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PALGRAVE FRONTIERS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Examining
Schellenberg’s
Hiddenness
Argument

Veronika Weidner
Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion

Series Editors
Yujin Nagasawa
Department of Philosophy
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK

Erik J. Wielenberg
Department of Philosophy
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN, USA
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 Veronika Weidner

Examining
Schellenberg’s
Hiddenness Argument
Veronika Weidner
Catholic Theological Faculty
Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich
Munich, Germany

Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion

ISBN 978-3-319-97516-0 ISBN 978-3-319-97517-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97517-7

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 In loving memory
of my grandparents
 Acknowledgements

First of all, I wish to express my grand gratitude and heart-felt thanks

for the extraordinary support of Prof. Armin Kreiner in the process
of writing this book. Staying calmly in the background, I knew that I
could always count on him being available immediately whenever I
sought advice. I thank the Catholic Theological Faculty at the Ludwig
Maximilian University of Munich, not least for deciding to honour
me with the Cardinal Wetter Award 2017 of the Catholic Academy in
Bavaria. From February until July 2016, I was offered the chance to
take special leave and enroll as a Recognised Student at the University
of Oxford. I sincerely appreciate the generous grants which I received
from the Catholic Theological Faculty, the LMUMentoring excellence
program for female junior scientists, and the international scholar-
ship program PROSALMU at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
In Oxford, John L. Schellenberg developed his hiddenness argu-
ment while pursuing a D.Phil. under the supervision of Prof. Richard
Swinburne in the late 1980s, and I wrote large parts of my book there.
I owe thanks to Prof. Graham Ward for his welcoming hospitality at
the Faculty of Theology and Religion and to Prof. Brian Leftow as well
as to Prof. Richard Swinburne for conversation about the hiddenness
argument. Furthermore, I very much appreciate Prof. Daniel Howard-
Snyder’s making the latest version of his paper’s then-draft entitled
“The Skeptical Christian” available to me. I am particularly indebted
to Prof. Christoph Jäger, Prof. Thomas Schärtl-Trendel, Prof. John L.
Schellenberg, Prof. Charles Taliaferro, Prof. Holm Tetens, Prof. Martin

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

Thurner, and Dr. Leigh Vicens for their very helpful comments on earlier
drafts of my manuscript. My special thanks goes to Dr. Luke Teeninga
who made significant linguistic corrections on the manuscript’s penul-
timate version and also provided most valuable remarks on its content.
Last but not least, I feel deep gratitude for the more than precious
encouragement of my family and friends. From the bottom of my heart,
I would like to thank Alma, Anna, Bianca, Christin, Constanze, Judith,
Katharina, Lisa, Mari, Miriam, Silvia, and Veronica, my three brothers
Ferdinand, Philipp, and Vinzenz, and, above all, my parents Katharina
and Michael.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

Part I Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument

2 Setting the Stage 13

2.1 Hiddenness in a Literal Sense 16
2.1.1 Missing His Presence—Hiddenness I 17
2.1.2 His Incomprehensible Essence—Hiddenness II 18
2.1.3 His Revelatory Works—Not That Hidden I 26
2.1.4 His Existence in Evidence—Not That Hidden II 43
2.2 Hiddenness Taken Non-Literally 51
2.2.1 The Occurrence of Nonresistant Nonbelief 51
2.2.2 Two Final Notes 53

3 Its Most Recent Statement 57

3.1 Preliminaria 58
3.1.1 Anti-Theistic 59
3.1.2 Deductive 64
3.1.3 Evidentialistic 65
3.1.4 Propositional and Experiential Hiddenness 73
3.1.5 Experiential and Propositional Evidence 77
3.1.6 The Hiddenness Argument and the Argument
from Evil 86
ix
x    Contents

3.2 The Argument Itself 91

3.2.1 Divine Love—Premises (1) and (2) 92
3.2.2 Conclusio (3) 110
3.2.3 No Nonresistant Nonbelief to Be Expected—
Premise (4) 111
3.2.4 Conclusio (5) 146
3.2.5 There Is at Least One Nonresistant Nonbeliever—
Premise (6) 146
3.2.6 Conclusio (7) 151

Part II Discussion of the Hiddenness Argument

4 Where to Go from Here? 155

4.1 Making Travel Arrangements 155
4.2 A Very Short Overview of Various Routes to Take 157
4.2.1 Avoiding Misunderstandings 158
4.2.2 Making Comparisons to the Argument from Evil 161
4.2.3 Challenging Schellenberg’s Premises 162
4.2.4 Introducing Further Propositions 167
4.2.5 Thinking a Step Ahead 175
4.3 My Way 177
4.3.1 Reading the Road Map 179
4.3.2 Tidying up and Packing a Bag 182
4.3.3 Ready for Take-Off 215

5 Conclusion 245

Bibliography 249

Index 265
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

That “atheism should be rated among the most serious characteristics

of this age, and thus be examined more carefully … [, and that] in the
awareness of the gravity of the questions raised by atheism, … these
questions should be considered seriously and more profoundly,”1 is
a remarkable point of view expressed in Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the World, which was promulgated on
the final day of the Second Vatican Council on December 7, 1965. As
I see it, the argument against the existence of God which the Canadian
philosopher John L. Schellenberg presented about 28 years later merits
such a diligent examination.2
In a nutshell, his argument has the form of modus tollens3 and claims
that if the God of theism exists, then the following state of affairs does

1 Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et

morum, corr., ext., trans. and ed. Helmut Hoping and Peter Hünermann, 44th ed. (Freiburg
im Breisgau: Herder, 2014), 4319, 4321. (Below, citations of this compendium will have
the following form: ‘DH 0123.’ The two letters indicate the compedium’s two main editors,
Denzinger and Hünermann, whereas the numbers are not related to certain pages in the com-
pendium but allude to the compendium’s own counting of all the documents it contains.)
2 See J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1993).

ing holds: (1) p → q, (2) ¬q, and (3) ∴ ¬p. Hence, MT is also labelled as ‘denying the
3 According to this rule of inference, which I hereafter refer to as ‘MT,’ the follow-

consequent.’

© The Author(s) 2018 1

V. Weidner, Examining Schellenberg's Hiddenness Argument,
Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97517-7_1
2 V. WEIDNER

not obtain in the actual world: that someone who, at some time t, is
not resistant toward a relationship with God lacks belief that God exists.
However, according to Schellenberg the consequent of this conditional
must be denied, since there is at least one individual who, at some time t,
is not resistant toward a relationship with God and yet does not believe
that God exists. Thus, it follows that we must also deny the antecedent
of the conditional and conclude that there is no God. As Schellenberg
rightly asserts, “it is a mistake to say that the hiddenness argument is a
very complicated argument. It is rather quite a simple argument which
requires complicated discussion.”4
Presumably, the hiddenness argument, as Schellenberg defends it,
has evolved and gained attention only recently, because we are living in
a time in which God’s existence is no longer taken for granted and in
which the explanatory power of the God-hypothesis seems to be dimin-
ishing.5 As a recent study issued by the General Social Survey of the
social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago
suggests, worldwide “there is a modest, general shift away from belief in
God.”6 John Calvin’s view on the matter that “[c]ertainly, if there is any
quarter where it may be supposed that God is unknown, the most likely
for such an instance to exist is among the dullest tribes farthest removed
from civilization”7 seems, at least nowadays, to be quite outdated. Those
who lack belief that God exists might not have sufficient evidence for the
existence of God at hand. At least Bertrand Russell reportedly replied,

4 J. L. Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 115; see, similarly, also p. 105. For ease of reading,
I omit the temporal tag ‘at some time t,’ but it should be understood as implicit. That is,
I will talk of a person who is, for example, not resistant toward relationship with God but
who lacks belief that God exists. But the present tense used here should not necessarily be
understood as relative to now, but relative to some t which may be now or a time in the past.
5 Accordingto Thomas Aquinas, the claim that all observable effects in the world are
explainable by natural or human-volitional causes without having to presuppose that there
is a God constitutes, in addition to the problem of evil, a likewise severe objection against
theism. According to that objection, the following holds: “Nulla igitur necessitas est
ponere Deum esse” (Thomas de Aquino, Summa Theologiae, ed. Petri Caramello, vol. 1
(Turin: Marietti, 1952), p. 1, q. 2, art. 3).
6 Tom W. Smith, “Beliefs About God Across Time and Countries,” in ISSP Data Report:

Religious Attitudes and Religious Change, eds. Insa Bechert and Markus Quandt (Cologne:
GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, 2013), 25. I take it that Smith’s notion
of belief in God here designates belief that God exists.
7 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, newly trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1

(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1863), 43.

 1 INTRODUCTION 3

upon being asked what he would say if he were to find himself after his
death to be standing, to his utter surprise, before the throne of God:
“‘Sir, why did you not give me better evidence?’.”8 Yet, this lack of suf-
ficient evidence that there is a God is, as Schellenberg sees it, neither a
state of affairs that theists should expect to obtain in the actual world
nor one which a perfectly loving God would allow to obtain. It is a com-
mon saying that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Yet,
Schellenberg does not agree with the view this saying expresses. Rather,
he claims that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is, in
Schellenberg’s view, the absence of a certain kind of evidence for the
existence of God is itself evidence that God does not exist.
However, by Schellenberg’s own admission, his reasoning is not
entirely without precedent nor is it entirely original.9

The idea that weak evidence for the existence of God or the presence of
nonbelief might count against the truth of theism does appear here and
there in the history of philosophy—though quite rarely. But it took until
1993 for it to be fully developed into an explicit argument against the
existence of God. And this argument is, I believe, original. (I’m not alone
in saying so: my critics in philosophy have done the same.)10

For example, Schellenberg mentions that he has found hints of sim-

ilar basic lines of thought in the writings of, inter alia, Joseph Butler,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ronald W. Hepburn.11
The short outline of the hiddenness argument I gave above may
have reminded an attentive reader of another prominent anti-theistic
8 Leo Rosten, “Bertrand Russell and God: A Memoir,” Saturday Review/World,

February 23, 1974, 26.

9 See, e.g., Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, 1, fn. 1; J. L.

Schellenberg, “Divine Hiddenness,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, eds. Charles

Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010),
509; Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument, 24–28; or also J. L. Schellenberg, “Preface
to the Paperback Edition,” in J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason
with a new preface (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), vii.
10 Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument, 23.

11 Joseph Butler, for example, states this: “It has been thought by some persons that

if the evidence of revelation appears doubtful, this itself turns into a positive argument
against it because it cannot be supposed that, if it were true, it would be left to subsist
upon doubtful evidence.” Yet, Butler immediately adds that, in what follows, he eluci-
dates “the weakness of these opinions” (Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion: Natural
and Revealed, intro. Ronald Bayne, repr. 1927 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1906),
181. See ibid. also pp. 181–198). Moreover, Schellenberg mentions this passage from
4 V. WEIDNER

argument that has constantly pressed on theists, namely the argument

from evil. The ancient argument from evil and Schellenberg’s more
novel hiddenness argument at least have in common that they consist of
premises which entail the conclusion that God does not exist.12 In other
words, both sorts of argument question the truth of the central theis-
tic claim that God exists and thus the truth of theism. As a result, these
arguments also question the reasonableness of those still holding an
affirmative doxastic attitude toward the claim that God exists or regard-
ing the truth of theism. Hence, providing suitable theistic responses is
the task of what in classical apologetics has been called a demonstratio

Nietzsche’s Daybreak, i.e., more precisely, aphorism nr. 91 entitled ‘God’s honesty.’ “A
god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure that his crea-
tures understand his intention—could that be a god of goodness? Who allows countless
doubts and dubieties to persist, for thousands of years, as though the salvation of mankind
were unaffected by them, and who on the other hand holds out the prospect of frightful
consequences if any mistake is made as to the nature of the truth?” (Friedrich Nietzsche,
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, eds. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52). Finally,
Schellenberg names Ronald W. Hepburn whom he interprets as referring to an inconclu-
sive evidential situation here: “One might be tempted to see in that ambivalence a vindi-
cation of atheism. For how could such an ambiguous universe be the work of perfect love
and perfect power? Could this be a way to love and express love, to leave the loved one
in bewildering uncertainty over the very existence of the allegedly loving God? … That
is: if the situation is ambivalent, it is not ambivalent; since its ambivalence is a conclusive
argument against the existence of the Christian God” (Ronald W. Hepburn, “From World
to God,” Mind 72, no. 285 (1963): 50). Moreover, to see a link between Schellenberg’s
reasoning and the one of Ludwig Feuerbach and to see that the former may be a remake
of the latter, see Auernhammer, Franziska, and Thomas Schärtl, “Gottesbegriff und
Religionskritik: Alte Muster in neuen Konzepten,” Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und
Religionswissenschaft 98, no. 3–4 (2014): 207–214. I might add that implicit formulations
of anti-theistic hiddenness reasoning are critically discussed in the writings of Michael J.
Murray and Robert McKim, which were published shortly before Schellenberg’s first pres-
entation of the hiddenness argument appeared in public in his book Divine Hiddenness and
Human Reason of 1993. See Michael J. Murray, “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God,”
American Philosophical Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1993): 27–38 (APQ received this paper, as
stated at its end, on March 10, 1992) as well as Robert McKim, “The Hiddenness of
God,” Religious Studies 26, no. 1 (1990): 141–161.
12 In Subsection 3.1.6 of Chapter 3, “The Hiddenness Argument and the Argument from

Evil,” I introduce some further similarities and dissimilarities between these two arguments.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

religiosa.13 Furthermore, the hiddenness argument and the argument

from evil have the same logical form. Both arguments are based on the
aforementioned rule of inference labelled MT and claim that there is
a certain state of affairs obtaining in the actual world each of which is
not to be expected to obtain if God exists. More precisely, first, these
arguments postulate that the existence of God exhibiting certain divine
attributes, i.e., (i) perfect love or (ii) perfect omnipotence, goodness, and
omniscience, makes it expectable that a certain state of affairs obtains in
the actual world, i.e., ad (i), that there is no involuntary lack of belief
that God exists or, ad (ii), that there is no moral evil or natural evil.14
Then, they claim that this state of affairs does not obtain, but that, on
the contrary, the negation of this state of affairs is actually the case, i.e.,
ad (i), there is some involuntary lack of belief that God exists or, ad (ii),
there is some moral evil or natural evil. Hence, they conclude that God
exhibiting the aforementioned divine attributes does not exist. In other
words, according to Schellenberg we

must be open to the possibility that the world would be completely differ-
ent than it is if there were a God. For the properties we ascribe to God
have implications, and these place constraints on what the world could be
like if there were a being with those properties.15

As a matter of fact, alongside the argument from evil the hiddenness

argument “has become one of the most prominent arguments for athe-
ism in contemporary philosophy of religion.”16 Thus, I fear that Paul
K. Moser’s judgement that “divine hiddenness offers no real threat to

13 For an overall account of what a demonstratio religiosa deals with today, see

Armin Kreiner, “Demonstratio religiosa,” in Den Glauben denken: Neue Wege der
Fundamentaltheologie, eds. Heinrich Döring, Armin Kreiner, and Perry Schmidt-Leukel
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1993), 9–48.
14 The occurrence of moral evil generally denotes a state of affairs obtaining due to mis-

deeds caused by human persons (malum morale). The occurrence of natural evil, on the
other hand, designates a state of affairs consisting of, e.g., natural disasters or fatal illnesses
(malum physicum).
15 J. L. Schellenberg, The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 2007), 198.

16 Travis Dumsday, “Divine Hiddenness as Deserved,” Faith and Philosophy 31, no. 3

(2014): 286.
6 V. WEIDNER

reasonable belief that the Jewish-Christian God actually exists and loves
us all”17 may probably be made too hasty. In what follows, I do not
enter the “much-traveled (one might say trampled) neighboring territory
of the problem of evil” but turn instead to “the much-neglected and
­little-explored territory … labeled the problem of Divine hiddenness.”18
In my book, the overall leading research question I started with and
which I have been constantly pondering about while undertaking the
investigation is this. Why, if there is a God, is God’s existence not evident
to everyone? Or rather, why is God’s existence epistemically hidden19 for
some? This constitutes the riddle or problem of divine hiddenness in my
eyes. Yet, I agree with Peter van Inwagen that as

is the case with the problem of evil, the problem of the hiddenness of God
is more often referred to than precisely stated. Theologians often refer to
this problem as if it were perfectly clear what it was, but their writings on
the subject do not always make it wholly clear what the problem is.20

I hope that this book helps making it more clear what the problem of divine
hiddenness is. In my attempt of doing so, I enter the field of religious epis-
temology. However, I am well aware that I am not an epistemologist by
training. And so I kindly ask those who are epistemologists by training to
give mercy to my mistakes and, if they wish, please correct them. I approach
the hiddenness argument in a systematic fashion, i.e., I am more concerned
with the content of some person’s argument and the claims made in sup-
port of it than I am with the details of the historic background of the argu-
ment and its claims. On this occasion, I wish to ask pardon from historians
of theology and philosophy for my abbreviated way of often only high-
lighting the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, I pursue this project from a
theistic point of view. Yet, I join the common academic debate about

17 Paul K. Moser, “Reply to Schellenberg,” in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of

Religion, eds. Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2004), 58.
18 Schellenberg, The Wisdom to Doubt, 243. There, these two direct quotes appear in

reversed order.
19 Similarly, in correspondence Holm Tetens proposed to speak of God’s ‘cognitive

hiddenness.’
20 Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil: The Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University

of St. Andrews in 2003 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

the question of whether or not there is a God without presupposing

God’s existence as an unquestionable factum brutum in my reasoning. My
approach differs from, for example, Alvin Plantinga’s stance in this respect.
According to Plantinga, the “Christian philosopher quite properly starts
from the existence of God, and presupposes it in philosophical work,” so
that, as a result, “Christian philosophers need not and ought not to see
themselves as involved, for example, in a common effort to determine
whether there is such a person as God.”21 Rather, I agree with Richard
Swinburne that “for those of us for whom it is neither overwhelmingly
obvious that there is a God or overwhelmingly obvious that there is no
God, it is normally obligatory to investigate the issue.”22 Furthermore, my
investigation is classifiable as bearing a certain handwriting23 which may be
labelled as what is today called analytic as opposed to continental.24
As Michael C. Rea rightly points out, analytics might generally be charac-
terised as placing “a high premium on spelling out hidden assumptions, on
scrupulously trying to lay bare whatever evidence one has (or lacks) for the
claims that one is making.”25 Winfried Löffler agrees with Rea that analytic
philosophy of religion is not tantamount to a bunch of certain content-based
positions but rather to a specific style of philosophy. Moreover, theologians

21 Both quotes are found in Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Faith

and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 261, 270.

22 Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,

2005), 141.
23 For example, the reader may notice the author write from the first-person-perspective

and in direct speech which may be regarded as inapt in other academic settings.
24 No clear-cut line can be drawn between current analytic and continental philosophy

of religion or theology. Yet, there are mutual, more or less justified, prejudices between
those affiliated with one or the other academic group in the community. The former is eyed
with suspicion due to an alleged forgetfulness of history, entertaining a dubious anthro-
pomorphic concept of God, or favouring some cold-blooded reasoning entailing all too
often complicated maths which is accessible only for a fine circle of the chosen few. The
latter group of academics, on the other hand, is confronted with prejudices such as overes-
timating the role of historic knowledge in philosophical or theological discussions, writing
merely associative yet occasionally beautiful prose, or blurring the way of argumentation
under a mountain of stilted verbiage. Maybe, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Presumably, if opportunities for mutual exchange were more frequently utilised, then each
side could learn a lot from the other and be challenged to avoid one-sidedness.
25 Michael C. Rea, “Introduction,” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy

of Theology, eds. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 5, fn. 6.
8 V. WEIDNER

and philosophers should neither be afraid of this style of reasoning nor

remain aloof from it and be reassured that it does not per se entail any guar-
antee of quality.26 Furthermore, I aim at accommodating this. “Where ques-
tions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim:
if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.”27 I think that
the following jest says a lot about how analytic philosophy works at best. “A
detective novel written by a good philosopher would begin: ‘In this novel I
shall show that the butler did it.’”28
In this spirit, I now give a sketch of the outline of my book and its
central claim. In Part 1 of this survey, Chapter 2 deals with the question
of what the notion of the hiddenness of God traditionally refers to and
means. I also specify two respects in which God has been claimed to be
not so hidden in tradition. As it turns out, Schellenberg’s use of the term
divine hiddenness differs significantly from the traditional one, thus it is
almost inevitable that Schellenberg’s argument would be frequently mis-
understood. In fact, the key purpose of this chapter is to clarify what is
not, at least prima facie, at issue in the hiddenness argument, against the
background of a general introduction into classical theological assertions
about the hiddenness and revelation of God.
Chapter 3 constitutes a fine-pored exposition of the hiddenness argu-
ment in its most recent version. In it, I elucidate in great detail why, on
Schellenberg’s account, it follows from the fact that God’s existence is not
evident to everybody that God does not exist. That chapter likewise evinces
an overall descriptive character and forms the main part of my book. By
painstakingly laying bare the specifics of the hiddenness argument, I endeav-
our primarily to prepare the ground for further reflection on the argument,
novel responses to it, and thus an even more in-depth debate about it.
Finally, Part 2 of this survey is dedicated to the discussion of
Schellenberg’s argument. The beginning of Chapter 4 briefly discusses

26 See Winfried Löffler, “Wer hat Angst vor analytischer Philosophie? Zu einem immer

noch getrübten Verhältnis,” Stimmen der Zeit 6 (2007), 375. As Armin Kreiner illumi-
nates, the significance of analytic philosophy for theologians, including not least its change-
ful history, consists in having drawn attention to two of the most central questions, i.e., the
one about the meaning and the one about the rationality of religious speech (see Armin
Kreiner, “Die theologische Relevanz Analytischer Philosophie,” Salzburger Theologische
Zeitschrift 9 (2005): 130).
27 John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983), x.

28 J. L. Schellenberg, Evolutionary Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

theistic replies to the hiddenness argument which, inter alia, question

some of its premises or offer a possible answer to the question of why
God’s existence might not be evident to everybody. Additionally, I give
a short outline of other accounts of anti-theistic hiddenness reasoning
which build upon Schellenberg’s reasoning. And so I draw a rough road
map sketching which roads have been taken in response to the hidden-
ness argument so far and which additional ways have been trod in the
wake of it in order to provide an orientation for those who are still unfa-
miliar with the debate.
Last but not least, in the main section of Chapter 4 I present my own
reply to the hiddenness argument. Contrary to my original plan, I do not
directly offer a particular defense29 but leave this task for a future occa-
sion. Instead, in this book I restrict myself to objecting to one particu-
lar subpremise of the hiddenness argument in some detail. To let the cat
out of the bag, I challenge Schellenberg’s view that, necessarily, someone
has to believe that God exists in order to be able to personally relate to
God. Instead, I argue that it is plausible that assuming that God exists
is sufficient to allow someone to be in a personal relationship with God.
In short, I propose that belief that God exists as well as assumption that
God exists are two possible instances of theistic faith that God exists.
Hence, I intend to show that, even though the hiddenness argument is
valid, it is not sound. That is, in my view the fact that there is some-
one who lacks belief that there is a God, even though she is not resistant
toward a personal relationship with God, does not, contra Schellenberg,
give us reason to reject the existence of a perfectly loving God.
The dispute over Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument arose in
English-speaking analytic philosophy of religion but is still hardly noticed
in English or non-English continental philosophy or theology30 and even
among German-speaking analytics. My book is written in English which
enjoys the status of being the international language of scholarship.

29 For what I here refer to and mean by the term ‘defense,’ see Subsection 4.2.4 of

Chapter 4, “Introducing Further Propositions”.

30 An exception might be a publication by Tomáš Halík which appears to be like a dis-

tant echo to the hiddenness debate by way of implicitly referring to it. In light of the reli-
gious ambivalence of the world in evidential terms, i.e., what he calls the hiddenness or
absence of God, Halík recommends that atheists and theists have more patience with God
(see Tomáš Halík, Geduld mit Gott: Die Geschichte von Zachäus heute, 4th rev. and impr. ed.
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2011), esp. 9, 11, 15).
10 V. WEIDNER

For I want to make a modest contribution to the discussion in which

philosophers as well as theologians are already engaged. Additionally, I
aim at attracting the attention of as extensive a range of scholars as pos-
sible who have not yet joined the debate. In fact, I would like to support
Schellenberg’s own objective that his hiddenness argument “should be
construed by theists not as a cry of triumph but rather as a challenge, an
invitation.”31
Needless to say, the reader may search but will not find an all-
encompassing solution to the riddle of divine hiddenness in this book.
Rather, I wish to help making sure that the anti-theistic force of
Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument as well as the argument’s shortcom-
ings are taken as seriously as they should be. I also wish to provide an
insight into the first preliminary results of my reflection on it. As a mat-
ter of fact, my thinking about it has just begun.32

31 Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, 13.

32 To conclude the introduction, let me make six technical comments regarding this sur-
vey. First, I use the conjunction ‘or’ in an inclusive sense, i.e., ‘This wine goes well with
game or fish’ may denote at least one of the following: ‘This wine goes well with game,’
‘This wine goes well with fish,’ ‘This wine goes well with game and fish.’ On the other
hand, when formulating ‘either … or’ I use ‘or’ in an exclusive sense, i.e., ‘This wine
goes well with either game or fish’ signifies only one but not both of the following: ‘This
wine goes well with game,’ ‘This wine goes well with fish.’ Second, in brackets like these
‘[ ],’ which may occasionally be found in a direct quote, I omitted a letter in the original
text and substituted it with the one in the brackets. Third, if a word is put in italics in
a direct quote, then this word appears in italics in the original. Fourth, unless otherwise
noted, all translations herein are my own. Fifth, biblical quotations are taken from the New
Revised Standard Version: The Go-Anywhere Thinline Bible Catholic Edition (New York:
HarperOne, 2011), except where otherwise specified. Sixth, citations and references are
based on the notes and bibliography system as outlined in the 16th edition of the Chicago
Manual of Style (see The Chicago Manual of Style Online, 16th ed., http://www.chicago-
manualofstyle.org/home.html).
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