Divine Hiddenness Objection Defeater
If God is real and loves people, why isn't He obvious? Why does He let sincere seekers spend years in silence? Why does He seem absent in the moments we most want Him present? This is the divine hiddenness objection, and in its modern philosophical form (J.L. Schellenberg's argument from non-resistant non-belief) it is widely regarded as the strongest contemporary atheist argument alongside the Problem of Evil.
The answer the historic Church has given, and that contemporary Christian philosophy has formalized, runs on five converging tracks. The objection equivocates between two senses of "hidden": God hidden absolutely (no self-disclosure anywhere) and God hidden relative to the inquirer's preferred mode of self-revelation. The argument requires the absolute sense to do its work, but Christianity claims and defends the relative sense: God has self-disclosed extensively (in creation, conscience, Scripture, the Incarnation, the Spirit's interior witness, the Church), just not always in the mode a given inquirer demands. Once the equivocation is named, the empirical claim that "non-resistant non-believers exist" is harder to verify than it appears, the spiritual goods served by current revelation-levels become visible, the Christological-kenotic mode of God's actual self-disclosure comes into focus, and the no-see-um inference at the argument's core (I don't see why God would be this hidden, therefore there's no good reason) is exposed as the same kind of inference that fails for the parallel Problem of Evil.
This page is the full debate-prep treatment: per-premise affirmative case, numbered opponent objections (steel-manned), 1:1 numbered rebuttals, per-premise live-cite kit, and tactical notes. Polemical on position, tender on person, the inquirer raising this...
Read the full page in the codex
If God is real and loves people, why isn't He obvious? Why does He let sincere seekers spend years in silence? Why does He seem absent in the moments we most want Him present? This is the divine hiddenness objection, and in its modern philosophical form (J.L. Schellenberg's argument from non-resistant non-belief) it is widely regarded as the strongest contemporary atheist argument alongside the Problem of Evil.
The answer the historic Church has given, and that contemporary Christian philosophy has formalized, runs on five converging tracks. The objection equivocates between two senses of "hidden": God hidden absolutely (no self-disclosure anywhere) and God hidden relative to the inquirer's preferred mode of self-revelation. The argument requires the absolute sense to do its work, but Christianity claims and defends the relative sense: God has self-disclosed extensively (in creation, conscience, Scripture, the Incarnation, the Spirit's interior witness, the Church), just not always in the mode a given inquirer demands. Once the equivocation is named, the empirical claim that "non-resistant non-believers exist" is harder to verify than it appears, the spiritual goods served by current revelation-levels become visible, the Christological-kenotic mode of God's actual self-disclosure comes into focus, and the no-see-um inference at the argument's core (I don't see why God would be this hidden, therefore there's no good reason) is exposed as the same kind of inference that fails for the parallel Problem of Evil.
This page is the full debate-prep treatment: per-premise affirmative case, numbered opponent objections (steel-manned), 1:1 numbered rebuttals, per-premise live-cite kit, and tactical notes. Polemical on position, tender on person, the inquirer raising this...
Read the full page in the codex
