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The question 'Why doesn't God make himself more obvious?' is pressing for many people. Even those who trust God's self-revelation are sometimes painfully aware that his revelation is partial. Anyone whose prayers have gone unanswered or who has experienced periods of God's silence or felt absence is likely to resonate with the thought that God is hidden - even if only partially hidden. What many see of God is most like a glimpse.
But the way in which God is supposed to be hidden in the arguments under discussion in the literature on the problem of divine hiddenness is a different kind of hiddenness. This kind of hiddenness is directly related to the evidence available for God's existence - specifically, it refers to the poverty of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence. The existence of a perfectly loving God is allegedly in tension with the evidential situation in which many find themselves: the evidence, some have claimed, is not enough to make the belief that God exists rational, and God, it is thought, would have put us in a very different evidential situation. Our evidence would be stronger than it actually is, if there were a loving God.
My goal in this paper is to clarify this argument and point to a couple ways the argument, as presented in the literature, needs elucidation. Specifically, I want to challenge a common assumption in the literature, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of nonculpable nonbelievers. (Throughout I will use 'nonbeliever' to refer specifically to a person who does not believe that God exists.) I conclude with the suggestion that glimpses may be a more apt analogy to use to represent our evidential situation than some of the prominent analogies in the literature.
Section 1 The Argument
Most of the arguments from divine hiddenness are offshoots of J.L. Schellenberg's central argument.1I will be working with the following simplified reconstruction:
(1). If a loving God exists, then there are no nonresistant nonbelievers.
(2). There are nonresistant nonbelievers.
(3). No loving God exists.
In this context, nonresistant nonbelief is usually equated with nonculpable nonbelief and is characteristic of those who lack belief...