Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief: New Perspectives by

Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

V Objections and disclaimers

In this essay, I have focused on hiddenness as an experiential problem. I have tried to make sense of the general phenomena while showing how the framework I develop here could be applied to the case of the atheist and the former believer. At this point, it is worth drawing the reader’s attention to what I have not tried to explain and to a couple versions of an objection to my project.

First, there is a way of developing the argument from hiddenness that focuses on religious pluralism (Maitzen, 2006). Instead of the non-culpable atheist, the focus of this argument is the influence of socio-cultural and historical position on belief and experience. A hiddenness argument developed along these lines can strengthen concerns about religious disagreement in a cumulative case against theism. Such an argument is worth taking seriously, and I think the shared attention model has a few points of application for such a problem. I have left it unaddressed here however.5

Second, as his essay in this volume nicely illustrates, Schellenberg wants to help us gain perspective on the phenomenon of hiddenness in at least two ways, the first of which I do not address and the second of which can be parlayed into an objection to what I have said. It is important to Schellenberg that we discuss the hiddenness of God with a sense of our place in history. The story one tells about divine hiddenness, according to Schellenberg, should not just fit the experience of a few people at this particular juncture of recorded history. Religion has existed for a very long time on this planet. From the perspective of deep evolutionary time, however, religious beings have been a blip on the screen, and, if one considers how long our planet might remain habitable, then everything we know about religion may be a preface to what lies ahead. I cannot but gesture at what might be said in response. I only note in passing that it is not obvious to me that the story arch of where we have been and where we are going as a species cannot be told in terms of a developing relationship with a personal God who is interested in us as a species. A panoramic view of human history surely induces epistemic humility, though, and that is undoubtedly helpful.

Another way in which Schellenberg tries to ensure that the discussion proceeds with appropriate perspective is to stress that there is a difference between philosophy and theology. Insofar as I follow the point, I take it to be a caution against religious philosophers who attempt to square our experience of the world with religious background beliefs without fully or fairly considering just how unexpected or improbable our experience is on those background beliefs. One can imagine God creating any number of worlds that differ from this one in which divine hiddenness is either absent or ameliorated. Even if we suppose that God could exist and be hidden, why think that he

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