God is hidden

Set out plainly, the argument has four steps.

1. If a perfectly loving God exists, he is always open to a relationship with every person capable of one.
2. A relationship with God requires believing that God exists.
3. Some people who are capable of that relationship, and not resisting it, do not believe God exists.
4. So a perfectly loving God does not exist.

The weight falls on the first two steps together. They mean that perfect love must guarantee, for everyone open to it, belief that God exists, here and now. That is a strong claim about what love must do, and it is not self-evident.

Love between people does not always work that way. A parent who wants a grown child to become a certain kind of person sometimes steps back rather than stepping in. A teacher who hands over the answers produces agreement, not understanding. Whether God’s love would hold back in a similar way depends on what kind of relationship it aims at. That is where the Christian account and the argument part ways.

Christianity does not describe the goal as agreement that God exists. The New Testament letter of James makes the point with some bite: “You believe that God is one. Good for you! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” (James 2:19). The relationship it has in mind is trust and love, and a turning of the whole person toward God, which Christians call repentance.

Evidence so overwhelming that no one could doubt it might secure belief and still miss that goal. A story told by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard illustrates it: a king who loves a humble woman disguises himself, because if he came in his royal power she might submit to him without ever loving him. The seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal suggested that God gives enough light for those who want to see and enough shadow for those who do not, so that what a person wants is engaged rather than bypassed.

Schellenberg has a reply. Believing that someone exists does not force you to love them; plenty of people have believed in God and turned away. So belief alone is not coercion. Christians answer that some kinds of evidence would still change the choice, as a constant, visible God might make everything else in life about him. Philosophers have not settled this. The premise that love must guarantee belief now is open to question, and the argument needs it to be certain.

Christianity holds that the evidence of God is real and can be resisted. It points to the existence and order of the universe: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). It points to conscience, which Paul describes as a moral law “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15). And it points above all to Jesus.

In a speech recorded in the book of Acts, Paul tells an audience in Athens that God arranged human history so that people “would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). On that account, seeking is built into the design rather than a sign that something has gone wrong.

You may think this is a convenient story told after the fact. It can be checked. The idea that God wants freely given trust, and so does not overwhelm people, runs through the whole of the Bible, long before anyone formulated the hiddenness argument. Whether or not it is true, it was not invented to answer you.

If Christianity claimed that God is always felt by anyone who looks, a single honest seeker who found nothing would count heavily against it. It claims nothing of the kind. Its own Scriptures are full of people who believed in God and felt abandoned by him: Job, the psalmists, and Jesus himself, who on the cross cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46).

That pattern continues. Letters published after the death of Mother Teresa revealed that for most of her decades of work in Calcutta she felt no sense of God’s presence at all. Felt absence is something the Christian account predicts, so it is weaker evidence against that account than it first appears.

Some Christians answer this argument by claiming that all unbelief is a hidden refusal. The New Testament does say that people can push away what they know (Romans 1:18), but it says that about human beings in general, believers included, and it gives no one the power to judge a particular person. This page does not claim to know your motives. Your account of your own search deserves to be taken at its word.

The letter to the Hebrews opens by admitting that God’s earlier speaking was partial: “On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets.” Then it makes its central claim: “But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2).

That is the Christian answer to hiddenness, and it concerns public events, not a private feeling you are asked to wait for: a teacher from Galilee, executed under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, whose followers began announcing, in the city where he died, that he had been raised. You can investigate that as history. The evidence that Jesus lived and was crucified is accepted by historians of every persuasion. What followed is where the real dispute lies.

This does not explain why some sincere people search for a lifetime and never find God. Christianity does not claim to know that. It claims that God has already shown himself in one place more fully than anywhere else, and that looking there is a reasonable next step.