Abstract
The introduction offers a brief presentation of John L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument which is the central focus of the book. Weidner notes how the hiddenness argument resembles the argument from evil, both of which conclude that there is no God. The book’s research question states: Why, if there is a God, is God’s existence not evident to everyone? Weidner approaches the book from a theistic viewpoint using an analytic style of philosophy. The book includes an account of the notion of God’s hiddenness, an exposition of the hiddenness argument, and a reply to the argument which rejects one of the argument’s premises arguing that beliefless faith in the form of the assumption that God exists allows for personal relationship with God.
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Notes
- 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 compendium 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).
- 3.
According to this rule of inference, which I hereafter refer to as ‘MT,’ the following holds: (1) p → q, (2) ¬q, and (3) ∴ ¬p. Hence, MT is also labelled as ‘denying the consequent.’
- 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.
According to 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.
- 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 elucidates “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 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 creatures 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 inconclusive evidential situation here: “One might be tempted to see in that ambivalence a vindication 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 presentation 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.
- 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 misdeeds 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.
- 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.
- 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 anthropomorphic 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 overestimating 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.
- 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 illuminates, the significance of analytic philosophy for theologians, including not least its changeful 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.
- 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 distant echo to the hiddenness debate by way of implicitly referring to it. In light of the religious 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).
- 31.
Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, 13.
- 32.
To conclude the introduction, let me make six technical comments regarding this survey. 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.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html).
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Weidner, V. (2018). Introduction. In: Examining Schellenberg's Hiddenness Argument. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97517-7_1
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