Abstract
According to the problem of divine hiddenness, if God is perfectly loving, he would make it so that anyone capable of having a personal relationship with him would be able to reasonably believe that God exists. Given that some people do not believe in the existence of God – and after careful, sincere investigation and due to no fault of their own – then such a perfectly loving God does not exist. In this chapter, I will, in §1, consider this argument in greater detail and suggest that it rests on two key assumptions: what I’ll be calling the perfectly loving assumption and the no-fault assumption. In §2, we will consider how both assumptions can be rejected so as to avoid the problem of divine hiddenness’s conclusion; however, I’ll also note that doing so comes with challenges. Special care will need to be taken either (i) to describe how God might be perfectly loving and yet purposefully hidden from some people or (ii) to explain away non-belief in a friendlier way – in a way that doesn’t rest on a blind arrogance or dogmatism.
This chapter distinguishes the existential problem of divine hiddenness from the evidential problem of divine hiddenness. The former is primarily concerned with the apparent hiddenness of a personal God in the lives of believers amidst terrible suffering. The latter is primarily concerned with the apparent hiddenness of God being evidence against God's existence. The chapter mentions John Schellenberg's landmark book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, that is the seminal work on the problem of divine hiddenness. The chapter then highlights the basic contours of the evidential problem of divine hiddenness, and suggests that the argument rests on two important assumptions: the perfectly loving assumption and the no-fault assumption. It further considers a few possible responses to the evidential problem of divine hiddenness, which center on rejecting either the perfectly loving assumption or the no-fault assumption.