2026-05-03

Out to Locust Ridge Preserve with M. Cool morning, no wind, the kind of day where you can hear the quiet between birdsong.

About a mile in I caught myself thinking about Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason again. I read it last month, slowly, mostly at night. I thought I had put it down. Apparently I had not.

The thing about J. L. Schellenberg‘s argument is that it does not behave like other arguments do. The Problem of Evil is something I can hold at arm’s length when I want to. I can think about somebody else’s child in the news, and I can be intellectually troubled, and I can close the laptop. The argument from Divine Hiddenness does not grant me that distance. It runs through me. If a wholly loving God exists and would be open to relationship with me, and if I have not been actively shutting that door, then the door should be open. I do not find an open door. The argument is asking what I make of that fact about myself, not what I make of suffering in general.

I tried to say some of this to M. on a switchback, and what came out was muddier than what I just wrote. She listened patiently. She is generous about my carrying these things on a hike. I told her I would come back to it later and she said, “you always do,” and we walked on.

What I want to mark, while it is fresh: arguments that run past me feel like puzzles. Arguments that run through me feel like something closer to grief. I do not want to overstate that, because I am still standing on a trail with a thermos of coffee, and life is not grief-shaped most of the time. But the difference is real, and I think the structure of the hiddenness argument is what makes it run that direction. It is asking me.

Saw a hawk on the way down.