Divine Hiddenness

Focal Point: 

There is a strange silence that meets us in our most desperate hours, a hush that seems almost cruel to the one who reaches out to the heavens with trembling hands and finds no response. In such moments, we are left to wonder whether our pleas for aid fall merely into a vast, empty sky — or worse, whether they are heard and met with indifference. This silence can feel like a door barred from the other side, leaving us alone with our fears and frailties. It is a silence that has haunted the faithful and skeptic alike, for it raises the unsettling possibility that God, if He exists, may be far more distant or mysterious than we once thought. Yet, within that silence, there lies an invitation, though hidden and hard to discern, to wrestle with our own understanding of faith, suffering, and the nature of God Himself.

The silence of God is not a phenomenon easily explained or comfortingly dismissed. It is an experience that strikes at the heart of what it means to believe, especially when belief demands a response from the Almighty, and none is given. In the Scriptures, we read of patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, who cried out to a God who sometimes seemed silent — yet, these same individuals remained faithful, not because they always received answers, but because they came to know something beyond what they could see or feel. Perhaps God’s silence is not the absence of His voice, but rather the shaping of our own, urging us to seek not merely signs and wonders, but the deeper mystery of His presence, a presence that does not always yield to human demands. In this silence, we are reminded that faith is, after all, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Introduction:

The argument from divine hiddenness is quickly becoming one of the default arguments used by many atheists, agnostics, and other non-believers to try and demonstrate the irrationality and insufficiency of belief in God. A growing number of individuals who promote and propound this argument revere it on the same level as the argument from evil and many use the argument from divine hiddenness in conjunction with the problem of evil to assault the faith of Christians around the world. This argument has even found a abundant soil and a ripe audience among the self-described “internet atheist” and “online infidel” crowd who utilize social media to propound an anti-Christian agenda. The argument from divine hiddenness is usually stated that an all loving and all-powerful God would not let his creatures suffer alone and that God, if he exists, has an intense and explicit desire to promote the well-being and flourishing of his creatures. For it is much better for God to have the good of his people in mind instead of bad, and it is much better that they flourish instead of suffer throughout their lives. Additionally they will claim that if God exists it would be better that God would make his existence known to humans because creatures knowing the existence of God without a doubt would be something that God would want his creatures to know. On this form of the argument, knowing God would accrue as a net benefit for God’s creatures, therefore God would want his creatures to know that he exists. Taken as a whole, the argument seems to lead to the conclusion that God would create the best possible world for this to occur, since God has hidden himself while his creatures suffer, it appears to negate the possibility for such a stated God to exist. Why would God remain silent to us when him conclusively revealing himself would take away all excuses for believing in him? That is the question that lies at the heart of this objection, and on its surface, it seems to be a powerful refutation against any faith and belief in him. Many people who use this argument are extremely confident that they have completely dismantled God’s existence and have sufficiently proven that anyone who remains a believer after the fact has to be willfully ignorant or so psychologically weak that can’t untether themselves from belief in God. However, the argument isn’t as good as some will make it out to be. Let’s get into it.