J. L. Schellenberg

J. L. Schellenberg is the philosopher who put the Argument from Divine Hiddenness on the analytic map. His 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason is the canonical statement, and the argument it presents has become a fixed feature of the literature in the way J. L. Mackie‘s Logical Problem of Evil became fixed in the nineteen fifties.

The argument, briefly: a wholly loving God would be open to a personal relationship with every finite person capable of one. If such a God existed, no such person who was capable of relationship and not resisting it would fail to believe that God exists, since belief is necessary to the relationship. But there are people, “nonresistant nonbelievers,” who do not believe and are not resisting. Therefore, no wholly loving God exists.

What distinguishes hiddenness from the Problem of Evil 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. The argument from 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 is what Margaret Halloran found compelling in January, and what she has not yet been able to set down.

Schellenberg has continued to develop the argument across several books, increasingly arguing for a position he calls “ultimism” rather than for atheism narrowly construed. He is one of the most patient writers in the contemporary literature.