Abstract
AbstractJ. L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument is one of the key contemporary justifications for atheism and has prompted numerous responses from those defending the plausibility of belief in God. I will outline a recent counterargument from Michael C. Rea, who claims that relationships with God are far more widely available than Schellenberg assumes. However, I will suggest that it invites a response from proponents of the hiddenness argument because it leaves some nonbelievers unaccounted for. I will rectify this by suggesting that a model of panentheism in which God is embodied in the cosmos allows all, including all nonbelievers, to have a relationship with God. I will then claim that semantic externalism and externalism about beliefs can enable nonbelievers to get to know this God. I will then challenge the hiddenness argument by suggesting that these relationships can accommodate the key motivations behind Schellenberg's insistence on personal relationships without requiring subjects to recognize that they are in a relationship with God.
Highlights
Due to the emotional impact subjects can have on God through their interactions with the world, one gets a much greater degree of immanence in this form of panentheism than in embodied classical theism, but transcendence is still prominent in this model
What exactly Schellenberg means by deep sharing is unclear, but there is a sense in which there is a form of deep sharing between nonbelievers and God through their interactions with the external world in embodied panentheism
Unlike in embodied classical theism, this relationship encompasses two of the criteria—that they are reciprocal and positively meaningful—Schellenberg claims are required for personal relationships
Summary
Due to the emotional impact subjects can have on God through their interactions with the world, one gets a much greater degree of immanence in this form of panentheism than in embodied classical theism, but transcendence is still prominent in this model.36 Divine embodiment does not just make a relationship with God attainable but establishes such a relationship in the lives of all subjects, including nonseeking nonresistant nonbelievers, through their interactions with the external world.
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