent which would be present if the thing in question actually did exist (or that certain telltale signs are present which would be absent if the thing in question actually did exist). If there had been a thunderstorm last night, your driveway would be wet this morning. If it is dry, you can safely conclude that there was no thunderstorm last night. The dry driveway is a telltale sign that leads you to infer the nonexistence of a thunderstorm.
Some atheists similarly argue for the nonexistence of God using these telltale signs arguments. The most widely known argument of this sort is the argument from evil: if there were a God, there would be no evil; but there is evil, so there must be no God. Evil is a telltale sign that there is no God. However, the argument we are going to focus on here is a different telltale sign argument—the argument from divine hiddenness: if there were a God, he would not be hidden; but he is hidden, so there must be no God. We turn to that argument presently.
The Argument from Hiddenness
The most notable contemporary defender of the argument from hiddenness is the philosopher John Schellenberg. In his book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, Schellenberg puts the argument as follows:
The argument is clear and simple. And the conclusion follows from the premises. So now the question is, is there anything wrong with these premises?
We can take issue with only two premises, and they are premises 2 and 3. Initially, many theists are inclined to reject 3. For them, anyone who fails to believe that God exists must simply be failing to see the evidence that God has plainly set before us. Because of this failure, all atheists must count as unreasonable.
However, just because God makes evidence available to us that is sufficient for belief isn't enough for us to conclude that all atheists are unreasonable. Instead, to reject premise 3 we would need to be able to credibly claim that the evidence God has provided is so clear, telling, and unmistakable that someone would have to be unreasonable to fail to see it. That is a strong claim. Of course the mere fact that it is a strong claim doesn't make it wrong. In fact, a number of Christians have taken this strong claim to be directly supported in Scripture, which teaches that the creation makes the existence, invisible attributes, and nature of God known in such a way that those who fail to see these things are “without excuse” (Rom 1:18—20). Perhaps that is a good enough reason to reject premise 3 and thus the argument as a whole.
Schellenberg is convinced otherwise. He claims that while some atheists might reject the existence of God for no reason or perhaps even for bad reasons, many others reject the existence of God for good reasons. Some of these atheists have given long, hard attention to the arguments for and against the existence of God; and, after fair-mindedly weighing the evidence, they have come down against it. Since Schellenberg thinks that we cannot count such atheists as unreasonable, he also thinks premise 3 cannot be denied. As a result, he thinks the argument stands or falls with premise 2.
Assessing the Argument
In the rest of this essay, I intend to show two things. First, the argument from hiddenness depends on a certain flawed logic. Once we show this, we will see why the argument from hiddenness fails to demonstrate the truth of atheism. But showing that won't take away the lingering unease we feel about the fact that God is as hidden from us as He appears to be. As a result, after we see what is wrong with this argument, we will consider this phenomenon of hiddenness and see what explanations theists might be able to offer for it.
To begin, let's reconsider premise 2. Why does the atheist think, as the premise states, that if God exists there would be no reasonable atheists? The answer is that if a loving God exists, He would want His creatures to enter into a loving relationship with Him. And if you want people to be in loving relationship with you, they first need to know that you exist. Thus God would make His existence clear and obvious to us, as a necessary precondition for having this all-important relationship with us. Furthermore, because of the importance of having this relationship with God, then God would provide us with evidence so unmistakable that we could only fail to see it if we are being unreasonable.
Notice that the reasoning offered in favor of this premise invites us to think about what God would or should do in order to achieve certain aims that God has. Specifically, it invites us to think that God should make His existence obvious to us as a way of achieving His goal of establishing human-divine relationships. However, whenever you hear someone make an argument of any sort that starts from what we ought to expect God would or should do in order to achieve His aims, you have to ask yourself this question: “How could these critics be sure about what God would or should do in order to achieve some goal or other that He might have?” Many times simply asking yourself the question makes the answer plain: they can't. God's wisdom and insight so vastly exceed our own that it would be the height of folly to assume that we could discern the various possible ways God might be able to achieve His goal. As a result, it is also the height of folly for us to presume to know how God should go about trying to achieve His aims.
We can see the same phenomenon at work when we consider the argument for atheism that takes the existence of evil as its starting point. Those defending this argument claim that there are certain things we can expect of God as a result of our knowledge that God is a perfectly good being who aims to do His best—for example, we can expect that He would prevent all evil. But reasoning this way ignores the possibility that there might be some good reason for God to allow those evils that we think He wouldn't or shouldn't allow. Maybe a good God wants to do away with evil. But maybe He also wants a world with free creatures that can make morally significant choices. Allowing such free creatures just might require putting up with their choosing and causing evil, at least for a time. And thus, what we initially expect of God—that He would prevent all evil—turns out to be mistaken on further consideration. God had reasons for permitting it that we just weren't initially aware of.
The same thing that is true with respect to evil might be true with respect to hiddenness. In fairness we need to say not that God would not permit there to be any reasonable atheists but rather that God would not permit there to be any reasonable atheists unless He has some good reason for doing so. Once we see the need to add this extra condition, we can see that the argument from hiddenness needs to be modified as follows:
(1) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving
(2+) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there would not be reasonable atheists unless God has some good reason for allowing there to be reasonable atheists.
(3) There are people who are reasonable and who are atheists.
(3+) There is no good reason for God to allow there to be such atheists.
(4) Thus, no perfectly loving God exists.
(5) Thus, there is no God.
While the logic of the argument is impeccable, defending premise (3+) is no small task! How, we should wonder, do (or could) atheists—or anyone else for that matter—know that premise (3+) is true? Interestingly, when atheists are pressed on this question, they answer as follows: we have thought about this issue for a long time, and we don't see any possible good reason for God to allow there to be reasonable atheists. Philosophers call arguments of this sort “noseeum” arguments since they hold that since I don't see any good reason for God to allow this sort of thing, there isn't any good reason. Are noseeum arguments any good?
Sometimes they are. If your roommate asks you to get the milk from the refrigerator and you open the door, look carefully, and don't see any milk there, it is reasonable for you to conclude that there is no milk in the refrigerator because you don't see it. That is a good noseeum argument. But not all noseeum arguments are good. Imagine that you go to the doctor to get your immunizations. The doctor removes the protective sleeve from the needle and is about to inject you with it when he accidentally drops it on the floor. He picks it up and appears ready to continue when you object: “Doctor, I think that needle might be dirty; there might be germs on it!” The doctor holds the needle up to the light, closes one eye, and stares at it intently. After a few seconds he says, “I have looked closely, and I don't see any germs on it; there's nothing to worry about.” This doctor has made a noseeum inference, and it is a bad one.
What separates good noseeum inferences from bad ones? For a noseeum inference to be good, two conditions must be met. First, it must be the case that you are looking for the thing in question in the right place. If your roommate asks you if there is any milk and you look in the oven, you are looking in the wrong place. Your failing to see it there would not be good evidence that you don't have any milk. Second, it must be the case that you would see the thing in question if it really were there. If your roommate asks if there are ants in the yard and you look at the window and say, “Nope. I don't see any,” you have made a bad noseeum inference. You are looking in the right place, but ants are too small to be seen by you even if they are there.
Is the argument in favor of (3+) more like the argument of the roommate looking for milk or the doctor looking for germs? The answer is clear: more like the doctor. To see why, consider our two conditions of a good noseem argument. First, when atheists are looking for the reasons that God might allow Himself to remain somewhat hidden, are those atheists looking in the right place? Well, it is hard to know because it is hard to know what the right place would be. In any case, it seems highly unlikely that the right place to look is in the introspective consciousness of the atheist. Why would atheists take their powers of imagination to exhaust all the possible good reasons God might have for allowing hiddenness? Second, if an atheist were looking in the right place for such reasons, is it clear that the atheist would find them? There is certainly no reason to think so. Perhaps the reasons are so complex and difficult to unscramble that we wouldn't grasp them even if they were, so to speak, staring us in the face. As a result, the argument for (3+) is a failure, and so the argument from hiddenness is as well.
Still some people might think this doesn't settle the matter. Is it fair simply to throw up our hands and say, “How are we supposed to know why God would allow hiddenness to occur?” After all, ignorance of this sort doesn't explain hiddenness, and the atheist is simply demanding such an explanation.
True enough, our pleading ignorance doesn't explain hiddenness. But here we need to make two important points. First, the argument from hiddenness itself does not oblige the theist to explain hiddenness. Rather, it is the atheist who needs to be able to defend that claim that God has no good reason for allowing hiddenness to make the argument from hiddenness work. That, after all, is one of the premises of the argument. The atheist has not adequately defended that claim because there is no way we could know such a thing. Second, despite this, it is true that nothing we have said here explains why God is as hidden as he is. Because of this, some of the existential anxiety that we feel when confronted with hiddenness still remains. So can the Christian go further and try to propose some reason that would explain hiddenness? Yes! And in the final section, we will look at one such explanation.
An Explanation of Divine Hiddenness
It seems clear that one of the things God wants in His creation is creatures who can, at least for a time, freely choose to love Him or reject Him. What does the world have to be like to allow that? First, it needs to contain creatures with the ability to make free choices. Second, those creatures must exist in conditions where that freedom can be exercised. What sorts of conditions might those be?
It turns out that there are a number of them, but we need to focus on only one of them here: an absence of pervasive coercion. Everyone has had the experience of driving down the highway, perhaps going just a little bit faster than the posted speed limit allows, and spying a police car off in the bushes on the side of the road. What is our reaction? Immediately we hit the brakes and slow down to a speed below the limit. The presence of the police officer causes us to fear a penalty for violating the law that forces us to slow down. And that is, of course, exactly why the officer is there. But things aren't always like that. There are plenty of times when no one is watching over our shoulder, ensuring that we do what we should. Under those conditions, no external threat constrains us, allowing us freely to choose to obey the law or not.
Now imagine what things would be like if there were, so to speak, moral police officers on every corner, threatening to fine or imprison us for any violation of our moral duties. In such a world not only would people be coerced into obeying the speed limit; they would be coerced into behaving morally under every imaginable condition. A world like that would be a world filled with pervasive coercion, and in such a world no morally significant free choice would be possible.
How is this relevant to divine hiddenness? To see how, consider the sort of world that Schellenberg or Hanson seems to think God should create. They think that God ought to reveal Himself in a way that makes possible the loving relationship He wants with creatures. They think this would mean, (a) making it unmistakably clear that God exists. But surely an all-good God would want to make more than that clear to us. If God really loves us and wants us to experience true fulfillment, God would want to tell us in equally clear and unmistakable terms (b) how we can have good lives; and this would mean revealing to us His moral will, and how following His moral will alone brings us happiness, and how failing to follow it will lead us into misery and destruction.
But consider for a moment what would really happen if God brought about (b). Were God to make those things described in (b) unavoidably and unmistakably clear to us, what would be the result? Undoubtedly, God would become the equivalent of the moral police, patrolling every corner of your life. God would be directly present in our lives, making clear to us that loving obedience is the only way to experience happiness and that sin and evil will lead to swift and unavoidable punishment. Under conditions like that, we would be subject to pervasive coercion in our daily lives. And in those conditions, morally significant freedom becomes impossible. As a result, it seems that God cannot make Himself known to us in the ways specified in (a) and (b).
At this point one might think that something in my assessment of the argument from hiddenness has gone wrong here. After all, like Schellenberg and Hanson, Christians think that God must, and can, and does make His existence and will known to us. But they don't think that His doing so undermines our ability to act freely. How is that possible? That is, how can God make His existence and will known to us without introducing pervasive coercion? Here is where some hard thinking is needed. To answer this question, we need to give careful attention to coercion and to how it works.
Coercion occurs when threats are made which put what we might call “coercive pressure” on us. When we unpack the concept of coercive pressure with some care, we can see that it results from the interplay of at least five factors:
- Probabilistic: the likelihood that the threatened consequence will actually be carried out.
- Temporal: how quickly the threatened consequence will be carried out.
- Epistemic: the extent of the “felt awareness” of the threatened consequence (more will be said on this below).
In order for God to preserve the preconditions necessary for creaturely freedom, the coercive pressure that comes with the knowledge of His existence and moral will must be mitigated. Which of these factors can God “monkey with” to lower coercive pressure and thus safeguard creaturely freedom?
It does not appear that God can mitigate (1) since the strength of the “threat” for disbelieving or disobeying God seems fixed. If one fails to come to know God or obey His moral will (including the command to trust Christ for our salvation), that person is destined for eternal separation from God. It does not appear that mitigating this consequence is possible. The second factor, probabilistic imminence, is equally fixed. If God promises some result for failing to know or obey Him, the probability that the threatened consequence will be carried out is 100 percent. How could it be less? Only if God might be fooled or forget or change His mind. None of those are possible.
Temporal imminence can be mitigated in some sense since at least some of the consequences of failure to believe or obey are pushed into the afterlife. But notice two things about this. First, for any given person, even the afterlife might begin in the next instant. So does delaying the punishment “until the afterlife” really reduce the “temporal imminence of the threat”? It seems not. Second, even if these punishments were seen as temporally distant, it is hard to imagine that this would make any difference given the extreme nature of the threatened consequence—eternal separation from God.
Let's skip epistemic imminence for a moment. What about (3) threat indifference? Could God mitigate indifference as a way of mitigating coercive pressure? It seems not. After all, the extent to which we are indifferent to threats seems to be something that arises from our own free choosing. Some people develop resistance to threats by working hard at it (bullies). Others do not (those who routinely allow themselves to be bullied). In either case the indifference seems to result from our own free choice. God could only attune this factor by (objectionably) interfering with our own free choice.
As a result we are left only with epistemic imminence. But what exactly is epistemic imminence? It is the factor that explains why, for example, television spots that show horrible accident scenes caused by drunk drivers actually succeed in deterring people from drinking and driving. These spots don't provide the viewers with any new information. No one thinks, after watching such a spot, “Gee, I never knew drunk driving could cause accidents.” Rather, what they do is take information that we already know and present it to us in a way that is emotionally gripping and compelling. What such television spots do is change the “epistemic imminence” of the “threatened consequence.”
Since God cannot mitigate coercive pressure by mitigating the other four factors that contribute toward coercive pressure, God must do it by modifying the epistemic imminence of His existence and moral nature. When He does so, however, the result is the phenomenon we have been describing as divine hiddenness.
Notice that decreasing the epistemic imminence (and thus becoming more hidden) does not mean that there will be no evidence or only weak evidence available to us concerning the existence of God. We can see this again by considering the television spots that serve to reduce the incidence of drunk driving. People who are moved by these spots already know full well that drinking and driving is dangerous. That evidence was already fully available to them. But the information imparted by the evidence lacked the epistemic imminence to compel them to stop drinking and driving. It took the television spots to do that. Likewise, God could make all sorts of information available to us concerning His existence and moral will (such as a written revelation, an Incarnate Son, etc.). As long as the information is not imparted in such a way as to make this information epistemically imminent (and thus coercive) God will succeed in safeguarding our morally significant freedom.
Conclusion
The argument from hiddenness represents a challenge to the truth of theism that is being voiced with increased urgency by defenders of atheism. However, atheists using this argument have failed to see that making it work requires the assumption—a large assumption indeed—that God could have no good reason for allowing there to be reasonable atheists. We have seen that this claim is based on a noseeum inference that fails the two tests that good noseeum inferences must pass. In addition, these atheists fail to see that there are indeed some good reasons that God should allow His existence to be partially hidden or veiled to us. One reason we have examined here is that such hiddenness seems necessary to safeguard creaturely moral freedom. As a result, the argument from hiddenness clearly fails to provide a good reason for accepting atheism.
1 Norwood Russell Hanson, What I Do Not Believe and Other Essays (New York: Humanities, 1971), 313-14.
2 John Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).