Some nonresistant nonbelievers are former believers; some lifelong seekers. Others are converts to nontheistic religion; and still others isolated nontheists. And drawing on considerations about responsiveness and caring,
noncapriciousness and justice, faithfulness, generosity, truthfulness, nondeceptiveness, and providence, so this argument claims, we can show the difficulty of squaring the existence of God with each of these types of nonresistant nonbelief. For why, if a God of perfect moral character exists, should we have onetime believers trying to make their way home without being able to do so; or dedicated seekers failing to find, or taking themselves to have found a truth that only enmeshes them in a meaning system distortive of what must, if God exists, be the truth; or individuals being entirely formed by a fundamentally misleading meaning system? Some of the arguments involved here are deductive, and some proceed inductively – for example, by analogy with the behaviour of human parents.
RESPONSE:
noncapriciousness and justice, faithfulness, generosity, truthfulness, nondeceptiveness, and providence, so this argument claims, we can show the difficulty of squaring the existence of God with each of these types of nonresistant nonbelief. For why, if a God of perfect moral character exists, should we have onetime believers trying to make their way home without being able to do so; or dedicated seekers failing to find, or taking themselves to have found a truth that only enmeshes them in a meaning system distortive of what must, if God exists, be the truth; or individuals being entirely formed by a fundamentally misleading meaning system? Some of the arguments involved here are deductive, and some proceed inductively – for example, by analogy with the behaviour of human parents.
RESPONSE:
This version of the divine hiddenness argument has a hidden assumption in it:
If god did reveal himself clearly in human history, then there wouldn't be a variety of religions in the world, and people who are free to accept and then reject relationship with God, and human beings are not the kind of creatures that can miss sufficient evidence for the truth of some proposition when they look for it.
However, Schellenberg himself offers a plausible defeater for the first two assumptions in his book: Human Reason and Divine Hiddenness (182) he seeks to answer the following question:
"...If a strong epistemic situation in relation to theism were to obtain, [would] human religiousness be reduced to a narrow and stifling uniformity? ...what is likely to follow from God presenting himself to the experience of all individuals capable of recognizing him in the manner desribed in Chapter 2 is not a uniform pattern of religiousness, but rather patterns of religious life that are (at one level at least) compatible, united under a common acceptance of God as personal and loving. Even this may be saying to much. For if humans would remian free to reject god, as I have argued they would, there would presumably remain the possibility of religious beliefs and practices incompatible at all levels with traditions built up on the experience of god, resulting directly or indirectly from the rejection of that experience by some individual(s) at some point in time."
The third assumption is demonstrably false from cognitive psychology today. See my other posts for more details.
If god did reveal himself clearly in human history, then there wouldn't be a variety of religions in the world, and people who are free to accept and then reject relationship with God, and human beings are not the kind of creatures that can miss sufficient evidence for the truth of some proposition when they look for it.
However, Schellenberg himself offers a plausible defeater for the first two assumptions in his book: Human Reason and Divine Hiddenness (182) he seeks to answer the following question:
"...If a strong epistemic situation in relation to theism were to obtain, [would] human religiousness be reduced to a narrow and stifling uniformity? ...what is likely to follow from God presenting himself to the experience of all individuals capable of recognizing him in the manner desribed in Chapter 2 is not a uniform pattern of religiousness, but rather patterns of religious life that are (at one level at least) compatible, united under a common acceptance of God as personal and loving. Even this may be saying to much. For if humans would remian free to reject god, as I have argued they would, there would presumably remain the possibility of religious beliefs and practices incompatible at all levels with traditions built up on the experience of god, resulting directly or indirectly from the rejection of that experience by some individual(s) at some point in time."
The third assumption is demonstrably false from cognitive psychology today. See my other posts for more details.
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