Response to Egnor on Divine Hiddenness
Egor has lots of bad arguments on his blog that I thought would be wroth getting into
Michael Egnor has done me the immense favor of putting many of his very poor arguments on his blog for all to critique. This is the first part of, probably a very long series, that will critique his articles.
Egnor thinks the divine hiddenness argument is nonsense.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) believed that struggle with Divine Hiddenness — the authentic struggle of a believer with God — is in fact the deepest kind of faith. He wrote
… For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but he who struggled with God became greatest of all… Faith is the highest passion in a person. There perhaps are many in every generation who do not come to faith, but no one goes further. Whether there are also many in our day who do not find it, I do not decide. I dare to refer only to myself, without concealing that he has a long way to go, without therefore wishing to deceive himself of what is great by making a trifle of it, a childhood disease one may wish to get over as soon as possible. But life has tasks enough also for the person who does not come to faith, and if he loves these honestly, his life will not be wasted, even if it is never comparable to the lives of those who perceived and grasped the highest. But the person who has come to faith (whether he is extraordinarily gifted or plain and simple does not matter) does not come to a standstill in faith. Indeed, he would be indignant if anyone said to him, just as the lover resents it if someone said that he came to a standstill in love; for, he would answer, I am by no means standing still. I have my whole life in it. Yet he does not go further, does not go on to something else, for when he finds this, then he has another explanation. – Fear and Trembling, 1843
Divine hiddenness is a struggle for all of us — theists and atheists alike — but this struggle is by no means evidence that God doesn’t exist. It is, rather, evidence of the immeasurable gulf between creature and Creator. A God with whom we do not struggle — a God who is not in some substantial and painful way hidden to us — is not God but is a mere figment of our imagination. God in Himself is immeasurably greater than we are, and He transcends all human knowledge. This is the basis for God’s Hiddenness to those who honestly seek Him, but it is not evidence for His nonexistence. We can know Him only indirectly and partially – by knowing what He is not, by knowing Him from his effects in the world, and by knowing Him by analogy. I discuss these ways of knowing Him in nature in more depth here.
What is meant by faith here. If it means
A) Believing things on insufficient evidence
then Egnor would deny that we have faith in this sense. It’s also unclear why this would be good. However, if he means
B) Trusting in god because we have independent evidence for his existence which should overcome all of our minor uncertainties about his reasons for certain things, this is totally compatible with divine hiddenness. After all, many people claim to have direct acquaintance with god, an intuition that he exists so strongly that no argument can convince them that he doesn’t exist. Why not give that intuition to all of us, but not explain evil, for example, still giving us the opportunity to exercise faith?
Yet there are lots of other problems with this account. For one, if having faith is the highest good, then will god remain hidden in heaven so we can have faith that he exists? That seems implausible and doesn’t cohere with theology. Additionally, it’s not clear why faith is the highest good. Egnor ignores (or should I say Egnores) all of the philosophy of well-being, favoring a bizarre unfounded axiology that holds that the particular features of the world are unmitigated goods, with no independent justification for holding that.
Egnor claims that hiddenness is not evidence for atheism, demonstrating either bizarre assumptions or not understanding what evidence means. A is evidence for B if the probability of A given B is greater than the probability of A given not B. If atheism is true, the odds of divine hiddenness are 100%. If theism is true, the odds are less than 100%. Thus, hiddenness is evidence for atheism. This is obvious.
Atheists, as is their wont, misunderstand Divine Hiddenness and turn it into a nonsensical argument against God’s existence.
The Divine Hiddenness argument is nonsensical because divine hiddenness is inherent in the nature of the Creator and the creature, as noted above. Furthermore, the atheist Divine Hiddenness argument seems to imply a bizarre inference: if the disbelief of even one person in the world disproves the existence of God, then it stands to reason that the belief in God by that person — that one holdout — would prove His existence. The atheist Divine Hiddenness argument seems to imply that God’s existence is contingent upon the disbelief of even one recalcitrant atheist. This argument is a precis of atheist arrogance — the atheist argument that God’s existence depends upon atheists’ opinion of Him. Atheists can’t wish Him away that easily.
When I first read this I quite literally fell out of my chair given how laughable it was (I’m using literally literally here).
Egnor is so totally wrong here. The claim made by proponents of hiddenness is that God would likely reveal himself if he existed. Thus, the fact he hasn’t is evidence that he doesn’t exist. It’s not claimed that it proves with certainty that he doesn’t exist, just that it’s evidence.
Egnor says that belief in god by people would prove his existence. No, because the odds on atheism of there being theists is pretty high. However, it is clearly evidence for theism. It’s more rational to believe in a religion that others believe in than one that none believe, because the probability of people believing in a religion if its true are greater than if it’s false. So of course it’s evidence, it’s just not a proof.
However, the evidence is incomparable here. If god existed he’d probably reveal himself to prevent us from all burning forever and to give us the highest goods that come from a relationship with him. He’d comfort the victims of the holocaust as they were being escorted to the gas chambers. Yet instead, he watches silently, not revealing himself. Why? Egnor says basically that this is just what he does. This is not an explanation.
On the other hand, the absence of god is not a being that can reveal itself. Thus, the fact that the non existence of god doesn’t rise up and declare its existence to the world is not evidence for anything. They’re just totally incomparable claims.
Hiddenness of God can be a consequence of our free will — a consequence of our blindness rather than His reticence. We can choose not to know Him. Sometimes this choice of ours is fully deliberate and explicit. Sometimes this choice of ours is less deliberate but implicit — we don’t want Him to exist (usually because we don’t want to be accountable to him) and we blind ourselves to His existence. But it is a cornerstone of Christian theology that all who honestly seek God find Him — the door is opened to all who knock. That has certainly been my experience.
But then Christianity is false. There are lots of non resistant non believers. How would Egnor explain religious Jews who follow a broadly Christian life style (in that they don’t commit sins that Jesus wouldn’t approve of) who are Jews based on the evidence for Judaism over Christianity. To the extent that your theory has to posit that billions of people are Jesus hating jerks, coincidentally much more in areas that haven’t been as exposed to Christianity, that is a defect of your theory. Why, on his account, does belief in Jesus differ based on time and geography?
This atheist misunderstanding of Divine Hiddenness certainly applies to His Hiddenness in personal experience (such as prayer) and in reading Scripture. But what about Divine Hiddenness in nature? Dillahunty and other atheists insist that God remains hidden in our everyday experience of the natural world. So, what exactly does it mean to “know” God in nature?
Perception vs. conception
By perception we know physical things in our environment — we see trees and cars and people. Perception is the way we know material things.
By conception we know the intelligible forms of things — we can understand logic and structure and other abstract concepts. Conception is a way that we understand the abstract characteristics of physical things and it is the way that we know immaterial things like God that have no physical instantiation.
God is not a physical thing in nature. God is Spirit. Therefore, we are unable to know anything about Him by perception alone. Our perceptual organs are not sensitive to immaterial (i.e., spiritual) things. Our perceptual organs by themselves are unsuited to knowledge of God.
God is immaterial and can only be known by the intellect — by our reason, not by our senses. Our perceptual organs can be of help by providing us with perceptions from which we can extract information that leads us to God, and both knowledge of God and action by God in our souls can alter our perceptual and emotional state. But by perception alone, by our nature we are blind to God.
We can know Him by using our intellect and love Him by using our will. So, if God exists, and He wishes to reveal Himself to us, one way He does so is by using our perceptions to provide information about Him to our intellect and thereby to move our will to love Him.
But what about people who use their intellect and conclude that he doesn’t exist. Additionally, what about Pakistani farmers who haven’t the time to read Feser books? The claim that all smart people who search have concluded that god exists is just absurd—study of philosophy of religion makes people less religious. I know that I’ve searched for whether god exists, and have concluded he definitely does not.
How God reveals himself to us
As I noted, God can show himself to us in several ways: by revelation (in Scripture and in personal experience) and by nature itself.
Does He do this? We will set aside Scriptural revelation and personal experience (given that atheists like Dillahunty discount these anyway) and consider the ways in which God shows Himself in nature (i.e., the ten ways that God’s existence can be known that I listed during my debate with Dillahunty. Here are three excellent references for the details of these various arguments: Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, (Edward Feser), Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Edward Feser), and Letters to an Atheist (Peter Kreeft).
Revelation is question begging absent a reason to trust revelation. There is also wildly inconsistent revelation from different religions. Not everyone has a personal experience with god, and certainly most don’t with the Christian god. The scholarly work he discusses doesn’t answer hiddenness because most people will never read Feser or Kreeft. The notion that a Pakistani farmer should have their life be made much worse because they can’t read Feser is just absurd.
The rest of Egnor’s article is just presenting arguments for god, ones that aren’t great, but it would take a long time to respond to all of them. How many successful arguments there are is not evidence against non resistant non belief. There’s overwhelming evidence for evolution, but there are non resistant non believers in evolution.
Despite the snark, Egnor utterly and catastrophically failed to answer divine hiddenness. This seems to be a common trend in answering hiddenness.