The Problem of Divine Hiddenness | When God Seems Silent

Part 1 of 7 — Theological Letters

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 prior citations 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 reference.

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Those familiar with my work will know that I have conducted extensive research on the “nones” — by which is meant, not Catholic or Orthodox nuns, but people with no religious affiliation. This terrible term emerges from religion surveys where “none of the above” appears as the last option — hence, nones. Back in 2015, there was a notable spike in religious dissociation in America, rising from roughly 5% to 15% seemingly overnight. Sociologists needed a term for this expanding demographic, so they settled on “nones,” though they clearly didn’t think through the confusion this would create in a spoken, as opposed to written, context. They were, after all, sociologists, not marketing specialists. So, here we are, stuck with the term.

I spent considerable time focusing on the religiously unaffiliated, creating a documentary called Becoming Truly Human, where I interviewed with this demographic. Since then, I’ve delivered multiple lectures and conference talks examining patterns of belief among the religiously unaffiliated. This work emerged from my academic study of the topic alongside my documentary work, all paired with my personal journey — myself having moved from an unaffiliated philosopher to an Eastern Orthodox Christian. So, I have quite a bit to say about the nones. We’ve devoted several episodes to this group on The Nathan Jacobs Podcasts, and you can find links¹ to those episodes below.

My focus here is not on the nones specifically, except to notice a frequent pattern that emerges when nones discuss their journey away from religion. When you ask, “Why did you move away from religion in the first place? What shook your belief or faith?” they often respond with semi-academic explanations. More often than not, they’ll name the problem of evil or the problem of pain as the thing that shook their faith. But if you listen carefully to their actual stories — the specific events in their lives that shook them — you discover that they are not, in fact, describing either of these problems. Rather, they are describing something closer to the problem of divine hiddenness.

I don’t say this as a criticism. Most nones are not trained philosophers. Why should they know the technical distinctions between the problem of pain, the problem of evil, and the problem of divine hiddenness? My point is simply this. When describing the experiences that shook their faith, the true nature of the spiritual crisis is one of divine hiddenness.

Allow me one example. One none in my documentary described how her parents were struggling in their marriage. She prayed, hoping God would repair their relationship, but her parents ended up divorcing. Her response was, There must be no God listening. What’s particularly interesting here is that her faith was not shaken by the fact that her parents were fighting — the presence of evil or suffering. Her crisis was that God didn’t intervene but remained silent.

The pattern is frequent. What many of the nones describe is not an evil event that sets them on their heels. Yes, that does happen — some catastrophic, devastating evil that makes them unable to believe that a Good being could observe those events without intervening. But more often, what’s being described is divine silence. When they turn to God in the midst of evil or crisis, and God seems absent, that palpable absence is what sets them back on their heels and shakes the foundations of their faith.

This is the problem I want to examine: the problem of divine hiddenness. If God is real, if He’s there, if He’s watching, if He’s so important to our lives, then why does He seem so absent?

The existential, “man on the street” version of the problem is exactly what I just described. I’m in some crisis; I cry out to God; and it seems like I’m shouting at the walls. Most people have some experience with this version of the problem. We’ll discuss the more academic formulation of the problem momentarily, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the problem is not an academic puzzle to be solved. Rather, most people have or will experience this type of crisis at some point in their lives. And when an existential problem is treated as a mere analytic puzzle, the results are typically unhelpful, leaving the questioner cold.

What often happens in analytic theology or philosophy is that an apologist will walk through a problem, showing why various presumptions or premises are problematic, and systematically dismantle it. They do this with the problem of evil frequently — Here are all the premises, and now we’ll dig in and show why those premises are problematic, why the conclusion doesn’t follow, or why certain presumptions are flawed. But this approach leaves the questioner who is honestly struggling with the reality of evil feeling no less befuddled than before. Why? Because the apologist is addressing something other than the real problem. Something has happened in the experience of the questioner that has left him in a palpable struggle, wondering where God is or how it’s possible that a good God could allow this particular series of events. There’s an existential component that is anything but a computational problem. A computational response, therefore, leaves the questioner cold because it fails to address the real issue. It’s like treating someone’s ear for a tinnitus ring when the cause is neurological.

The problem of divine hiddenness has the same character. Folks point out analytic problems with cases like the one leveled by philosopher J. L. Schellenberg — the main proponent of divine hiddenness in contemporary philosophy of religion. But numerating these analytic flaws often leaves a person thinking something like, I guess that addresses the problem technically, but I still don’t feel any better. Now, the highly rational child of Modernity might be inclined to reply, Well, that's just because you’re irrational. But I don't think that’s, in fact, the case. I think it’s because anthropologically, we are more than just minds. The issue is that what has prompted this problem is not a sheer problem of analysis but a legitimate problem of experience.

I think it’s crucial to acknowledge the existential side of these problems. This is where I’m sympathetic — very sympathetic — to the problem of divine hiddenness. I know from personal experience what it’s like to be in the thick of crisis, to cry out to God with tears, desperate for God to answer, and to feel like I’m shouting at the walls. I know what that’s like, and I think it’s important, when dealing with very real existential problems, that we’re honest about those very real human experiences.

Now, I do want to address the analytic side because I don’t think questions of reason and analysis are irrelevant. I simply don’t think they’re the whole story. So let’s start with a typical analytic approach: the formal presentation of hiddenness from Schellenberg, the types of analytic problems that can be shown with the argument, and why it seems to fall apart upon scrutiny. But then, I want to move into areas where I think these analytic responses are deficient, where something more is needed, and I’ll offer (over the course of these six installments) what I think that something more is.

The Formal Problem of Divine Hiddenness

The problem of divine hiddenness, as formally structured by someone like Schellenberg, runs basically as follows: If there is a God, then this God would be all-loving. If there is an all-loving God, then He would not permit such a thing as rational unbelief. There is rational unbelief; therefore there is no God.

The argument is formulated rather similarly to the problem of evil, where there is an attempt to demonstrate that if we grant the classical divine attributes of an optimal being — that He’s omnipotent and omnibenevolent — then evil shouldn’t exist. Evil exists; therefore God doesn’t exist. It’s a straightforward formulation.

However, there are a host of problematic presumptions within this argument. I’m not unique in pointing this out. Others who have dealt with this problem, like Paul Moser, have highlighted these as well. Let me point out several key presumptions.

First is the presumption that there is such a thing as rational unbelief — meaning, someone who has looked at the evidence, given an honest accounting of it, and come to the conclusion that there is no God.

The second presumption is that were there sufficient evidence, a person would believe. This is an anthropological assumption that we, as human beings, believe anything for which we see sufficient evidence.

This gets to a third presumption: the argument conflates belief and faith. When talking about this sort of thing, there’s a presumption that if I were presented with sufficient evidence, I would believe the evidence and therefore adjust my life accordingly.

In addition, the argument also presumes a host of theological premises. It presumes that belief is the basis for salvation and damnation, embodying a very Protestant picture of soteriology. It also presumes that there are folks who don’t believe and ultimately will be damned. And the list of theological presuppositions go on.

Now, all of this is noteworthy because these presuppositions are not necessarily obvious. Each one of them is vulnerable critique.

Approaching the Problem: Negative and Positive Responses

There are a couple of different ways to approach this problem. One is from the negative side: You can try to chip away at the various presuppositions and show that the argument’s presuppositions are problematic. Therefore, the formulation fails, and the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.

The second approach is to offer a positive accounting for hiddenness. This is where people offer some sort of instrumental value to God being hidden, arguing that there's a good reason why God is hidden. In other words, rather than divine hiddenness being unloving, it’s actually a loving, or good, or necessary thing for whatever reason.

Let’s consider both tactics, starting with the negative ones by digging into the presuppositions.

The Presumption of Rational Unbelief

Let’s begin with this notion that there is such a thing as rational unbelief. I find it very interesting how casually people will introduce as a premise, Well, you know you can’t prove the existence of God. I heard this constantly as a philosophy professor. Students would very casually assert the point, and I would simply reply, That's interesting. You said you can’t prove the existence of God. Can you tell me why you think the proofs fail? What would follow was a blank stare, the student being wholly unaware that there are proofs for the existence of God. So, I would follow up and ask, You are aware that there are proofs for the existence of God, yes? Formal, philosophical, analytic proofs that aim at demonstrating His existence? Usually, the answer was no; they were completely unaware of such proofs.

If you’re amongst those who are unaware, yes, there are proofs for the existence of God. Thomas Aquinas famously catalogs five in his Summa Theologiae. More exist, but Aquinas runs through some of the common proofs, which he advocates.

Here, you can find things like the cosmological argument — specifically, the Aristotelian version, which is an argument from motion or mutation. In this proof, we encounter Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”: Aristotle arguing that the flux of our world needs to rest upon a cause immune to such flux, and this First Cause is what men call God.

Aquinas also catalogues the Kalām cosmological argument, which is different from Aristotle’s, since it requires a start to the world — something Aristotle did not believe in. This argument contends that if the world had a beginning, then there needs to be a First Cause (chronologically speaking) to set things in motion.

You also find in Aquinas proofs from teleology — the idea that the order of nature includes purpose — as well arguments from the hierarchy of being. And Aquinas’ proofs are not exhaustive. There are other arguments, which he does not advocate, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God, which attempts to prove the existence of God from the very definition of the term. This proof emerges in Anselm — in two different formulations — and has been advocated by contemporary philosophers, such as Charles Hartshorne and Alvin Plantinga. In short, if you understand what God is — the optimal being — then you understand that He exists.

On top of all of this, there are other arguments that have emerged over the years for the existence of God. I think, for example, of various moral proofs for the existence of God, be it in Kant, Lewis, or others; of Plantinga’s case that belief in God is as epistemically justified as belief in other minds; the work of James Joiner, who has argued that the classical notion of a Highest Good should be counted as a proof; and I, too, have made the case from realism and properly functioning faculties — to name only a few.

So the first question the objector must answer is this: Have you, in fact, done a full accounting of the evidence? If you’re going to say there is such a thing as rational unbelief, then have you done an accounting of the evidence sufficient to conclude that the evidence fails? The question is crucial because the case presumes that one can look at the evidence and arrive at rational unbelief.

The Anthropological Presumption

One defense of rational unbelief that people pivot to when confronted with the vast array of proofs is the second major presumption of the argument: Well, if the proofs worked, then everybody would believe. In other words, the objector need not examine the proofs himself to see that they fail. The fact that so many do not believe in God is proof in itself that they must fail. For if they worked, every educated person would believe.

This line of reasoning carries a massive presupposition about anthropology, namely, that if sufficient evidence is presented to a reasonable person, then that person will concede the point being demonstrated. This rationalist anthropology presumes that humans are computational machines who make choices based solely on analysis.

The problem, of course, is that the premise is demonstrably false.

I’m sure we can think of any number of anecdotal experiences to the contrary, where a “reasonable person” is confronted with an evident truth and refuses to accept it. But setting aside anecdotes, let’s start by considering the underlying anthropology.

Ancient anthropology consistently recognizes that we are animal-spirit hybrids, and as such, we have more than pure intelligence. We have animal desires, or passions, and we all know what it’s like to have our minds tell us we should do something good, only to choose something else that feels more pleasurable. In retrospect, we might look back and denounce the choice as foolish, but the fact remains, we all know what it’s like to face a lapse in judgment. So the idea that reason always wins and that we’re computational machines is utterly contrary to our experience as rational animals.

The medievals, too, offer reasons to question this presupposition. Without going through the whole of medieval faculty psychology, suffice it to say that in the medieval era, there was an early dispute between the intellectualists and the voluntarists regarding how we engage in decision-making.

The basic assumption was that choice involves two different faculties: the faculty of will, which chooses, and the faculty of intellect, which judges between available choices. The intellectualists tended to think the will is just a blind follower of the intellect. Wherever the intellect lands in its assessment of the available options, the will simply follows. The voluntarists disagreed — partly because they believed this leads to psychological determinism and partly because they thought it was contrary to experience: We often arrive at certain judgments (like, I should work out) and don’t act on them. So the voluntarists thought the will has a more fluid, spontaneous character where it can push back on the intellect, redirect it, and engage in alternative paths of reasoning based on desires, passions, or whatever have you.

The point is this. Even within medieval faculty psychology, the observations of the voluntarists offer reason to question whether a sound analytic judgment suffices to move the will.

The Eastern Church fathers only add further reasons to think this presupposition is problematic. I have an entire episode² on mystery, exploring the relationship between reason and faith in the Eastern patristic tradition. For our purposes here, however, let it suffice that the Eastern fathers think we are more than just mind and will. They speak often about “the heart” — an aspect of Hebrew anthropology that seems to have fallen out of Western anthropology. And closely related, they speak about the nous — typically translated “mind” but which is evidently more than the intellect and will of the scholastics.

This more brings us to what Vladimir Lossky called the “deep ontology” of these fathers. They recognize that the creature carries within his breast, as it were, a great many things of which he is unaware. This is what modern psychology would later explore in its talk of the subconscious. The fact played a significant part in these fathers journeying into the desert. They understood that stripping away all distractions and coping mechanisms brings to the surface passions and inclinations that may surprise us — precisely because we do not fully know ourselves.

The fact that the human person consists of much more than just his voluntary thoughts is directly relevant to their understanding of the knowledge of God. I mentioned previously that nous is more than just intellect and will. This something more is what opens the person up to a knowledge of God that transcends analysis. Or more accurately, this something more makes possible a knowledge of God that is superior to mere analysis.

To see the point, let’s consider what Basil of Caesarea has to say about philosophy. Now, contrary to those who suggest that the Eastern fathers are critical of philosophy, Basil understands philosophy to yield a host of truths about the world. Unlike those who read St. Paul’s term for philosophy, “the wisdom of the world,” in a negative way, Basil reads it as precisely that: The philosophers offer wisdom about the world, having discerned (truly) that the world is not chaotic but rationally ordered by a divine Mind.

Basil’s criticism of philosophy is not that it leads to false conclusions. His criticism is that it offers only knowledge about God, not knowledge of God. Christian wisdom aims at the latter, which is a communion with God that is deeply intimate. And here, the fact that nous is more than mere intellect or will is critical. For this more is what makes possible intimacy of the kind the Christian strives for with God.

Perhaps an analogy might help. Let’s imagine a newly born infant that comes into the world and is immediately carried to his mother’s breast. This child, who drinks for her very body, does he know his mother? Plainly, the answer is Yes — more deeply and intimately than most anyone else in the world. But does the infant have any analytic concept of what it means to be her son? No, not yet. It has no understanding of the fact that he was gestated within her wound, birthed from her body, fed at her breast — no grasp on formal or relational properties that might frame the concept. Yet, it has a deeper and more intimate knowledge of his mother than the philosopher who might stand at a distance and offer an analytic framework.

This captures something of what I mean when I say that the Eastern Church fathers have a concept of nous that is more than intellect and will. The Eastern Church Fathers acknowledge the capacities of the intellect to discern true things about the world and even God. But how the human person is made to relate to God is something far beyond bare analysis — precisely because the human person consists of far more than bare analysis. What the Christian is called to — what is offered in the gospel — is something much more intimate. And this intimacy is possible because of the depth of the human person.

The reason I bring this up is to say the Eastern Church fathers have a much richer anthropology than that of a computational machine. Yes, we reason and make conscious choices, but there is a great deal to us that sits beneath the surface. Modern psychology is far from the first to conclude that there is more to our choices than just a series of judgments. And recognizing that the human person is much more complex than a bare intellect assessing data is supremely relevant to the presumption that if we had the evidence, we would believe the thing in question.

Often, unbelief is not a problem of knowledge. One can know what is true and sound and remain unmoved because there are deeper factors at play — be it the influence of the animal nature, motives driving our wilful resistance, or even factors of which we are unaware that color and steer our choices. All of this is to say, it is no small presupposition that unbelief indicates deficient evidence.

We can see the falsehood of the point in contemporary terms easily enough. We live in an era of disinformation and propaganda. I’m guessing we’ve all witnessed examples of people repeating an evident falsehood, being shown the counter evidence, and doubling down on the belief — precisely because it fits their priors. This, of course, is what we call confirmation bias. It’s pervasive in our culture.

The phenomenon tells you something else is at work. In addition to the sorts of anthropological considerations noted above, these cultural trends point to an important social factor. The fact is that man is a social animal. I’ve talked about in other places Peter Berger’s work on how our beliefs are formed largely through social conditioning. Because we are social animals, there’s a tendency to derive our beliefs from others. And because taking a minority position relative to the herd carries a sense of danger, our animal instincts push us to accept things that “everyone knows to be true.” The pressure is not strictly rational. It’s animal and instinctual. This is, in fact, Berger’s point — that we often mistake this animal impulse for a rational judgment, when in fact, it is not.

The point is this. The complexity of the human person — as a rational animal, a free animal, a social animal, and a divine image bearer — makes human choice far too complicated to sustain the premise that unbelief can only result from insufficient evidence.

So, the argument has several problems right out of the gate. For it requires that those who do not believe have given an adequate accounting of the available evidence and that the resulting unbelief is solely the product of a rational assessment. Yet, the former is highly questionable to those who believe the proofs do, in fact, work, and the latter is equally problematic to any who have given a full accounting to the complexity of human behavior.

What Would Sufficient Evidence Look Like?

Now, let’s consider the term sufficient evidence. A valuable exercise when looking at a problem like hiddenness is to ask, What should God have done? What would constitute sufficient evidence?

The reason this is important is because the objector is suggesting that we are presently in a certain state of affairs that is problematic, and if God exists, he should have done otherwise. Such a suggestion is also present in the problem of evil: If God exists, then he should have prevented evil from entering our world. Yet, upon scrutiny, we often discover that these sorts of suggestions are not so easily defended as we might think.

So, let us ask the same thing about divine hiddenness: What is the non-problematic state of affairs? What would it look like if the world was such that God gave sufficient evidence for belief?

Candidly, it’s not entirely clear what the answer to this question is. To answer, we would need to wade into the waters of theological meta-narrative, to consider how much evidence would suffice, and to ask what sort of evidence would constitute evidence sufficient to believe? We also run into questions like, Would this or that evidence override free will?

Such questions expose an important feature of the problem. Let’s grant for a minute the presumption that the evidence is insufficient, and for this reason, our present state of affairs is undesirable. What would the alternative, desirable state of affairs look like? To answer, we need to wade into waters of theology, worldview, and narrative. For as one begins to flesh out what God has failed to offer and what he ought to have offered, we must answer whether what we are proposing is in fact possible, given the nature of God and world. And as the objector lays bare his presumptions in these areas, we may well find that what he proposes ought to be is not, in fact, possible.

Now, I’m going to shelve for the moment the underlying theology because I want to return to that at the end. The reason is this. The majority of philosophers and apologists engaged in the present discussion are either Catholic or Protestant. The insights of the Eastern Church fathers are not typically represented in the dialogue. Yet, I think their contributions are significant, to say the least.

However, there is plenty that can be said about the argument from a strictly philosophical perspective without terribly specific theological commitments. In specific, I have in mind the case, made by some, that divine hiddenness may have a certain instrumental value in the formation of the human person.

To be continued…

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