The Problem of Belief in Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness Argument
1. Introduction
In his 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, J.L. Schellenberg introduced a unique argument against God’s existence. In the years since there has been much criticism targeting every aspect of his argument, and Schellenberg has responded to that criticism, clarifying and defending his stance. I don’t believe he has been successful; the argument remains too full of assumptions that can be and have been too easily rejected. In this essay, I will target a less addressed (though not neglected) premise of his argument, that nonresistant nonbelief exists or at least has existed, and an assumption that premise partially relies upon, that belief is involuntary, to add, if possible, another small note to the large pile of criticism. To do so I will begin by 2. summarizing Schellenberg’s argument and then arguing myself that 3. beliefs can sometimes be voluntary and thus people can be sometimes culpable for the beliefs they do or do not hold and 4. belief in God is the sort of belief that can be voluntary and thus the sort that people can be culpable for, which would count as resistance.
2. Summary
Here is Schellenberg’s argument as written in his 2015 book on the topic, The Hiddenness Argument:
(1) If a perfectly loving God exists, then there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person.
(2) If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
(3) If a perfectly loving God exists, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists (from 1 and 2).
(4) Some finite persons are or have been nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
(5) No perfectly loving God exists (from 3 and 4).
(6) If no perfectly loving God exists, then God does not exist.
(7) God does not exist (from 5 and 6) (p.103).
To clarify some terms, by “open” Schellenberg means not closed, by action or omission. So he claims that a perfectly loving God would not actively prevent someone from forming a personal relationship with Him, nor would He omit some knowledge or capability necessary to enter into such a relationship. This second requirement is more controversial than the first as Schellenberg uses it to claim that “in the absence of resistance, belief in God would be like a light that turns on when one becomes capable of relationship with God and stays on, even if the degree of its brightness should fluctuate” (“Divine hiddenness: part 1,” p.3). This, specifically, is what Schellenberg claims is or has been denied to some people, which is antithetical to God’s existence. Schellenberg also insists that a “personal relationship” with God must be an “explicit, reciprocal interaction” (“The Hiddenness Argument Revisited (I),” p.208), arguing that this sort of relationship is better than — as has been used as a response to his argument — an implicit unconscious relationship with God through aspects of His person such as truth, goodness, beauty, as well as what is often called by the religious the voice of God within us: conscience, and thus what a loving God would prefer.
I think the assumptions that God could never have good reasons to withhold the knowledge of His existence from some people and that in all cases implicit relationships are further from God, or less desirable to God, than an explicit relationship, are indefensible, in that we cannot, from our limited vantage point, defend such bold claims about an infinite being. This response is a form of skeptical theism — which is skepticism about our capability to know and judge God’s reasons for acting or not acting — but by it I don’t mean we must simply shrug and walk away from the problem and back into our respective belief camps. Rather, I mean that, among the many possible explanations for why God does not simply “turn on the light” of knowledge in every (supposed) non-resistant human, we need not pick one as our champion and can instead simply recognize the fact that if we are capable of coming up with potentially valid reasons for hiddenness, then God, were He to exist, could very likely come up with even more. As Schellenberg’s argument is deductive, any doubt we can justify about his premises necessarily leads to doubt about his conclusion.
But my concern in this essay is focused on Schellenberg’s term “nonresistant” when applied to nonbelievers. By this he means that the person in question is open, not closed, to the belief that God exists, which, as mentioned, Schellenberg sees as required for relationship with God. A person is nonresistant (or, as used in his first book, “inculpable” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) when they do not actively prevent themself from coming to belief in God or omit to put in a responsible effort to come across evidence for such a belief. Examples of nonresistant nonbelievers Schellenberg uses are former believers, lifelong seekers, converts to nontheistic religion, and isolated nontheists:
In the first case you have the nonresistant nonbelief of those who regret the loss of a connection to God and unsuccessfully seek to regain it; in the second, that of seekers whose continued search has yielded nothing in the way of evidence sufficient for belief; in the third, that of seekers whose search has uninterruptedly led to nontheistic religious belief; and in the last, you have the nonresistant nonbelief of those never in a position to ‘resist God’ because they are shaped by a meaning system in which the idea of a loving God inviting humans to loving relationship is absent or alien (“The Hiddenness Problem and the Problem of Evil,” p.47).
I think the case of isolated nontheists presents the strongest form of the hiddenness argument, but I also think it can be addressed by the responses briefly outlined above. For that reason, I will focus on the other examples which are alike in that they are about people who do not have enough evidence to form a certain belief. This is important because Schellenberg claims that “belief, as most contemporary philosophers would agree, is involuntary in the sense that one cannot choose to believe something at a time just by trying to. So by not revealing his existence [God] is doing something that makes it impossible for [someone] to participate in personal relationship with [Him] at the relevant time even should she try to do so” (“Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy,” p.17). I will now argue that this particular belief is such that one can choose it, thus those who do not may be more resistant than Schellenberg admits.
2. Voluntary Belief
Some clarification is needed here too. It is much clearer that we can try to cultivate belief than that we can simply choose to hold specific beliefs, and even those who deny the latter can accept that we can choose the people we interact with, the ideas we spend time contemplating, etc., and that these practices can influence the evidence we encounter and thus the beliefs we come to hold. Belief cultivation guides us toward beliefs that are in line with what we desire, but if we desire to believe something regardless of its truth value, then the result is self-deception. This is a concern believers in involuntary belief have about their opponents, that the only beliefs they can choose to have are false ones because if they were true then they wouldn’t be able to help but believe and wouldn’t need to choose.
So someone who avoids evidence for God’s existence in order to cultivate disbelief would be resistant and thus irrelevant to Schellenberg’s argument, but someone who avoids evidence against God’s existence in order to cultivate belief would be self-deceiving and thus irrelevant to the argument that God does exist. Where does that leave my argument? Well, belief cultivation is not the type of voluntary belief I aim to defend, but I bring it up to lay the path for my stronger claim. It is necessary to recognize that we are free beings, even if that freedom results in error. It is the same for our actions. In fact, it is only because our actions are free that we can say some of them are in error. It would not be good to go down the only path available to us, it would just be. But it would be good if another path were available that was less good. But when we choose the first path over the second, we do so because we believe that it is better.
Thus, belief in what is good motivates action, and at least some of our actions are free. Our freedom makes us culpable for failing to choose the right actions, but if our beliefs are not free, then it would seem a valid defense to say that one could not help but think their actions were right. When we say to someone who has done wrong “You should have known better,” we are also saying “You should have held a truer belief.” This statement wouldn’t make any sense without at least belief cultivation being within our powers, for it also means “You should have held a belief the rest of us hold,” and that would be true if the belief the rest of us held were indeed truer, and if you were at least uncertain about the truth you could have at least tried to cultivate that communal belief for pragmatic reasons.
This brings me to the topic of uncertainty, and it is here that I will part ways with cultivated belief. While it is clear that
I do not have any voluntary control over believing propositions that seem to me to be evidently true. But I do have direct voluntary control over believing propositions that do not themselves seem evidently true, but that can be shown to be true or false by argument. I do not have to assent to such propositions: I consider the evidence, assess its likely relationship to truth, and then I choose either to assent, to dissent, or to withhold assent in the interest of holding true beliefs. My will convinces my intellect to assent because it perceives assent to this proposition as a means of acquiring a true belief, and therefore as a good [emphasis added] (Murphy).
For the same reason we can choose our actions based on their perceived goodness, we can choose our beliefs based on their perceived goodness, but only when the truth is not evident because truth is an ultimate good. We can choose to follow sub-goods when the location of this ultimate good is uncertain the same way we can follow breadcrumbs down a forest path in order to locate home.
Allow me to illustrate: Why do we believe our senses are trustworthy? Many times they are not. Perhaps more often than not they have been experimentally proven reliable, but experiments only work within reality, and there is no sensory evidence capable of proving reality to be at all what we believe it is. We might be in a simulation. We might be mad. Why do so few of us believe we are? Evidence doesn’t compel these beliefs. And of the people who do believe we are in a simulation, or that they are dreaming, or mad, how did they come to those beliefs? If it is fair to say that there is at least some admitted evidential uncertainty for at least some people as to the validity of our senses, and that at least some of those people do nonetheless hold as strong beliefs about skepticism or realism as anything else does seem to be evidence that belief is not always necessarily the result of evidence. And when we ask, for example, someone like myself who believes in the truth of perceived reality despite a lack of evidence, the common response, and the one I also give, is that there’s no good in believing anything else. However, I think skeptics often respond differently, appealing to the high probability of simulation theory, or other such evidence. But in order to claim their response as a counterargument to my claim and argue that the realists are being self-deceptive, one would have to become a skeptic themself. So long as I am not addressing skeptics then, my claim stands, and my claim is that were we to present the evidence for skepticism to someone who has never questioned it before and who, as a result, becomes uncertain about the truth, that person would be able to choose what to believe. In fact they would need to, in order to decide what to do with themselves next.
3. Voluntary Belief in God
At least some conditions for voluntary belief then are that there be uncertainty about truth and values at stake, for the uncertainty creates space for choice and the values motivate choice. When it comes to the sorts of nonresistant nonbelievers Schellenberg discusses — former believers, lifelong seekers, and converts to nontheistic religion — it seems then that I will have to avoid the last sort again because uncertainty does not apply. It might be possible to argue that we are culpable for errors in our belief in the manner of a student being culpable for errors in his math homework, and thus, if God exists, converts to nontheistic religion are still culpable (though perhaps not resistant), but that is a topic for another time. Even just a small amount of doubt may be useful against Schellenberg’s bold conclusion.
Having established that voluntary belief is at least sometimes possible, I can point out a condition that, while not necessary to it, makes it easier to engage in. Low stakes. While values must be at stake in order to choose between options, the lower the stakes, the easier it is to make said choice. For example, I choose not to believe that there is intelligent alien life somewhere in the universe, but because I also don’t believe the stakes are particularly high either way, I would be content to change that belief with minimal reason. A belief may seem less like belief, and more like fancy, the lower the stakes get, (suppose I believe non-intelligent unicorns could exist somewhere in the universe) but this supports the point I am about to make.
When it comes to the question of whether to believe in God or not, the stakes are relatively high. Pascal’s wager, after all, compares infinite gain or infinite loss, depending on our actions, if God does exist, and only finite gain or loss if He does not. Thus, the pragmatic thing to do would be to at least try and cultivate the belief that God exists. It is not too much of an inconvenience, given the stakes. On the other hand, nontheist beliefs — say, naturalism, or the multiverse theory — are very low-stakes beliefs to consider. How one lives their life might not change much if one accepts them, and they might even permit (i.e. be indifferent to) actions you want to take but were hesitant to under the threat of a possible omnipotent disapproving lawmaker. Compared to theism, I argue these beliefs are more like fancy; you may believe in one or another and not much changes. But if you believe in theism, everything changes; there are laws to be obeyed, purposes to be fulfilled, etc. Thus, if someone is properly uncertain or agnostic, and they could use their values to choose to believe in God but don’t, I argue it is possible — more possible than Schellenberg's argument can admit — that that person is culpably resistant to the responsibility that comes with such a belief.
4. Conclusion
Schellenberg's divine hiddenness argument relies on the assumption that belief is involuntary, thus God, knowing that, would provide sufficient evidence to cause belief in his existence in order to be open to the good that is relationship with Him. Apart from the other problems with his argument, I reject the total determinism of belief, thus opening the door to the possibility that at least some of the nonresistant nonbelievers Schellenberg's argument cites are in fact, by action or omission, choosing to resist belief. This is so because choosing to believe doesn’t necessarily mean deceiving yourself or believing without evidence, it can mean choosing goods acquired through belief when the good of truth is uncertain. We wouldn’t want to believe true propositions if we didn’t believe the truth was good, thus in the absence of clear truth it is only sensible to strike out on a path and look for it. If we reject a path because it is more demanding than another, then we are resistant to the duties inherent in the pursuit of truth, which is not a condition even Schellenberg would demand God answer for.
Bibliography
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(Written April 2024)
