God Has Not Revealed to Jonathan McLatchie a Solution to Divine Hiddenness
Responding to Mcclatchie's defense of divine hiddenness
The argument from divine hiddenness argues that if God existed he would not remain hidden—his existence would be evident to all diligent observers. McLatchie wrote a response to this argument—one which I don’t think succeeds.
A Lack of Obviousness Does Not Mean Poor Evidential Support
Why does God not make His existence more obvious? The first point I will make in response to this question is that God’s existence not being obvious does not entail that it is not well evidentially supported. We know from physics, for example, that a physical object like a table or a chair is comprised of mostly empty space. This is not at all obvious (in fact it would seem to be almost obvious that it is not the case) and yet we have good evidential support that it is so. One may reply that whereas we know scientifically that the chair is mostly comprised of empty space, we nonetheless still live our lives as if though it is not — our day-to-day choices and beliefs are not based on how we scientifically understand things to be, but how we experience them in our daily lives. However, I can think of counter-examples where we do act against what we feel in accord with the available evidence, even when we are putting our lives on the line. For example, despite being a frequent flyer, I get anxious about being on an airplane. Even though I know rationally that flying is the safest way to travel (statistically, your odds of being involved in a fatal plane crash are less than 1 in 12 million), flying – especially in turbulent conditions – just doesn’t feel like it is safe to me. Nevertheless, I frequently overcome my fear of flying by stepping onto an airplane, often for very long distances. In that case, I am literally committing my life to what my rational faculties tell me, and disregarding what my emotions and feelings tell me, because I know that generally my rational faculties are a more reliable gauge of what is actually true than my feelings.
The argument from divine hiddenness doesn’t need to hold anything about the evidential support for theism. It could be that one who was fully acquainted with the evidence would conclude that Christianity was true. This is no defense of hiddenness. Theism has to explain why God would remain hidden from genuine seekers who have neither the time nor ability to examine the complex arguments that McLatchie thinks lead to God—arguments from hard to evaluate biological phenomena that aren’t known by most people—and certainly by most people throughout history. I think that the evidence overwhelmingly favors atheism, but I would never doubt that there are non resistant believers in theism. So even if the evidence is decisive and favors God, McLatchie gives no response here to the actual argument from hiddenness—why would God keep himself hidden from Pakistani farmers who haven’t time to read the Mcgrew’s book or Stephen Meyer. This is thus a red herring.
Someone recently asked me why God cannot be more like the force of gravity, which we experience directly. However, while we do have direct experience of the effects of gravity, it is not immediately obvious what causes things to gravitate towards the ground. The law of gravity was not articulated before Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Indeed, in attempting to explain why unsupported bodies fall to the ground, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put forward the idea that objects simply moved towards their ‘natural place’, the center of the earth (which in Aristotle’s cosmology was the center of the Universe), and that objects fall at a speed proportional to their weight. So perhaps gravity is less ‘obvious’ than one might think (though something which nonetheless enjoys strong evidential support). I would argue that the evidence of God is all around us, so we do in a sense experience God in a similar way to how we experience gravity. Just as we observe the effects that gravity has all around us but do not see the gravitational force that actually causes those effects, we also see the many things that God has made all around us, even though we do not see the being who actually caused those things to exist.
Okay, gravity is probably a bad analogy. A better question would be, why not make God like induction. Philosophers have a very tough time solving the problem of induction. However, everyone believes in induction even if they can’t prove it. Some things are just rationally self evident. Why not make God self evident?
One may still object here that it should not take us a lot of work to discover that Christianity is true. Rather, the truth of the gospel, granting what is at stake, should be readily apparent. I shall return to this objection in due course. However, I will note here that I do not think God requires more than it is reasonable for a serious enquirer to give to an issue of this much importance. Some enquirers are better placed than others, and God looks for us to exert ourselves according to the light we have been given. I have heard, for instance, many stories of Jesus revealing Himself to people in dreams and visions in Muslim-majority countries, presumably since those are parts of the world where it is harder for people to otherwise hear the gospel. In the west, we have ample access to the gospel and to the tools needed to do our due diligence in investigating its claims.
Most people don’t believe in the God that Jonathan believes in. The notion that there’s nothing God could do to convince the majority of people on earth is absurd. What McLatchie defines as a serious observer would exclude most people on earth—many of whom don’t have the time to do the serious inquiry which Jonathan advocates.
There are also a multitude of people who would be considered to be serious inquirers by any non ad hoc definition— people who are not Christians. Sobel, Russell, Oppy, numerous muslim scholars, etc. People who devote their lives to doing good would almost certainly not resist if they were convinced God really existed.
I think we have to trust the goodness of God, since presumably God, in his omniscience, knows what every person would have done had they had more evidence — i.e. whether they would have chosen to enter into a relationship with God or to reject Him. We know from plenty of Biblical examples that not everyone who is presented with conclusive evidence for God (whether by miracles, predictive prophecies, or direct manifestations) submits to Him. If God knows that a given individual is not going to enter into a good, lasting relationship with Him, then why would God ensure the person believes? Furthermore, Scripture also indicates that people are judged in accordance with the amount of light they have rejected (e.g. Mt 11:21-22; Jn 12:47-48). Even many contemporary public atheists have essentially said that no amount of evidence could change their mind. For example, Richard Dawkins was asked in a conversation with Peter Boghossian what it would take for him to believe in God. Dawkins said that not even the second coming would be enough evidence. When Boghossian asked him whether any amount of evidence could change his mind. He replied, “Well, I’m starting to think nothing would, which, in a way, goes against the grain, because I’ve always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind when evidence is forthcoming.” It could, therefore, be seen as an act of mercy for God to withhold from them more evidence if they were going to reject it anyway and thereby bring upon themselves greater judgment. This adds yet further plausible motivation for God not to ensure that everyone had greater access to evidence for His existence, which would thereby render them more culpable. This point has been independently made by Travis Dumsday in a paper in the journal Religious Studies. [3]
This last point may be challenged by the skeptic by pointing to the existence of non-resistant non-believers. As Schellenberg puts it, “If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.” [4] However, I would contest that there is such a thing as long-term non-resistant nonbelief. My own view is that the evidence for Christianity is such that anyone who is fully informed and takes it upon himself to impartially examine it — with a heart open toward accepting God as Lord — will, in the long term, come to find Christianity to be true and well supported. In any case, human psychology, particularly at the subconscious level, is so complex that I doubt that it is demonstrable that any nonbeliever is completely nonresistant.
A few points are worth making.
1 God is a philosophical view more so than a scientific one. This question can rather seem like asking what evidence would convince one of dialetheism.
2 This raises the deeper question of why God punishes people more who have been given more evidence but remain unconvinced.
3 If God made his existence as evident to Dawkins as induction is, Dawkins would certainly believe.
4 There are numerous examples of Christians doing horrible things and going against divine law. Thus, it doesn’t seem like people’s acceptance of God is proportional to whether or not they’d enter into a genuine relationship with him if his existence was evident, unless one thinks that child molesting Catholic priests have a more genuine relationship with God than William Macaskill would.
5 There are huge numbers of non resistant non believers. I know that I would devote my life to God if I was convinced he existed and was perfectly good. My Jewish grandfather who is now dead was certainly not resistant—he helped others as much as was humanly possible and died a religious Jew, wanting to do things that Judaism commands. The notion that he wouldn’t have wanted to do things that Jesus commanded if convinced of his divinity is absurd. To the extent that one has to stipulate that every single person who goes to their grave a non Christian didn’t seek sincerely, that makes their hypothesis much less plausible, because it has to posit something very implausible about a vast number of people.
It’s an especially curious coincidence that whether or not someone seeks sincerely varies based on time and place. Strange that the number of people who are resistant is much greater in Japan than in the US—and that it seems to roughly track the prevalence of Christianity in a particular area.
If we’re just trusting that God has a good reason, that’s the skeptical theist line which I reject for reasons given here. The problem is even bigger in the case of hiddenness because a relationship with God is the highest good, so it can’t be subordinated to other greater things. It is the greatest possible thing. This would be like claiming a perfect chess player wanted to take their opponents knight rather than have an immediate checkmate.
Couldn’t God Have Given Us Stronger Evidence?
A related objection is that it is possible for the evidence for Christianity to have been stronger than it in fact is. Surely, if God existed, He would have given us the strongest possible evidence. However, I do not think that we need expect something that goes beyond perfectly adequate evidence for the serious inquirer. Many atheists are under the mistaken impression that God wants people to believe in Him no matter what they are going to go on and do with that knowledge. It is never contended anywhere in Scripture that it is a commendable thing to believe in God yet reject a relationship with Him. In the Old Testament, the Jews had no doubt that God existed – they had seen many miracles performed before their eyes – and yet they went off time and again into idolatry. Even those who saw Jesus’ miracles before their very eyes didn’t believe in Him (e.g. John 12:37) and wanted to put Him to death – e.g. see the reaction of many after Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11:45-53). The eighteenth century lawyer and Christian thinker Joseph Butler (1692-1752), in his Analogy of Religion, put forward the idea that our time on earth is a period of probation. [5] For some people in particular the form that that probation may take is a form of testing whether they are willing to engage in the intellectual inquiry that is necessary to give themselves a fair examination of the evidence.
An objection I sometimes encounter is that, if God exists, then there should not be any reasonable arguments against His existence at all. However, this complaint, it seems to me, boils down essentially to the dubious claim that, if Christianity is true, there cannot be any puzzles that require mental effort to work out. Another point to bear in mind is that many people are not even presented with these as puzzles that seriously compromise the evidence that they already have. For some people, working through the problem of evil is part of their probation here in this life. And if they are diligent, they will work through it. Even if they cannot find adequate and satisfying answers to why there exists so much suffering in the world, they can learn to trust in the goodness of God, and find in the problem of evil insufficient ground to overturn the positive confirmatory case for Biblical theism. Either they will find adequate answers, or they will find enough positive evidence to make the fact of their inability to find those answers not, in the end, sufficient to undermine their faith.
This claim is strange for a few reasons.
1 There are people much smarter than McLatchie (and than I) who are atheists, who have studied the evidence quite deeply. I don’t think that Sobel or Oppy has failed to seriously read the literature. I also don’t think that it’s reasonable to postulate that they’re all motivated atheists—especially given lots of deconversions from former Christians. A friend of mine—perhaps the smartest person I know—is an ex Christian who would like for Christianity to be true.
2 People become less religious after studying philosophy of religion. This would be very strange if the evidence unambiguously supported Christianity. McLatchie might think that the evidence that supports Christianity comes from biology and history, but then he’d have to accept that there are dilligent observers who are non Christians. They just don’t study the particular domains that possess evidence that McLatchie finds compelling. It would be absurd for Oppy to try to form a scientific view about the biological evidence or a historical view about the new testament—that’s just not his area of expertise. It’s much more reasonable to defer in such domains. There are also numerous examples of people deconverting after studying history and biology—Jonathan seems to be one of the few people who thinks those arguments are overwhelmingly compelling.
3 This is subject to the objections from earlier. Would we really say that a Pakistani farmer deserves to burn forever or lose out on eternal bliss because they didn’t have time to read Stephen Meyer’s books—books which are widely regarded as psuedoscience by the res of those in his subject area. This once again gives the theist the task of explaining the curious biological divergence in religious belief.
Why Does God Require of Us So Much Work?
I often hear the objection that in order to really be compelled by the evidence for Christianity, one has to take a very deep dive into esoteric scholarship. Surely, if God were real, the truth of the gospel should be a lot more self-evident. Indeed, this is actually also an objection to my epistemology that I frequently encounter from some Christians as well – namely, that my hard line evidentialism implies that Christians cannot be rational in believing the gospel unless they become an academic and invest hundreds of hours in the study of the evidences for Christianity. Since not everyone has the aptitude and access to resources necessary to undertake such deep study, so the objection goes, this cannot be God’s normative way of imparting rational confidence to believers that the gospel they have entrusted is indeed true.
However, I want to be careful here to draw a distinction between what I call an explicit rational warrant and what can be called an implicit, or tacit, rational warrant for Christian faith. Every Christian, I would argue, can have at least an implicit rational warrant for believing that God exists and that He has revealed Himself in the Bible. Romans 1:20 teaches that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” The Greek word translated “without excuse” in this verse is ἀναπολογήτους (literally, “without an apologetic”). Furthermore, the Psalmist wrote that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” (Ps 19:1). I do not think the Scriptures are envisaging people having to do PhDs in astrophysics or molecular biology, or master probability theory, in order to see the hand of God revealed in nature. Every time we step outdoors and behold the things that God has made – especially living organisms – we intuit that things have been made for a purpose, even if we couldn’t explicitly express why that is the case. Indeed, throughout history, the vast majority of people who have lived have been theists.
This implicit or inarticulate sense of the case for theism explains, I think, why some people come to believe that there must be a God when they hold their newborn child in their arms for the first time – they see the incredible design and elegance that is inherent in the process of development from a fertilized egg to a new born infant. They recognize, even if only implicitly and intuitively, that this is a process that required a high level of foresight to bring about – since it involved a high-level objective – which points to the involvement of a conscious mind in the programming of developmental pathways.
I agree that there are some people who are compelled by theism even in the absence of arugments. However, this is far from true of everyone. Theism has always seemed patently absurd to me. Why would God make it so that lots of people have non theistic intuitions? My tacit rational warrant points me very far away from Christianity. I remember thinking God seemed ridiculous when I was 6 (my mental picture of God was also a cloud of lightning, rather amusingly). Reading the old testament and New Testament only increase my confidence that Christianity is absurd. When I read it divinity is the last quality it seems to possess. When some people look at the trees, they see God. When I look at the trees, it seems obvious that there’s no God. McLatchie has to explain that second fact.
This also is obviously totally inadequate to get one to Christianity. One who sees design in the world will not conclude Christianity is true—if they’re in a primarily muslim country, they’ll probably conclude Allah is the explanation.
Those with an implicit rational warrant for belief in God may not be able to hold their own in a debate with a learned atheist scholar. This is why we hear so many ill-formulated attempted arguments for God that are along the right lines but not sufficiently nuanced to pass for sound argumentation. But I would argue that they nonetheless have sufficient rational warrant for their belief that God exists. Over time, as a believer matures, I would argue that the rational warrant for belief that was in the first place implicit should become more and more explicit and articulate.
In fact, even a biologist as staunchly atheistic as Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the double-helical structure of DNA) said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,” [6] Richard Dawkins similarly said at the beginning of The Blind Watchmaker that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose,” [7] Dawkins then spends the remainder of the book trying to argue, in my opinion unsuccessfully, that this design is not real but only apparent.
People also have a moral compass and have an implicit sense that there are objective moral norms and duties in the world – something which makes much better sense if theism is true than if atheism were true. Besides general revelation (i.e. what may be known about God from the created Universe), this sense of objective moral norms and duties also provides people with an additional witness, even if only implicit, to the existence of God.
People can have a similarly implicit rational warrant for believing that God has revealed Himself in the Bible. This is not something that you need a PhD in Biblical Studies to discover. I think for many believers they read through the Bible and encounter the cumulative force of various prophetic passages like Isaiah 53, recognizing Jesus in them. They might not be able to express the argument explicitly enough to debate a learned Rabbi. But they nonetheless, I would argue, have an implicit rational warrant. Likewise, they might read through the New Testament accounts and perceive implicitly some of the hallmarks of verisimilitude, such as the criterion of embarrassment, or unexplained allusions, or undesigned coincidences. They might begin to recognize the evidential value of the testimonial evidence we have in the New Testament in regard to events such as the resurrection. Many of those categories of evidence are actually not at all hard to grasp and may be perceived through common sense.
This is what, I suspect, many Christians in fact are talking about when they say that they just know that Christianity is true. I think often-times Christians can confuse an implicit rational warrant for belief in Scripture (which is based on evidence) with some sort of mystical inner-witness that Christianity is true. For example, one may have an inarticulate sense of the power of the whole case for Christianity without realizing that it is, in fact, a rational response to a cumulative case argument.
So, where am I going with this? I would argue that discovering evidence for God is not actually that hard. Rather, it has been made artificially hard by bad scholarship and poor standards that insist that the simplest answer cannot actually be the correct answer. This is true in science as well as Biblical scholarship. A lot of the ink spilled on these issues, therefore, is ink spent answering really bad arguments that should never have gotten traction to begin with but, because they provided an excuse for unbelief, they have become widely accepted and highly esteemed, even among academics who should know better.
But when lots of people seek they don’t discover God. Many lose their faith from closely examining the evidence. God wouldn’t allow people to be kept out of eternal salvation by bad scholarship if he could avoid that by making his existence more obvious.
On the point of scripture, my confidence in its divinity decreases when it makes totally false historical claims about darkness enveloping the earth, condemns handwashing as pompous and pretentious, defends horrific attrocities in the old testament like beating slaves, predicts the imminent end of the world, etc.
I argue for utilitarianism with lots of arguments that I think are good. However, I do feel as though I just know that utilitarianism is true. This would not lead me to conclude that those who doubt it are dishonest, just that their intuitions differ.
The point about DNA is irrelevant given that lots of people do study the evidence McLatchie references and remain unconvinced. Biologists are more atheist than the general public. McLatchie has a PHD in biology, unlike me, so I won’t contest the details of his biological argument. Instead, I’d merely point out that many other very smart people are not convinced by his arguments.
Jonathan then respond to the where is God objection by arguing that God has intervened and done lots of miracles. I find such claims suspect—generally my prior is such that I find miracle claims doubtful and it has not seemed to convince most people who have dilligently studied the issue. Apparent miracles often have a naturalistic explanation. However, this seems to be a bit afield of the rest of the piece (and quoting it in full would make this article too long for substack), so I won’t fully address this.
What About Unanswered Prayer?
As for unanswered prayer, this is a recurring thing that comes up in my conversations with ex-Christians – that is, that answered prayers do not seem to be distinguishable from chance and the act of prayer often feels like talking to the wall or the ceiling. This feeling during prayer is something I can relate to myself experientially, so it is not simply a theoretical issue for me. If Christianity is true, however, this entails that prayer is legit. Our belief in prayer should not be predicated on our evaluation of our feelings while praying or on our later examination of the result of prayer. To do this is not to evaluate prayer in a manner consistent with what Scripture teaches us concerning prayer. Nowhere in Scripture are we promised that prayer will be accompanied by an internal sense of being heard. Rather, prayer is supposed to be accompanied by a conviction that our prayers are heard in Christ, since it is through Him that we have access to God.
We are also not in a position to determine whether something is providentially caused by God or not. The Biblical view is not to look around for obviously miraculous causes and give God credit for those only, while presuming non-miraculous events would have happened anyway. Rather, we should view God as sovereign and credit Him with providential control over all things. So greatly has a twenty-first century naturalistic bias permeated our thinking that we in fact often fail to give God sufficient credit for His daily providence.
Prayer, then, should not be evaluated on the basis of a mystical sensation of being heard, or our impression of miraculous divine action in response to prayer. To do so is to judge prayer by a criterion which we were never given by God. How, then, should we evaluate the validity of prayer? We should evaluate it by the validity of the work of Christ and our faith in Him. If we are trusting in Christ then we have true and valid prayer. There is more that can be said, of course, about limiting our appreciation of prayer to when God says “yes” to a request, but my point here is simply that evaluating prayer by these standards is a problem from the start. Our belief in prayer stems from our beliefs in Christ and the two should never be separated. If we believe in Christ because of the evidence for His resurrection, then we are being inconsistent to fail to believe in prayer.
Another thing I will say about prayer is that there is, I think, what I would call an epistemic asymmetry when it comes to prayer. An epistemic asymmetry is where making an observation might be strong confirmatory evidence for your hypothesis but not making that observation is only weak, or even negligible, evidence against it. To take an illustration, imagine I see a spider crawling along my desk as I sit here and type this article. That would be excellent evidence for the hypothesis that, somewhere in my apartment, there is a spider. But suppose I do not see a spider in front of me. That is only very weak, even negligible evidence, that there is no spider in my apartment (since there are many other places where a spider might be). That is an example of what I call epistemic asymmetry.
So, how does this relate to prayer? I would argue that specific answers to prayer are relatively strong confirmatory evidence but apparently unanswered prayer is only comparatively weak disconfirmatory evidence. The reason for this is that there could be many explanations for why your prayer went unanswered. Perhaps God, in his omniscience, said ‘no’ because He knows (better than you do) that what you asked for is not good for you. Or perhaps there is unconfessed sin in your life. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that sin can hinder our prayer life. For example, Proverbs 28:9 says, “If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.” 1 Peter 3:7 says, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” There could thus be any number of reasons why your prayer was not answered and it is not necessarily particularly improbable that, if Christianity is true, many of your prayers will not be answered in the way that you desired. We have plenty of Biblical examples of prayers going unanswered. David’s prayer for the life of his illegitimate child by Bathsheba was unanswered (or answered negatively, depending on how you prefer to classify it). The same is true of Jesus’ prayer that the cup might pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the latter example, Jesus’ prayer included the qualifier “If it is possible…” And the answer was, “No, that can’t happen.” It would probably be classified as the most spectacular unanswered prayer of all time by the atheists, except for what happens afterward with Jesus being raised from the dead.
The answered prayers, on the other hand, depending on their level of specificity, can in principle be relatively strong confirmatory evidence for Christianity. Even if you cannot point to specific examples in your own life, there are writings by other people that would potentially document such examples (presuming them to be accurately reported). For example, George Müller (1805-1898) was a Christian evangelist and the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. There was a time when the orphanage at Bristol had run out of bread and milk. [12] Müller was on his knees praying for food when a baker knocked on the door to say that he had been unable to sleep that night, and somehow knew that Müller would need bread that morning. Shortly after, a truck carrying milk broke down, directly in front of the orphanage door. There was no refrigeration. The driver begged Müller to take the milk, which would go bad if it were not consumed. It was just enough for the 300 children in the orphanage.
To the extent that one thinks that we can’t predict what prayers God would grant, prayers can’t be good evidence. If delivering milk and bread is evidence for God once in history, then people dying of cancer when others pray for them to be saved is good evidence against God. The empirical evidence against the efficacy of prayer is much more decisive than particular examples of prayers that are granted—that are hard to verify and potentially coincidence.
McLatchie concludes
Conclusion
To conclude, while the problem of divine hiddenness is, on first inspection, a thorny issue, further analysis reveals it to be not as weighty a concern as it first appeared. Given the existence of plausible explanations of divine hiddenness (e.g. God’s knowledge, in His omniscience, of how different individuals will respond to the evidence of His existence), I would argue that the problem of divine hiddenness, though a complete answer eludes us, is not sufficient to overturn the extensive and varied positive confirmatory evidences of Christianity.
This would depend on my priors. However, the argument from hiddenness seems like very strong evidence against God. McLatchies responses mostly consisted of giving lots of evidence for Christianity. This is not an answer to the argument, because it leaves open the task of explaining why religiosity is so contingent on culture, time, and place, why non resistant non believers exist, and why God’s arguments would be both unconvincing often to those who cannot read complex literature and to those who can—though McLatchie may doubt their reasoning abilities.
So here are the facts he can’t explain
Non resistant non believers.
Christianity varying by time and place.
Christianity not being self evident or near self evident.
People who believe in God but go against the ideals of the faith.
Deeply religious non Christians who would become Christians if they were convinced. A poor muslim farmer from Pakistan is unlikely to witness a miracle that’s unique evidence of Jesus or to have a powerful religious experience, and they are unlikely to have the time nor ability to read the Mcgrews.
Much of McLatchies article seemed to change the subject—arguing that we have really good evidence for God. Be that as it may, that’s not an answer to hiddenness, any more than my long series of blog posts arguing for utilitarianism is evidence that there are no non resistant non utilitarians.