The ability to detect God is a common topic that atheists have brought up and one that I’ve personally heard several times while talking with them. They’ll ask, “If God is real, then where is he and why is he hiding?” or “Why doesn’t God just appear to everyone right now so that we can all believe?”
I recently attended an atheist conference in Florida in which Dan Barker, a popular-level atheist, raised this very issue at the beginning of his debate (out of the 14 different debates that I have watched of Dan on YouTube, he made this objection in every single one!).
Dan said that if God exists, then we shouldn’t need to debate about it, and the very fact that we do proves that God isn’t real. Many skeptics think that if God exists, then it should be easy for us to detect Him with some of our senses, whether internally via some religious experience or externally via our five senses.
Alas, we are to live by faith and not by sight; however, the concept of biblical faith is to be understood as trusting in what you have good reasons to believe is true. We have very good reasons to believe that God exists despite our inability to detect Him with our senses, and the fact that a great number of people across the world don’t believe that He exists.
The Hiddenness Argument
The basic argument for God’s hiddenness, otherwise known in the literature as the problem of divine hiddenness, is that if God loves the whole world and wants the world to believe in Him and have a good relationship with Him, then we should observe more people in different parts of the world believing in God, especially those who are not resisting and are open to the possibility of God’s existence.
But since we see so many people that don’t believe God exists, the skeptic says that this is evidence for the non-existence of God.
Although there are several good answers to this problem, I want to look at just a couple and demonstrate to you why God remains hidden, so-to-speak. This will be helpful for your next conversation with your skeptical friend, and even helpful to you as a Christian.
God’s Hiding is as an Act of Mercy
Atheist philosophers have claimed that God could give us powerful religious experiences and miracles to the extent that we couldn’t help but believe He existed. But if this were the case, then what would that mean for our moral autonomy?—the idea that God wants us to make moral decisions without being strong-armed into doing so.
When I was a kid, my mom told me not to eat any cookies before dinner. One day when I got home from school, I was by myself in the house, waiting for what seemed like hours for dinner (it was probably like 20 minutes). I was tempted to eat a delicious chocolate chip cookie, but I wrestled with the idea as my mom’s warnings popped in my head.
Suppose I made the right decision on my own in the absence of anyone nearby and refrained from eating one of those delicious cookies. This situation seems to be more honorable, then had I refrained only because my mom was standing right behind me and watching my every move.
In a similar way, God wants us to make the right decisions without us having the imminent feeling that He’s breathing down our necks and looking right over our shoulder every second of the day.
Philosopher Travis Dumsday points out that in Scripture you will see all sorts of terrible behavior by individuals that had direct encounters with God, yet this didn’t stop their immoral behavior, and the consequences for that behavior was drastically more severe than ours today.[1]
It was made very clear to these people that God existed because He spoke directly to them, revealing Himself in a much stronger sense than He does now. Just think of how He revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush (Ex. 3:14-15), yet God held Moses to an extremely high level of moral accountability that most could not handle.
The Exodus is another example where God performed miracles and signs and wonders for the Israelites. Moses disobeyed God, struck the rock, and received a severe punishment of not being able to enter the Promise Land.
The Israelites chose to worship the golden calf, and they were destroyed in the wilderness. Ananias and Sapphira told a lie, and their lives were immediately taken by God (Acts 5).
They did all this despite having a very strong revelation and experience of God. There are also several other well-known biblical figures that had similar experiences of God, yet still chose to disobey Him and the consequences were severe.
What do all these people have in common? Each paid a high price for their sins. This seems to reflect what Jesus said about the servant who knew his master’s will and yet still chose to disobey.
We’re told that the servant would receive a greater punishment than the other servant that didn’t know his master’s will who did things worthy of punishment (Luke 12:48).
God wants us to be morally responsible for our actions and doesn’t want us to feel overwhelming pressure like He’s looking over our shoulder all the time. Imagine being able to see and sense that kind of strong presence. You would be terrified and always feel forced to make the right decisions with Almighty God right beside you.
God’s goal isn’t to scare us into making the right decision in every circumstance, and when we make the wrong one, He lovingly corrects us and uses the mistake for our betterment to make us more holy.
Hebrews 12:10 says, “For they [our earthly fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he [God our Heavenly Father] disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.”[2]
So, imagine our world if God were to actively make His presence more fully known to every person. It could be that in doing so, we would still sin yet be held to a much higher moral standard while receiving severe punishment for our wrong doings. Dumsday notes,
“Having been granted the great privilege of first-hand contact with divine reality, we would have to be held to a higher moral standard, and would have to face the decidedly negative consequences of that fact in the form of more severe, justly administered punishments. I submit that this gives us reason to believe that God may have our best interests at heart in not granting to each of us a rationally indubitable belief in His existence in this life.”[3]
With God’s presence being not as forceful, it is an act of mercy, for not only can we still believe in His existence through less-stronger direct religious experiences, but when we finally see Him face-to-face, we will have less serious offenses to account for.
But God had to start somewhere, and this is why He revealed His plans and purposes directly to one nation, Israel, and then progressively revealing that plan indirectly to other nations as not to hold them to the same level of moral accountability and punishment.[4]
Moreover, think of the fallen angels that were once in the presence of God. You couldn’t get any closer to God than that! And what happened? Many rebelled, they still chose to disobey God, and now they are eternally separated from Him. That’s quite the punishment. The consequences for their actions which occurred in the direct presence of the Almighty were very severe.
Nonbelievers Might Still Reject God
What if God did decide to reveal Himself to nonbelievers? What if He made it even more clear than He already has? Even though we can’t see God, we can still observe the effects in the world such as nature, and reason back to the cause of the things we do see.
This is why Paul says that no mentally competent adult is without excuse for disbelieving in God because God has revealed Himself to us through His creation. Paul states,
“For his [God] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
We are also made in the image of God and have his moral law written on our hearts (Rom 2:15).
Furthermore, we have a sense of God when experiencing something beautiful like music, poetry, art and nature. Philosopher Eleonore Stump says that
“in knowing goodness or in sensing beauty, a person is also knowing God, to one degree or another.”[5]
But again, what if God revealed Himself in an even greater way to people who are suppressing this truth in their unrighteousness? (Rom 1:18). What if God made it perfectly clear who He was to nonbelievers?
Well, it might be that if God did reveal Himself in an undeniable fashion to these individuals, these people would still reject God and become even more angry at Him.[6] This would only make them hate God more, not love Him. God’s goal is not to get people to simply believe in Him, but rather He desires for everyone to submit to a personal and meaningful relationship with Him.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard atheists say that if God did make it clearer that He existed, then they would still reject Him. In fact, Dan Barker declared that if God existed, then he would tell God to go to hell and would have nothing to do with Him.
So, if Dan is going to deny a positive relationship with God, then why would God reveal Himself in a fuller way to Dan? That would only cause Dan to receive a harsher punishment, and that’s not what God wants.
To reject that amount of revelation would certainly bring about a greater level of accountability and condemnation to the individual for denying the greatest conceivable being to whom we owe our existence.
And because God knows who would, and would not, submit into a relationship with Him, then there is no need for Him to reveal Himself in a fuller way to these individuals. Regarding these types, Philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder says,
“For nonbelievers to be ill-disposed toward God just is for them not to be capable of being ‘softened’ by a direct experience of his love, or at the very least for them to be very unlikely to be ‘softened’ by it.”[7]
In other words, because God knows these hardened people won’t be softened by more of His love and self-disclosure, then it seems that it’s an act of mercy that God does not provide them with even more light or revelation.
God is not going to force anybody into a relationship with Him because love, by definition, must be given freely by the other party. Imagine trying to get someone to love you. You can do everything in the world to try and persuade them to fall in love with you, but ultimately, it’s up to the other person to freely give their love back to you.
God wants creatures that have the ability to freely choose Him. It would be very sad, self-centered, and pathetic if the only way God could get people to want Him is if He programmed them to do so.
Imagine programming a robot to love you and desire a relationship with you. That machine isn’t capable of expressing anything meaningful or real because it has no volitional will. It didn’t give you anything—you are the one that gave it to yourself.
No. God is much better than that type of love-starving programmer, and we repeatedly see in Scripture that God desires for His creation to live for Him by enabling them to freely make that decision.
When we don’t choose God, then He expresses sadness, disappointment, and anger. If God was directly programming our decisions, then why would He hold us accountable if He is the one that programmed our decision not to love Him?
What God Doesn’t Want
God loves each person unconditionally and desires that they freely enter a positive relationship with Him, but He doesn’t want to force people to do this. God doesn’t desire robots, rather He desires free creatures who desire Him.
God doesn’t want to be unmerciful. God doesn’t want to punish people more than what is necessary; therefore, if God reveals Himself in a greater way to those that He knows will still reject Him, then He doesn’t want to provide that level of accountability to the person rejecting Him.
God is gently nudging everyone’s hearts as He desires that they believe in Him and submit to a loving relationship with Him, because He doesn’t desire that anyone spend an eternity apart from Him. Scripture makes it plainly clear:
“[God] who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
“Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23).
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Although there are several other reasons for God’s hiddenness, we can see that one of those reasons is an act of mercy. Thanks for reading!
Blessings,
Andrew Drinkard
[1] See Travis Dumsday, “Divine Hiddenness as Divine Mercy,” Religious Studies 48, no. 2 (Cambridge University Press: 2012), 183–98; Travis lays out several examples, many of which I referenced in this section.
[2] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the English Standard Version.
[3] Travis Dumsday, “Divine Hiddenness as Divine Mercy,” Religious Studies 48, no. 2 (Cambridge University Press: 2012), 188.
[4] Dumsday, “Divine Hiddenness as Divine Mercy,” 188.
[5] Eleonore Stump, “Theology and the Knowledge of Persons,” Roczniki Filozoficzne / Annales de Philosophie / Annals of Philosophy 69, no. 3 (Catholic University of Lublin, 2021): 19, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27068952.
[6] See Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Divine Openness and Creaturely Nonresistant Nonbelief” in Adam Green and Eleonore Stump, eds. Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 132-133.
[7] Howard-Snyder, Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief, 132.
