The following piece is adapted from a podcast series on the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. While my typical written work includes extensive citations, I have not added references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which can be a bit more colloquial than my usual writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I’ll revise this piece to accommodate a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, I trust my body of work should suffice to instill confidence that the philosophical, theological, and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified by an investigation of the figures and sources referenced. If you have yet to read the first several pieces in this series, you may want to do so (links below). However, this particular post — and those to follow — wades into fresh waters, so one can likely dive in without looking back on the start to this series.
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Part 1: The Problem of Divine Hiddenness | When God Seems Silent
Part 4: Non-Resistant Unbelief
A basic distinction in logic is between whether an argument is valid and whether it is sound. Validity concerns the structure of an argument — whether the conclusion follows from the premises. If the answer is yes, this structural validity does not, in itself, suffice to tell us whether the conclusion is true. To see why, consider the following syllogism: (1) All cars are red; (2) this is a car; (3) therefore, this is red (from 1 & 2). The conclusion follows from the premises. But any reader can see the flaw in the argument: Its first premise is false — not all cars are, in fact, red. So, while the argument functions, it builds on a faulty premise. Such an argument is valid but not sound. A sound argument is a valid argument with true premises.
I raise this because it highlights how critical it is to not merely assess whether an argument is structurally valid but also whether its claims are true. As we will see, the problem of divine hiddenness carries a host of presumptions — many we have already discussed in the previous four posts — that are anything but obvious. In today’s post, I want to highlight these assumptions, which comprise the metanarrative of the objection, and ask whether this metanarrative is, in fact, true.
As we will see, the hiddenness objection not only contains a series of ambiguities and questionable presumptions, but also harbors a theological outlook derived largely from Latin Christianity — Protestant and Catholic. When scrutinized in the light of the Eastern Church fathers, many of these theological assumptions prove to be false, and the Eastern metanarrative that emerges in their stead offers a clear explanation for the present phenomenon of “hiddenness” that the objection presumes is inexplicable for the theist.
General Assumptions in the Hiddenness Objection
When delving into the Schellenberg-style objection from divine hiddenness, we see a number of obvious assumptions worth noting.
First, the objection seems to presume that the current state of affairs is normal and proper. Unlike the Christian narrative, where there is a Fall of both angels and men, and something has gone fundamentally wrong with creation as a result, the objection’s framework treats the world as we now see it — as it presently unfolds and in which we find ourselves — as the normal state of affairs.
Second, within this status quo, God is hidden, so the argument goes. As noted in a prior post, this premise requires, at the very least, that God and world are two distinct things: We have direct access to the one (world) but not the other (God). For a pantheist, this premise is problematic at best, since God and world are one and the same thing; hence, the pantheist could not concede the premise that we have no immediate access to God. Only if God and world are distinct substances, as the deist and theist claim, can this premise gain traction.
Third, because of this hiddenness, people arrive at unbelief that is both rational and void of resistance. The claim, of course, is not simply that such unbelief is possible but that it in fact occurs within our world — individuals finding themselves unable to believe, despite the pairing of rational investigation with spiritual openness.
Fourth, God could be less hidden, and to this we must append a crucial caveat: Less hidden without negative consequences. By “negative consequences,” I have in mind the sorts of things discussed in my second post, such as coercion. If God desires a loving relationship with his creatures, freely entered into, then his unveiling cannot be of a kind that might induce fear of a coercive sort.
This fourth claim carries a host of ambiguities about what it might look like for God to be less hidden or how much unveiling is required to satisfy the objector. Nonetheless, the objection presumes that there is a threshold that God could meet that would make belief relatively easy without negative consequences and within a short period of time.
The point about timing is critical to the objection. People like Alex O’Connor — a well-known YouTuber who has helped popularize the hiddenness objection — is a young man, only in his 20s. He often presents himself as the enfleshment of rational, non-resistant unbelief. In doing so, he presumes that his present spiritual and intellectual pursuits should be sufficient to result in belief if a loving God exists. The tacit assumption, of course, is that the evidence for and the pursuit of God should yield belief within a relatively short period of time, the matter being easily resolved one way or another by one’s early 20s. (Speaking from the perspective of one for whom his 20s is a distant memory, yes, this is a rather narrow time frame.)
Now, as noted in my first post, the argument presumes a broadly Christian understanding of God — and specifically a protestant conception of salvation. In this light, the claim must tacitly grant what philosophers, such as Paul Moser, point out is the type of relationship this God desires with his creature — one of faith and love, freely entered into.
Pairing this with the previous point, then the objection presumes that God could meet a threshold of unveiling that would make belief relatively easy within a short period of time and without resulting in coercion, thereby preserving one’s free choice whether to accept or reject God, leaving room for the exercise of both faith in and love for God for those who choose him.
Anthropological and Western Assumptions
The framework also contains a number of anthropological assumptions. In part one, we discussed a number of these presumptions.
The argument has a rather simplistic and naive take on the nature of human belief, presuming that our rationality means we are computational entities that assent to belief or unbelief based on an unclouded assessment of data. This, of course, ignores that we are social animals that derive many of our beliefs from what those around us “know to be true,” as Peter Berger discusses. Hence, we are influenced by culture, social pressures and trends, and by our herd instinct that finds descent from such trends to be dangerous.
The point intersects with the reality of the animal passions, an influence recognized throughout the ancient world, pagan and Christian alike. We are not mere minds but rational animals — beings with animal impulses that assail our rational nature, swaying us and influencing us in ways that cloud our reason.
Added to this are the observations by the medieval scholastics, who recognize that we are more than computational machines but reason paired with choice, and that choice does not always choose what is good or right. And when introducing the Eastern Church fathers into the mix, we discover a still deeper anthropology that speaks of the inner world of the heart and other (call them) subconscious realities that hold sway over us.
All of this has been previously discussed, but the point is this. Considering this confluence of factors, it becomes problematic to suggest that the only reason someone wouldn’t believe in God is due to a lack of evidence. We harbor many beliefs and unbeliefs that are far from evidence-based. The idea that “sufficient evidence” — whatever that might mean — would inevitably result in belief or, conversely, that unbelief constitutes proof of insufficient evidence is thus dubious.
The presumption is largely Western and particularly Modern. For it presumes that rational analysis is the primary and best path to religious belief or even God himself. The fact is evident in testimonies like O’Connor’s, where his narrative describes a cognitive journey — reading books, talking with and debating people, and earning a degree in theology. While he mentions praying, living with Christians, and listening to worship music, the overwhelming emphasis is on the rational pursuit.
Admittedly, I’m sympathetic to this Western impulse. Anyone familiar with my own journey knows that it was a journey through the history of ideas.1 But the approach is quite odd if you’ve observed how religion operates globally. Most people in the world do not approach religion through this head-first assessment. This is very much a product of us being children of the Enlightenment generally, and specifically the products of a largely Protestant culture, where the goal of the religious journey is belief, and the path to persuasion is apologetics about proofs for the existence of God and evidentialist cases for the reliability of the Bible or the historical Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Such a framework quite naturally gives the impression that analysis of this kind should be sufficient to reach belief in God of the kind that is significant to the human person, namely, belief that allows one to not only believe in God but attain salvation.
Now, I recognize that the Protestant wing of Latin Christianity would reject this premise, holding that the Holy Spirit must do a work in the heart of the person in order for him or her to believe unto salvation. But the fact remains that one can plainly see why the apologetic enterprise would leave one with the impression that the aim of these evidences and proofs is to produce belief and, with it, salvation.
Clockwork Universe Assumptions
Within the hiddenness objection, I also see tacit assumptions reflective of what I would call a clockwork universe mentality.
The first facet of this has already been touched on: Matter is one thing; God is another — the universe being its own substantive reality entirely distinct from God. Wherever and whatever God is, presuming he exists, he is hidden because all that we observe and engage with on a daily basis is not God.
I suspect this presumption carries a second, which is that our world is a closed system: God and matter are not just distinct, but they are insulated one from another — God is not in matter but outside of it.
To be clear, you need not believe that matter is God to suggest God might be in matter. You could distinguish substantively between God and matter while suggesting matter serves a vehicle or conduit for God. But the notion that the entire observable world is absent of God — that God is hidden from us — tacitly admits a rejection of not just pantheism (all is God) but also of panentheism (all is in God) and even the lesser known view of the Eastern Church fathers that the divine energies uphold and pervade the created world.
Finally, and likely by extension of such unstated assumptions about the world, it seems to presume that if God were to show up, he should appear not as one of the objects in the room, as it were — these being natural things, not supernatural — but as a new object in the room, something between the things that otherwise are.
We can see this in the way that advocates of hiddenness speak about how God might reveal himself. When New Atheists speak about the prospect of divine manifestations, they speak of God appearing as a dancing light or a booming voice in the sky. Such conceptions presume that if God were to manifest, then he must manifest as a new object in addition to the things around us; he cannot manifest in and through the things around us — God and world being mutually exclusive of one another.
Bringing these points together with the previous ones, we see a compounding metanarrative:
The current state of affairs is the normal (not just common) human experience. Within this normal state of affairs, God is hidden. This hiddenness is of such a kind that it enables rational and non-resistant unbelief in God. God could choose to be less hidden in ways that would induce belief with little effort, quickly, and non-coercively, producing the type of relationship that the Christian theist claims is of utmost significance to the human person, namely, one that is predicated on free will, faith, and love. The primary road to belief of the kind that the theist claims is of significance should be primarily sought through intellectual investigation — though perhaps peppered with prayer and worship music. And we live in a clockwork universe where God and matter are both distinct and separate, God and matter being mutually exclusive of one another; hence, if God manifests, he must manifest as something new and distinct from the present objects of our experience.
For my part, I would contest most of the premises within this metanarrative, starting with what most would consider the least contestable, namely, that God is hidden.
What Sort of Evidence is Sufficient?
The premise that God is hidden or has insufficiently revealed himself highlights a crucial ambiguity in the objection, already touched on: What exactly is the self-revelation or unveiling that God ought to engage in?
As explained in the prior post, the objection is a moral one: If a God of the kind preached by the Christians exists, then he has a duty to reveal himself, and the present state of affairs fails to meet this duty. Setting aside the question of where this duty comes from or how the objector is aware of it, the charge is simple: God ought to make himself more evident. What precisely is the state of affairs the objector is demanding? What would it mean for God to make himself less hidden or to reveal himself more? And more specifically, what is the mode of unveiling that successfully meets the objection while still demanding free ascent, faith, and love?
The objector rarely makes clear precisely what this alternative state of affairs might look like. So, it is worth digging in on some questions to fill in this rather notable and important gap.
Let’s begin with a simple question: Should God’s manifestation or unveiling or revelation be direct or indirect? In order to satisfy the objector, must God unveil himself directly to me or to you or to the objector? Or would it suffice for him to reveal himself indirectly?
I ask because, granting the biblical testimony, God has revealed himself on numerous occasions in remarkably unsubtle ways.
Now, you might reply, I don’t believe the Bible. That may be the case, but notice that, as pointed out in my first post, the argument does. In other words, the problem of divine hiddenness is based on a hypothetical: If the God of Christianity is real and as significant to the human person as Christianity claims, then he ought to be less hidden. Given this construction of the argument, any response is perfectly justified in presuming the very same hypothetical, namely, if Christianity is true.
In this light, let’s grant, for argument’s sake, that everything in the Bible is true and happened as fantastically as described. In that case, God has offered a booming voice along with a host of other fantastical phenomena far beyond what any of the New Atheists have requested: God has manifest as one like the Son of Man within a flaming bush; he has worked miracles like parting the Red Sea; he has descended in smoke and fire upon Sinai, shaking the earth with his voice; he has sent his Son to be incarnate, speaking to all, healing the sick, raising the dead, and conquering death by his own Resurrection.
For the argument to hold water, we must say this is not good enough. Presumably, the inadequacy would reside in the fact that it’s indirect: God revealed himself to them, not to me, and I simply do not believe their testimony.
Such a posture, however, leads me to question whether this belief is, in fact, “non-resistant,” as it claims. I suspect that it indicates a disposition toward unbelief that favors atheistic explanations over theistic ones.
Let’s say, for example, that God revealed himself rather fantastically to a body of people who are neither you nor I. Imagine that God declared in Calcutta in a booming voice, “I am God, and Jesus Christ is my Son; believe in him” — as he reportedly did at Christ’s baptism. Would the objector believe the report? Or would he raise an eyebrow and presume the story to be propaganda or the eye witnesses to be plagued by uneducated superstitions or to think the cell phone footage to be a hoax or to wonder if what he is seeing is AI?
My suspicion is that a great many advocates of divine hiddenness would react with this very type of skepticism. And I suspect the reason is because of something William James observes in his lecture, The Will to Believe. We often harbor certain leanings about the nature of the world, such that a proposition strikes us as a live or dead option. Many mistake this striking as a rational assessment, but as James points out, it is not; it is pre-rational, saying more about our inner disposition than about the reasonableness of the claim. And I suspect something like this is at work in many who would never accept the testimony of others to divine revelation: They believe God does not exist and would thus accept any explanation over the theistic one.
Now, whether the reality of such a disposition means that God has a duty to reveal himself directly to each one of us, I’m unsure — though I admit it seems unreasonable on the face of it. But let’s entertain, for a moment, that “sufficient evidence” must involve direct experience. God cannot reveal himself to someone else and expect me to accept this secondhand testimony.
Entertaining this premise, a new question emerges: To meet this demand, must the evidence be direct and personal, or would direct and universal revelation suffice?
I ask because, as already discussed, there are a number of evidences for God that are rooted in our direct experience. I would point, for example, to our innate grasp of the divine structures of reality, to phenomenon of conscience, to our intuitions concerning justice, or to even the sense of the numinous — all points discussed in my third post, which I will revisit below.
But rather than begin with these, let’s grant the legitimacy of the proofs for the existence of God (which I do, as discussed in my third post), and which O’Connor himself admits are persuasive. If any of these proofs work, then every rational being does, in fact, have direct access to the evidence for God’s existence.
For our purposes, let’s suppose that I’m correct and some of the proofs for the existence of God are sound. Take, for example, the ontological argument, which claims that if you know what God is, then you know that God exists — just as you know a square has four sides.
To simplify the case, consider two beings: Being A has all the classical divine attributes — omniscience, omnipotence, etc. — but exists contingently, which is to say that Being A, like you and me, could exist but need not exist. Being B, by contrast, has the same divine attributes but necessarily exists: To exist is part of its very nature. Which is the greater being? Obviously, Being B is the superior being, and therefore, Being B, not A, is the one worthy of the name God. Therefore, God necessarily exists. For anything less is unworthy of him.
This argument, like other proofs — such as the argument from contingency or the teleological argument — draws on basic logic and features of reality that are accessible to all of us. If we grant that any of the proofs work, then you and I and every other rational being have direct and universal access to the proof that God exists. And if my claim that our very faculties, conscience, and the like also point in this direction (a point I will revisit below), then the evidence for God is directly accessible to each one of us. It simply isn’t customized.
Now, if the objector insists that this is still inadequate, then we arrive at a demand for something more: God must reveal himself directly and personally to me in order for his self-revelation to be sufficient. In a word, I demand a private miracle.
Private Miracles and Unbelief
The demand for a private miracle raises several problems. The most obvious is that, once articulated, it seems rather self-important that God owes me a private miracle to prove His existence. Ironically, objectors from the New Atheist camp often criticize the Christian for having too high a view of humanity, thinking this speck of dust in the vast cosmos more important than he ought. Yet, somehow these same objectors entertain that God might owe each one his own private miracle.
Putting aside its ironic self-importance, however, there is a logical problem. As Leibniz points out in his dealings with Malebranche, once you make miracles a law — that is, making it a requisite regular occurrence — you no longer have a miracle. For this reason, I’m unsure that the one who says that God owes each of us a private miracle has said anything meaningful at all. For in the saying, he has turned a miracle into a law.
But suppose we overcome this hurdle and grant that God is morally obligated to reveal himself directly and personally through a private miracle, and this isn’t too high a demand nor too self-important. Another problem emerges, namely, the self-flattery that each one might believe.
I do not claim to know anyone’s heart other than my own — and even that one I know rather poorly, as Basil of Caesarea would remind me. So, far be it from me to claim to know the heart of Alex O’Connor or any others who level this objection. But I think it safe to say that many who presume they would react well if God revealed himself do themselves too much flattery. As Immanuel Kant once observed, “A man is never so easily deceived as when it comes to having a high opinion of himself.”
When someone like O’Connor says he would gladly believe, and he wouldn’t require a booming voice from the sky, just a light dancing before his eyes, and he would live on that thrill for the rest of his days, satisfied that God exists, I believe that he means what he says. But I think a more sober assessment comes from Richard Dawkins.
In a recent interview, Dawkins was asked what evidence would make him believe in God. He gave an admirably honest answer: He used to say it would require a booming voice from the sky, declaring his existence. But he now admits that he wouldn’t believe even in this case because he’d consider it more likely to be a hallucination or magic trick. Without any evidence whatsoever, he would deem a hallucination or a trick more likely than the conclusion that God exists.
The admission goes to the very point noted early in reference to James. Dawkins does not harbor non-resistant unbelief but endemic skepticism. He sees the world through such a dogmatically materialist lens that even a divine appearance of the most extraordinary kind he would promptly dismiss and explain away. Why? Because he has an innate disposition to believe the world is a Godless place. Hence, the proposition that anything originates from God, even something as fantastical as a booming voice from the sky, is a dead option for him. Now, as James rightly observes, Dawkins mistakes this disposition is rational, but the fact that it springs forth prior to any consideration of evidence, favoring an atheistic explanation over a theistic one, shows that it is pre-rational, guiding his analysis rather than following from it.
To be fair, I do not think Dawkins is alone in this leaning. Speaking for myself, I’ve traveled to places throughout the world that house wonder-working relics; I’ve seen exceedingly strange things firsthand, and yet, despite my will to believe and my rational conviction that these things are true, I see something else in my heart: A deeply ingrained skepticism of the supernatural, inherited from the Western Enlightenment. This cancer is something I must proactively put in check, lest it grow within me, overtaking both my reason and will. But that the influence of my Western roots has planted so poisonous a seed within me I cannot deny.
For this very reason, I can see how easy it would be to embrace Dawkins’ disposition. And I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see how easily we could walk the same road, fostering skepticism and allowing it to grow to a point that no amount of evidence could dislodge this stone from the heart.
Because I believe there is ample and sufficient evidence to support belief in God generally and in Christianity specifically, I suspect that one who is dissatisfied with the body of evidence and demands a private miracle has, in fact, nurtured the type of endemic skepticism that Dawkins harbors, one that cannot but view all things — including evidence — through the lens of a Godless “scientism” that would accept any explanation over the explanation that God exists.
But notice what was said above about nurturing or putting in check such a disposition. Neither belief nor skepticism is fully independent of choice. Rather, like so many things about our person, this disposition is shaped by our free self-determination. Much like any pre-volitional inclination, we bear some responsibility for what we do with this impulse: Whether we allow it to overcome our reason and direct our choices or whether we stay its pull, allow reason to have its say, and then choose accordingly. My suspicion is that a great many fail to see this fact, treating belief as a feeling that is outside of their control and which should stir involuntarily in response to evidence; if the feeling of belief is absent at the close of the argument, then they must not believe, and the evidence must be inadequate.
For this reason, I strongly question whether miracles are, in fact, the most effective way to overcome unbelief. Common enough is the skeptical demand that God show himself, and the nature of such a showing, when pressed, typically amounts to a miracle. The tacit presumption is that a dazzling event should suffice to stir this feeling of belief. But for one who has nurtured the disposition to accept any explanation other than God, I greatly doubt that a miracle could bear such fruit.
If we grant the biblical testimony, miracles tend to do less to change the person and more to reveal what is already within the heart — much like Dawkins’ own self-assessment. Consider, for example, the story of Moses and Pharaoh. The Eastern Church fathers observe something rather notable about the tale, namely, that God deals with Moses and Pharaoh identically: He shows up, declares who he is, proves it by miracle, and then makes a demand. Moses flourishes into a Saint. Pharaoh, by contrast, hardens with great resistance.
The contrast suggests something synergistic. Rather than a miracle happening and belief following, the biblical testimony suggests that our subjective condition plays a part in how we receive such things. You see the same throughout the Gospel narratives: Jesus works a great many miracles publicly, but the reactions vary considerably. The religious leaders of his day, convinced that he is not from God (seemingly from pride and self-interest), would rather say he works miracles by the Devil than admit he is the Messiah. And no amount of miracles ever changes their hearts. To the contrary, the more the miracles, the greater the resistance — just as in the case of Pharaoh.
Yes, some approach Christ and give up everything to follow Him. Others appear to want nothing more than a personal benefit from him. And as noted, others are so blinded with corruption that they wish to destroy him. The point is this. The miracle doesn’t determine the response. Rather, the consistent testimony of Scripture is that the miracle only exposes what is already in the heart. As Simeon prophesies to Mary about her Son: He is ordained for the unveiling of the secret thoughts of the hearts of many.
So, for my part, I’m skeptical that miracles of any kind would move the needle for the one already skeptical of the evidence God has supplied. I expect the more likely result is that these would simply expose the skepticism that is already present, not change it.
God Is Not Actually Hidden
I’ve partially contested the premise that God is hidden by arguing that if you believe the biblical account, God has unveiled himself through prophets, apostles, theophanies, miracles, written records, his incarnate Son walking among us, demonstrating this through miracles and Resurrection.
In addition, we have the testimony of history herself to the Truth of Christ. As Tom Holland has argued — and as Athanasius argued long before him — the post-Incarnation world differs dramatically from the pre-Incarnation world, and these changes testify to the Truth of the Christian gospel.
As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I would add to this that we have testimony upon testimony that this works through the stories of saints — not just claims that faith will change lives, but an unbroken chain of stories of people who repented, believed, renounced the world, pursued God, and became wonder workers and clairvoyants manifesting the promised fruit of faith in Christ. In short, their deification through Christ is its own demonstration that he truly is the Son of God who came to heal humanity and return us to God.
But I’d go further: I do not think he’s hidden, and I don’t think we each need a personal miracle because I think we have direct access to God right now. I’ll name several areas where I believe this is the case.
Rational Faculties as Divine Perception
At the risk of redundancy, allow me to revisit several arguments discussed in my post, “Proving God.” Those who follow my work know that I am a full-throated advoce of realism. Realism begins with the observation that all rational beings think in general nouns — genera, species, and common properties. The question of realism is whether we think this way because these structures are part of the reality in which we find ourselves or whether this are useful fictions the mind invents to order a world that is not in fact orderly. The one who says these structures are real is aptly named a realist.
As argued in the aforementioned post, one cannot help but think and speak and reason as a realist: The very nature of perception is an act of mind organizing the things perceived according to genera, species, and common properties. Reasoning and logical inference is based on the grouping of things and moving from commonalities or differences to conclusions. So one can only argue against realism by employing realist tools. To even articulate a rejection of realism, one must speak as a realist. If I want to say that all of reality is nothing but mindless matter in motion, I need to employ concepts like reality, matter, motion, and the negation of mind.
For such reasons, I believe realism is inescapable — being required by math, science, logic, and basic communication. This, I think, is why the mind simply cannot shed its realist skin, as Étienne Gilson has rightly observed.
In my third post, I explained why realism natural leads to the conclusion that the world arises from something like a Mind. But here, I would make a more basic point. The structures of reality that the mind abstracts with its every perception is the rational structure of our world. What this means is that our mind naturally perceives the order from the divine Mind. In other words, we need not reason back to a big bang or wonder about whether the sort of fine tuning required to bring about life is possible without intentionality. The simple fact is that our world is organized according to patterns of Mind, and we perceive those patterns in every act of perception. In every glance, every observation, every perception, we participate in something of God.
Conscience as Direct Access to God
Even when people claim morality is subjective, as C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, we have moral intuitions about the world that tend to bubble to the surface. People naturally and innately discuss fairness and right and wrong. Children emerge knowing the conditions of moral culpability.
Our species is intuitively aware of a moral order to the universe, which is precisely why we do not fight like animals but rather quarrel, appealing to moral rules that we presume the other is aware of and knows he should follow. And in the face of such appeals, the other does not raise a skeptical eyebrow at such rules; rather, he defends himself, trying to justify his actions in the light of such rules.
Even when people try to dismiss this as a social construct, advocating for each his own or whatever floats your boat, this moral order reintroduces itself. The would-be moral relativist ceases to be a relativist the moment someone mistreats him, since he will immediately complain about unfairness or injustice. These are not statements that he finds a thing unpleasant; these are moral judgments, suggesting that right and wrong are part of the very fabric of reality.
This awareness of the moral order is immediate and unshakable. Like realism, even when we try to shed it, we revert to it.
Speaking as a Christian, I believe the very reason that you, as a rational being, are conscious of the moral order while a dog is not is because you are an icon of God. You have direct access to this feature of the natural order, just as you have direct access to the structure of nature identified by the realist. Like the act of perception generally, you are tapping into God’s Mind through the operations of conscience.
John Chrysostom goes so far as to suggest the Holy Spirit operates through conscience. Our moral intuitions are not mere detectors of some facet of reality but a direct relational connection with God. You are not merely perceiving something divine in these moral intuitions. You are sensing the working of God upon you.
Cosmic Justice and the Universal “Why?”
Similarly, there’s what I observe as the expectation of cosmic fairness. We all know what it’s like to say “Why?” when tragedy occurs. We might say “Why, God?” if we’re theists, but even those claiming atheism cry out “Why?” This reflexive tendency appears universally in human experience.
What’s interesting about this “Why?” is that it’s really asking about cosmic fairness or justice. What’s revealed is that every human heart contains awareness that our cosmos is supposed to be just. We’re aware there should be an order of nature, and that moral order perceived through conscience should yield a just and fair cosmos. When we encounter injustice, we reflexively ask why.
This is particularly interesting because our world obviously isn’t presently just or fair. Nobody would argue that our cosmos rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked in the here and now. This is why you have moral arguments for God’s existence from people like Immanuel Kant, and assumptions within Judeo-Christianity about final judgment where people are ultimately called to account.
Our intuitive awareness that the righteous should be rewarded and the wicked punished, that the world should be fair, that justice is the cosmos’s underlying mandate, is so strong that grave evils indicating cosmic unfairness disrupt our thinking and capacities. This testifies to an underlying intuition that, like conscience, exists because we’re icons of God. We perceive that the world ought to be just, and this perception is direct access to something divine—the moral order of the universe.
The Numinous and Universal Paranormal Experience
I also see this in the case from the numinous. C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, offers a genealogy of religion mentioning Pascal’s quote about the weakness of proofs for God’s existence. Lewis never critiques the proofs as fallacious—he points out they have little to do with how people first became religious.
This addresses the disconnect between the rational side wanting to be persuaded by arguments from contingency but left cold because you’re not just a mind. The movement toward religion throughout human history is rarely through analysis—that’s the outlier, not the norm.
Lewis points out that the first stage of religiosity is the sense of the numinous, referencing Rudolf Otto’s response to Kant. Otto complained that Kant left out an important feature of human experience: the idea of the holy. Otto discussed the numinous as this sense of dread or awe you encounter with the uncanny—the paranormal.
As Lewis explains, if someone told you there was a tiger in the other room, you might experience fear. But if someone told you there was a ghost in the other room and you believed it, you’d experience something we might call fear but of a very different kind. Nobody is primarily afraid of a ghost because of what it will do to them, but by the simple fact that it is a ghost—it’s uncanny.
This experience of the paranormal, of encountering something on the other side of the veil, touches the fringes of the numinous. Otto suggested that human experience universally includes this paranormal encounter, and additionally there’s the idea of the holy—encountering the sublime spirit, the Supreme Spirit, with this sense of shrinking before the holy.
When I taught World Religions, I’d start by asking where students thought religion came from. I’d get typical new atheist responses about ancient people being ignorant about lightning and positing a man on a mountain throwing bolts. After letting this run its course, I’d ask, “Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?” The room would go quiet, then after awkward silence, someone would say, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but...” and share a ghost story. Then another, and another, until 75-90% of the class had shared paranormal stories.
Paranormal encounters are ubiquitous, even if we rationalize them afterward. I like to say 100% of people believe in ghosts, even hard-bitten atheists, because if you stick them in an abandoned asylum at night and lock them in, they’ll experience fear—not because they think a hobo lives there.
This raises the question: Is this universal human faculty malfunctioning, or is it revelation? Lewis creates a fork in the road—it’s either universal malfunction or revelation. The reason we have this instinct, this sixth sense, is because there is stuff on the other side and we can sense it.
As a soft foundationalist advocating properly functioning faculties, I’m hesitant to resort to malfunctioning faculties. Once you say certain universal aspects of human reason are malfunctions, you cast suspicion on the whole reliability of human rationality and our ability to discern true things about the world. This is a dangerous premise, so I tend to resist it.
Instead, my tendency is to say that if you have something like this—a universal human experience—it’s probably an indication of revelation, not malfunction. I actually think the sense of the paranormal, the sense that our world is haunted, is direct sense experience. Not sense experience of your five senses, but sense experience of the fact that there is stuff on the other side of the veil. And for those fortunate enough to encounter the holy and know what it’s like to have that sense of shrinking in the presence of the Divine Spirit, this too represents direct access to God.
God Is Not Hidden
So I contest the fundamental premise that God is hidden. Through conscience, we have direct access to the moral order grounded in God’s mind. Through our universal expectation of cosmic justice, we perceive the divine mandate that reality should be ordered toward fairness. Through the numinous—our universal experience of the paranormal and, for some, the holy—we have direct sense experience of realities beyond the veil, including the Divine Spirit Himself.
Add to this the indirect testimony of biblical history, the unbroken chain of saints’ testimonies, the transformation of the world through Christianity, and the available rational proofs for God’s existence, and the picture that emerges is not one of divine hiddenness but of divine self-revelation through multiple channels.
The problem of divine hiddenness, when examined closely, reveals more about our modern Western assumptions—our clockwork universe metaphysics, our computational anthropology, our Enlightenment skepticism—than it does about any genuine absence of God. The question is not whether God has made Himself known, but whether we have eyes to see and ears to hear what has been made available to us through conscience, through our moral intuitions, through our sense of the numinous, and through the rich testimony of those who have found God precisely where He promised to be found: in the pursuit of righteousness, in the cry of the heart for justice, and in the awesome recognition that we are not alone in a material cosmos but surrounded by, and made in the image of, the Divine.
For a full account of my journey from wild-eyed heretical philosopher to an Eastern Orthodox Christian philosopher, see my essay, “My Journey to Orthodoxy (1 of 2)” and “My Journey to Orthodoxy (2 of 2).” You can also listen to this piece here: “My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy.”