Divine Hiddenness
I took a quick survey of the literature on the problem of divine hiddenness. One current approach to the problem is to treat the lack of clear evidence for God as a subspecies of the problem of evil. Lack of theistic evidence is problematic only insofar as it leads to lack of theistic belief, and lack of theistic belief is a problem only insofar as it is sinful or causes suffering. So the question becomes: why would a good and powerful God hide Himself, allowing so many people to fall into the sin of unbelief, when it would be so very easy for Him to convince them of His existence with clear and undeniable evidence?
The first cut at the problem, then, is to apply the same sort of device used to respond to the general problem of evil: free will. We start by arguing that certain sorts of conditions must hold if humans are to have free will, and one of those conditions is that our choices must be free from compulsion or threat. Then, we argue that certain sorts of evidence for God's existence would amount to compulsion or threat. Finally, we argue that the sorts of evidence which atheists commonly demand would, in fact, threaten free will, while the evidence which we do, in fact, have does not threaten it. The claim here is that allowing room for epistemic doubt is the only workable way for God at once to 1) provide people with accurate information about the eternal judgement that is to come and 2) allow those people to make a free choice about whether to change their lives as a response.
An important problem remains unaddressed by this analysis. Many atheists attest to absolutely no sense of God's existence whatsoever. Surely, these folks could sustain some non-zero, yet low, level of awareness of God without hampering their freedom. But it appears God fails to provide even that. Why? The response here is, again, to rely on free will: humans are sinful, and one of the consequences of sin is that it blinds the sinner to God's presence. We all have, in fact, been given a basic awareness of God's existence, but some sinners are so effective at suppressing this awareness that they end up with absolutely none at all.
This summary follows the argument of Michael J. Murray in his 1993 article,
"Coercion and the Hiddenness of God." American Philosophical Quarterly 30 p. 27-38. I think I generally agree with it, though I would add two points. First, we don't need to rely entirely on the free-will theodicy: we can also appeal to soul-making, and claim that divine hiddenness is required to enable us to develop the virtue of faith. Second, we don't need to imply that individuals who have zero sense of God's awareness are somehow more sinful than those who do. Perhaps some people are just (randomly) born spiritually blind, just as some may be born physically blind. Neither sort of blindness need be a result of the blind person's own personal sin. Instead, blindness itself may be a form of evil to which we collectively become liable as part of the Fall. The good news is that Jesus came to make the blind see and the deaf hear, so any of the spiritually dead can be given life....
The first cut at the problem, then, is to apply the same sort of device used to respond to the general problem of evil: free will. We start by arguing that certain sorts of conditions must hold if humans are to have free will, and one of those conditions is that our choices must be free from compulsion or threat. Then, we argue that certain sorts of evidence for God's existence would amount to compulsion or threat. Finally, we argue that the sorts of evidence which atheists commonly demand would, in fact, threaten free will, while the evidence which we do, in fact, have does not threaten it. The claim here is that allowing room for epistemic doubt is the only workable way for God at once to 1) provide people with accurate information about the eternal judgement that is to come and 2) allow those people to make a free choice about whether to change their lives as a response.
An important problem remains unaddressed by this analysis. Many atheists attest to absolutely no sense of God's existence whatsoever. Surely, these folks could sustain some non-zero, yet low, level of awareness of God without hampering their freedom. But it appears God fails to provide even that. Why? The response here is, again, to rely on free will: humans are sinful, and one of the consequences of sin is that it blinds the sinner to God's presence. We all have, in fact, been given a basic awareness of God's existence, but some sinners are so effective at suppressing this awareness that they end up with absolutely none at all.
This summary follows the argument of Michael J. Murray in his 1993 article,
"Coercion and the Hiddenness of God." American Philosophical Quarterly 30 p. 27-38. I think I generally agree with it, though I would add two points. First, we don't need to rely entirely on the free-will theodicy: we can also appeal to soul-making, and claim that divine hiddenness is required to enable us to develop the virtue of faith. Second, we don't need to imply that individuals who have zero sense of God's awareness are somehow more sinful than those who do. Perhaps some people are just (randomly) born spiritually blind, just as some may be born physically blind. Neither sort of blindness need be a result of the blind person's own personal sin. Instead, blindness itself may be a form of evil to which we collectively become liable as part of the Fall. The good news is that Jesus came to make the blind see and the deaf hear, so any of the spiritually dead can be given life....
posted by Ang at 10:04 AM
1 Comments:
I see this was written a while ago, so it prolly doesn't matter what I post here. That said, you fail to address the argument from divine blackmail, i.e., if God is so opposed to coercion, it is incosistent with His character to send us messengers to warn of Hell. As a punishment awaiting those who don't get with the program, sending us to Hell is about as coercive as He could possibly be!
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