Argument from Divine Hiddenness

The Argument from Divine Hiddenness is J. L. Schellenberg‘s 1993 argument, given canonical form in Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Briefly: a wholly loving God would always be open to a personal relationship with every finite person capable of one. Such openness requires the possibility of belief, since one cannot enter a relationship with a person one does not believe exists. But there are people, “nonresistant nonbelievers,” who are capable of relationship and not actively resisting belief, and yet who do not believe. Therefore, no wholly loving God exists.

The argument’s distinctive feature is that it is structurally first-personal in a way the Problem of Evil is not. The problem of evil reasons about gratuitous suffering observed at a distance. Hiddenness reasons about the reach of one’s own attention: have I, who would welcome a relationship with God if there were one, been left without belief?

The asymmetry matters because it puts the inquirer inside the argument. To take hiddenness seriously, one must ask whether one is oneself a nonresistant nonbeliever, and whether one’s friends, who are not believers and who one does not think are resisting, count. The answer is harder to arrive at than the answer to the corresponding question about gratuitous suffering somewhere else in the world.

Margaret Halloran encounters Schellenberg over winter break of her second year and writes that hiddenness has done something to her that the abstract problem of evil never did. She does not entirely know what to do with it.