The Hiddenness of God

Abstract

AbstractThe problem of evil can sometimes seem to be a special case of a more general problem, the seeming absence of God from the world, the conviction that some people sometimes feel that, if there is a God at all, he is ‘hidden’. This chapter considers the question: What does it mean to say that God is hidden? It contends that the answer to this question turns on an understanding of the divine attribute of omnipresence. Consideration of the implications of the omnipresence of God shows that there can be only one sense in which God is ‘hidden’: he does not present human beings with (or at least presents very few of them with) unmistakable evidence of his existence in the form of ‘signs and wonders’. The fact that God does not present all human beings with such evidence suggests an argument for the non-existence of God that is of the same form as the global argument from evil: ‘If there were a God, he would present all human beings with unmistakable evidence of his existence in the form of signs and wonders. And yet no such evidence exists. There is, therefore, no God’. This chapter presents a response to this argument that is parallel to the response to the global argument from evil in Chapters 4 and 5.