Philosophy and Science

or why I'm not a philosopher

In #articles

I was listening to the Dogma Debate episode “Does God Really Love You?” with Blake Giunta, and was really struck by the structure of the discussion. I have dealt with Blake’s discussions here before, but this time it really jumped out at me what the problem was. The topic was divine hiddenness, and Blake specifically wanted to address that part of the divine hiddenness problem where God seems to be invisible in every way to non-believers - why does he hide? You can listen to the debate, jump to 44:40 where he outlines many possibilities for why God might not want to or feel the need to appear to unbelievers. They include things like “the human might lack the right desire for God” (e.g. to escape punishment) or “some non-theists might form an initial proper relationship with God [if he was revealed to them] but then abandon it later on”. There is another list of responses from other philosophers Blake gives later in the show, but a more complete exploration can be found at Blake’s website here. In each of these cases, the argument goes, God would have good reason not to make himself known.

The response given here is essentially the same response apologists give for the problem of suffering - God may have good reasons you don’t know about. Fair enough, but that doesn’t give us any reason to actually believe in this being. I think it is probably true that, give the conception of God that Blake gives, there is sufficient flexibility that any and all philosophical arguments will fail - one cannot assign either a probability 1 or 0 to the existence of this God. For me, I don’t really care. I want a reason to actually believe that something exists; if someone is making the claim, I want evidence. This sort of argument might be a first step - maybe God is silent because “some non-theists might form an initial proper relationship with God [if he was revealed to them] but then abandon it later on”. Ok, but how could you test that? It may be plausible yet still false, as are most of the reasonable ideas people come up with. In science, we don’t finish with the argument, we start with it and ask “how would we know?” I’ve never heard Blake, or any other apologist, take that next crucial step. How can you, through some kind of observation, tell the difference between one of these excuses being true and God simply not existing? How can you, through some kind of observation, tell the difference between the different reasons purported to explain this hiddenness - given that it is impossible they are all true in all cases.

Care to try?