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NOTES 1. Paul Scherer, Love is a Spendthrift (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 4-5.There is a sense in which God hides himself. Sometimes it is because we are looking for him in the wrong place, ... or among things that we can see, until one dull morning we seem to lose him entirely because he refuses to do our bidding. Sometimes it is because we carefully avoid looking for him in the right place. Over and over again he is where we are quite sure he is not. –Paul Scherer11. Clarifying the Question
Someone once asked Bertrand Russell what he would say if after his death he met God. Russell’s proposed reply: “God, you gave us insufficient evidence.”2 This reply reflects an attitude of many people, including theists as well as atheists and agnostics. Why isn’t God more obvious? If God exists, why doesn’t God give us “sufficient evidence” of God’s existence? God, I shall argue, does indeed supply sufficient decisive evidence. The decisive evidence supplied is, however, profoundly different from what we naturally expect. So a key issue is: who has the proper authority to decide what kind of evidence God must supply? God or humans? Russell does not say what kind of evidence God failed to supply, but he assumes nonetheless that some kind of evidence is lacking, or “insufficient,” regarding God’s existence.Our question is whether God’s hiddenness justifies atheism. This question calls for some clarification of its key terms “God,” “hiddenness,” and “justifies.” The term “God” represents a wide range of notions in ordinary parlance. Its ambiguity is severe but often unnoticed. Let’s use the term “God” not as a personal name but as a supreme title, in keeping with one longstanding use. This use of the term requires of any possible holder: (a) worthiness of worship and full life-commitment and thus (b) moral perfection and (c) an all-loving character. One might use the term in a different manner, but then one will not be talking about the kind of God central to the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lacking a better candidate for title-holder, let’s consider the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. We thus shall speak of “the Hebraic God.” We shall also speak of “Hebraic theism” as the view that the Hebraic God actually exists. Is Hebraic theism true? In addition, is it adequately grounded in evidence indicating that it is true? Or does our available evidence indicate, as Russell suggested, that Hebraic theism is false or at least unreasonable? Such questions motivate this essay.
Lacking elaboration, the term “justifies” is nearly as unclear as the term “God.” Philosophers and others use the term with different meanings, and this often blocks progress toward understanding and true belief. Justifiers, broadly characterized, are truth-indicators; they are evidence indicating that a proposition is true.3 They can be fallible; thus a justifier can yield justified false belief. Justifiers can also be defeasible; they thus can cease to confer justification once one’s evidence base is expanded. My evidence for believing that a table is before me, for instance, can be defeated by my acquiring evidence that a holographic image of a table is being projected before me. Justifiers, then, need not guarantee truth or certainty, and they can confer justification in various strengths or degrees. In addition, justifiers can vary from person to person; my justifiers need not be yours too. Whether justifiers must be reproducible or showable is controversial in some quarters. Some people assume that if you cannot show your justification, then you do not actually have it. This, however, is doubtful. Showing justification requires a certain skill in formulation that goes beyond the mere having of justification. As for the reproducibility of justification, I can reproduce only what I can control, but evidence (for example, from experience) need not be under one’s control. We must be careful, then, not to build into justification something extraneous.
The proposal that a factor (for example, divine hiddenness) “justifies atheism” implies that this factor makes it reasonable to endorse the truth of atheism. One might take this to imply that the justifying factor makes atheism more likely to be true than theism. At any rate, our question becomes: does our evidence regarding God, subtle and easily rejectable as it is, make it reasonable to believe that the Hebraic God does not exist? Any answer would be altogether premature in advance of reflection on the nature and announced intentions of the God in question. Many atheists and agnostics jump to a nontheistic conclusion without adequate attention to such reflection. As a result, their nontheism is altogether premature.
1. The Kind of God in Question
It’s a waste of time to ask about God’s existence if we lack understanding of the kind of God in question. If we leave the notion of God amorphous, our question about God’s existence will be similarly obscure and resistant to worthwhile reflection. We would then not know what kind of evidence of God to expect if God does in fact exist. Many philosophers of religion are in exactly that disadvantaged position. They do expect a certain kind of evidence of God, as we shall see, but their expectation lacks a cogent basis in the notion of God, at least if the Hebraic God is our concern. The notion of God and God’s purposes suggests what kind of evidence of God one should expect. It is odd, therefore, that philosophers of religion rarely attend adequately to that notion.Anything but amorphous, the Hebraic God is famous for hiding at times. The theme of divine hiding recurs throughout the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament.4 So we are confronted by an all-loving God who sometimes hides from people. Many people assume that an all-loving God’s existence, if real, would be obvious to all normal humans. God’s existence is not, however, obvious to all normal humans. So, according to many people, we may reasonably (or, justifiably) deny that God actually exists. These people ask, rhetorically: how could an all-loving God fail to manifest God's reality in a way that removes all serious doubt about God's existence? Some normal humans, of course, do not believe that God exists. They claim not to have adequate evidence (for reasonable belief) that God exists. Would an all-loving God permit such doubt about God’s existence? How could this be permitted, if God is indeed all-loving? Many atheists and agnostics deny that this could be permitted by an all-loving God. They thus recommend against belief that God exists.
Does divine hiding support a recommendation against Hebraic theism? The kind of hiding characteristic of the Hebraic God entails neither the nonexistence nor the unavailability of God. In addition, such hiding does not entail either that God hides always or that humans have no evidence of God's reality. Hebraic theism acknowledges that divine hiding occurs not always but at some times, for God’s own purposes. The Hebrew scriptures present God's hiding as at times a response to human disobedience and morally significant indifference toward God (Deuteronomy 31:16-19, 32:19-20; Psalm 89:46; Isaiah 59:2; Micah 3:4). This is not, however, the full account of divine hiding. God hides at times for various purposes in interacting with humans. Divine hiding is not always a judgment on human disobedience or indifference. It is, according to Hebraic theism, often a constructive effort on God’s part to encourage (deeper) human focus, longing, and gratitude toward God. God thus aims to take us, even if painfully, to our own deepest resources and their inadequacy, where we become aware of our needing and already depending on God. In apprehending God’s absence, one can achieve a deeper, more profound appreciation of God’s presence. Human experience of a contrast between God’s presence and absence can highlight the preeminent value of God’s presence.
Hebraic theism places divine hiding in the context of God’s primary desire to have people lovingly know God and thereby to become loving as God is loving. God’s primary aim is not to hide from people but rather to include all people in God’s kingdom family as beloved children under God’s lovingly righteous guidance. A loving filial relationship with God is God’s main goal for every human, according to Hebraic theism. This means that God wants us to love God and thus to treasure God, not just to believe that God exists (see Deuteronomy 6:5; Mark 12:30; James 2:19). The Hebraic God wants all people to enter lovingly into God’s life, in action as well as thought. So production of mere reasonable belief that God exists will not meet God's higher aim for humans. For our own good, God is after something more profound and more transforming than simple reasonable belief. As all-loving, God will not settle for anything less.
Divine hiding typically results from a deficiency of some sort on the human side of the divine-human relationship. If God is hiding from us, according to Hebraic theism, we should assess our standing before God. We then may need to change something in our lives, perhaps certain attitudes and practices incompatible with the ways of God. Even in such a case as that of “blameless and upright” Job, a certain presumptuous attitude about knowledge of God needed revision (Job, chapters 38-42). Similarly, many people today boldly presume to know how a loving God should or must intervene in the world, allegedly if God is to be genuinely loving. A loving God, however, will not and should not be bound by superficial human expectations. Rather, human expectations must be transformed, for the good of humans, toward the profoundly loving character of God. This disturbing and humbling lesson is central to Hebraic theism.
According to Hebraic theism, human “wisdom” falls short of God’s wisdom, and human expectations are typically superficial and even misplaced in comparison with God’s loving intentions and character. Due humility is thus the order of the day, relative to the ways of the Hebraic God. This should be no surprise, once we reflect on the significant differences between an all-loving morally perfect God and self-centered humans. Even so, according to Hebraic theism, God takes no pleasure in staying away from humans or being rejected by them (see Ezekiel 18:23,32; 33:11). The epistle of James puts decisive responsibility on us humans: “Come near to God and God will come near to you” (4:8; cf. Jeremiah 29:13; Malachi 3:7). The key issue is thus: how may humans acquire knowledge of the Hebraic God?
3. Proper Knowledge of the Hebraic God
Jesus prays as follows regarding the lessons of his mission to inaugurate the kingdom of God: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matthew 11:25-26, NRSV/Luke 10:21-22; cf. Psalm 8:2). Proper knowledge of God, according to Jesus, requires one’s humbly, faithfully, and lovingly standing in a child-parent, or filial, relationship to God as one’s righteously gracious Father. Such filial knowledge rarely surfaces in philosophy of religion or even in Jewish-Christian approaches to knowledge of God. This omission is regrettable indeed.Jesus's awareness of being God's beloved son was not a matter of mere intellectual assent. It was a profound experiential relationship that called for talk of God as Father, in keeping with the Hebrew scriptures.5 Jesus was gripped, even overwhelmed, by his Father's love and its effects. Jesus's experience of being God’s son is clearly expressed in his prayers. Indeed, Jesus seems to have regarded filial prayer toward God as an ideal avenue to proper, filial knowledge of God. Such prayer is primarily a matter of asking what God wants from us rather than what we want from God. This kind of humility figures importantly in the issue of what kind of evidence of God we should expect.
Proper knowledge of the Hebraic God is inherently person-relational. We come to know other human persons by actively relating to them in personal interaction with them. Likewise, we come to know God via personal interaction whereby we become personally accountable to God. Through moral conscience, for example, one can be personally convicted on moral grounds by the personal will of God. One could not responsibly apprehend the reality of a parent’s or a spouse’s love for one apart from a sincere personal relationship with that parent or spouse. An analogous point holds for one’s responsibly apprehending the reality of God’s love. So Hebraic filial knowledge of God is irreducible to knowledge that a particular object in the universe exists. Such filial knowledge, in keeping with God’s preeminence, requires that one know God not as a mere object but as the supreme personal subject who is Lord of all, including one’s own life. Knowledge of this kind results from God's gracious self-revelation, not from human ways that are self-crediting, manipulative, or exclusive.
For our own good, we cannot know God on our own self-serving terms. Instead, we must be amenable to God's better terms for filial knowledge, and this requires genuine humility. It challenges our presumed epistemological autonomy. We must enter into, and participate in, a loving filial relationship with God in response to God’s drawing us toward God through conscience and other means. This, of course, is no matter of mere intellectual assent to a proposition. It demands that one put the Hebraic God at the center of one’s life, in terms of whom one values, loves, and follows.
Divine hiding arises from God’s upholding the supreme value of God’s invaluable loving ways. God sustains the value of God's gracious ways of human renewal in the presence of all people who would compromise the value of those ways to their own detriment. Having preeminent value, God’s loving ways must remain sacred and not be diminished in value. God's primary goal in self-revelation is transformation of recipients toward God's loving character. This goal will not be satisfied by God’s achieving our reasonably believing that God exists. A person can reasonably believe that God exists but loathe God. So God must be careful, even subtle at times, to have God's loving self-manifestation elicit a freely given response of humble love rather than fear, indifference, or arrogance. God cares mainly about what and how we love, not just what we believe. For our own good, God aims that we love God above all else.
Proper moral education toward God’s kind of sacrificial love and reconciliation is difficult noncoercive business. Its important lessons must be shown to us in action rather than simply stated to us in sentences or arguments. We must learn such lessons in living them rather than merely thinking them, for the lessons concern who we are, not just what we think. This holds true especially when our moral educator is God. Accordingly the crucifixion of Jesus, as God’s unique son, offers a noncoercive demonstration of God’s self-giving love toward humans.6 Given the important reality of human free will (a requirement for genuine love), such moral education has no guarantee of success, even when God is the loving educator. Not even God can force genuine loving reconciliation.
We must attune ourselves to evidence of God’s self-revelation. Consider an instance of non-English language: Abba yithqaddash shemakh. Tethe malkuthakh. Lakhman delimkhar, habh lan yoma dhen. [An English translation: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Our bread for tomorrow, give us today.] Perhaps you did not initially apprehend the meaning of this (transliteration of an) instance of Palestinian Aramaic. Perhaps you were not even confident initially that this inscription actually has meaning. The problem, however, lies not in the Aramaic token. It lies rather in the overall perspective of beliefs and other attitudes you bring to this inscription. Call this perspective your receptive attitude. The problem of perceiving meaning lies in your lack of appropriate exposure and sensitivity to Palestinian Aramaic. Clearly, then, the reception of significant evidence sometimes depends on the receptive attitude of people. In particular, failure to receive some evidence stems from psychological facts about the intended recipients, rather than from flaws in the available evidence.
The analogy, in brief, is this: people whose receptive attitude is closed to God's program of all-inclusive renewal by grace may be blinded from the available evidence for the reality of God. The evidence may be readily available, just as our Aramaic inscription is meaningful. We need, however, appropriate “ears to hear and eyes to see” the available evidence. We need a change of receptive attitude to apprehend the available evidence in the right way. This change involves the direction of our lives, including our settled priorities, not just our intellectual assent.
The needed change includes acknowledgment that on our own we humans, individually and collectively, have failed dismally at manifesting God’s all-loving character. This failure occurs in the face of serious challenges to our existence (for example, death), to our well-being (for example, physical and mental decline), and to our moral standing (for example, our tendency to selfishness). These challenges constitute our human predicament. We have no self-made or even self-discovered solution to this predicament. This humbling acknowledgment is significant for our knowing God. It calls for our beginning and continuing a humble filial relationship of acknowledged dependence toward God. Such a relationship demands a renunciation of our supposed independence of God, even in the cognitive domain.
Without suitable openness to transformation toward God’s character, we may be blinded by our own counterfeit “intelligence” and “wisdom.” We will then lack the kind of openness, humility, and filial obedience appropriate to relating, cognitively and otherwise, to the God of the universe. We will have then assigned the authority of God to ourselves or to some other part of creation. In that case, we would be guilty of idolatry, perhaps even a kind of cognitive idolatry where we demand a certain sort of knowledge or evidence of God inappropriate to a filial relationship with God. To the extent that we violate God's program of human volitional transformation, we are slaves to selfishness and need to be set free. Cognitive idolatry can keep us from the needed transformation toward freedom. It often rests on a principle of this sort: Unless God (if God exists) supplies evidence of kind K, God’s existence is too hidden to merit reasonable endorsement. The problem is not with a principle of this form; it is rather with the specification of kind K. If we specify K in a way that disregards the character and intentions of the Hebraic God, thereby protecting ourselves from the divine challenge of transformation, we manifest cognitive idolatry. We then wield a cognitive commitment designed to exclude God. This is the heart of cognitive idolatry.
Our self-protective fear typically yields antipathy toward God. Candidly, philosopher Thomas Nagel reports his fearful hope that God does not exist.7 He avowedly wants a universe without God. Nagel has a “cosmic authority problem” with God. A highly educated atheist acquaintance of mine has a similar attitude toward God. When asked how he would respond if after death he met God directly, he replied that he would immediately kill himself. These are sad cases of our self-protective fears banishing God from human lives. All humans suffer from this problem to some degree. It is the problem of ultimate authority for our lives. We typically want to be, or at least to appoint, the ultimate authority for our lives, as if we had a right to this. We thereby deceive ourselves, blinding ourselves from the supreme reality and authority.
The extent to which we know God depends on the extent to which we are gratefully willing to acknowledge God’s authority and, as a result, to participate in God's program of all-inclusive redemption. So it becomes obvious why we humans (not just atheists and agnostics) have difficulty in knowing God. The difficulty stems from our resisting transformation toward God’s morally perfect all-loving character. So it is simply presumptuous for us humans to approach the question whether God exists as if we were automatically in an appropriate moral and cognitive position to handle it reliably. God is, after all, a very special kind of agent with distinctive purposes, and not a household object or laboratory specimen. We humans cannot easily abide a gracious Being who evades our self-approving cognitive nets.
God cares about how we handle evidence of God's existence. We are to become, in the image of God's character, more loving in handling it. So contrary to a typical philosophical attitude, knowledge of God is not a spectator sport. It is rather part of a process of God’s thorough make-over of a person. It is, from our side of the process, akin to an active commitment to a morally transforming personal relationship rather than to a mere subjective state or disposition. We come to know God only as God becomes our God, the Lord of our lives, rather than just an object of our contemplation, self-indulgence, or amusement. God refuses, for our own good, to become a mere idol of our speculation or entertainment. We manifest dangerous arrogance in assuming that we can have proper knowledge of God without undergoing profound transformation. In proper knowledge of God, knowers must be transformed to become like the known in character.
Proper knowledge of the Hebraic God is inherently ethical and practical rather than simply reflective. Spectators complaining from afar may in fact remain afar by their own self-isolating choice. Knowing God requires one’s apprehending a call to come in from afar and gratefully join God's all-inclusive plan of gracious redemption. This plan is no mere intellectual puzzle for philosophers. God is more serious than our mental gymnastics, for our own good. We have lives to form and to live, not just thoughts to think or intellectual puzzles to solve. God's call, in keeping with the call of Abraham, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Saul of Tarsus, requires that we commit to using our whole lives for the advancement of God's kingdom of sacrificial love. So proper knowledge of God extends to our deepest attitudes and convictions, not just to our thoughts.
The Hebraic God is anything but cognitively “safe,” or controllable. We cannot control either God or God’s hiding on occasion. So we cannot remove God’s hiding with our self-made recipes. The Hebraic God leaves us empty-handed when we insist on seeking with our self-made tools, including familiar recipe-like religious practices. We therefore cannot “solve” the problem of divine hiding if a solution requires a self-made tool to remove such hiding. We are, after all, neither God nor God’s advisers (Isaiah 40:13-14). At best we are God’s obedient children. So we should not be surprised at all that we lack our own devices to banish, or even to explain fully, all cases of God’s occasional hiding.
4. Evidence of God
We have touched on two kinds of knowledge: (i) propositional knowledge that God exists, and (ii) filial knowledge as one's humbly, faithfully, and lovingly standing in a relationship to God as righteously gracious Father. Filial knowledge of God requires propositional knowledge that God exists, but it exceeds propositional knowledge. One can know that God exists, as we noted, but hate God. Filial knowledge of God, in contrast, includes our being reconciled to God (at least to some degree) through a loving filial relationship with God. It requires our entrusting ourselves as children to God in grateful love, thereby being transformed in who we are and in how we exist, not just in what we believe.Filial knowing of God is knowing God as Lord in the second-person, as supreme “You.” Lordship entails supreme moral leadership, and moral leadership entails a call to moral accountability and direction. When self-centered humans are the recipients of God's call, the call is for moral redirection and transformation toward God's character of sacrificial love. Knowing God as Lord requires our surrendering to God as follows: “Not my will, but Your will,” “Not my kingdom, but Your kingdom.” Filial knowing of God thus involves Gethsemane, as the way to the cross, in that it depends on our volitional sensitivity and submission to the will of God. Such knowing requires a genuine commitment to obey God's call, even if the call is to give up one's life in sacrificial love on a criminal's cross. We thus come truly to know God not in our prideful cognitive glory but rather in our own volitional weakness relative to the priority of God's will.8
Are we entitled to know God? In particular, are we entitled to know that God exists without knowing God as Lord, as the morally supreme agent for our lives? Some people uncritically assume an affirmative answer, but this will not settle the issue. An even prior question is: who is entitled to decide how one may know God —we humans or God? Given our moral and intellectual inferiority relative to God, can we reasonably make demands on God in favor of our preferred ways of knowing God? Perhaps God's dispensing of knowledge of God is truly gracious, a genuine gift calling for grateful reception. Many people presume that we have a right to know God, even on our preferred terms. In virtue of what, however, does God owe us revelation and knowledge of God on our preferred terms? God actually owes us no such thing, despite our bold expectations.
God does not owe us any kind of hands-off, personally abstract confirmation of God’s reality, contrary to what Russell apparently assumed. Indeed, God owes us nothing beyond fidelity to a loving character and to the promises stemming from such a character. On due reflection we see that we are in no position to make evidential demands of God beyond such fidelity. Nothing requires that God allow for (i) our propositional knowledge that God exists apart from (ii) our filial knowledge of God. Ideally God promotes the two together. God can be all-loving in supplying evidence of God’s existence in a manner sensitive to human receptivity to filial knowledge of God. God’s loving character does not require that God offer evidence of God susceptible to our trivializing God without being challenged toward volitional transformation. Nobody has shown otherwise. So God’s elusiveness, or hiddenness, does not recommend atheism.
God's ways of imparting knowledge of God may differ significantly from our natural expectations regarding God. How we may know God depends perhaps on what God lovingly wants for us and from us. As knowers we are responsible to God, and not just to ourselves and our antecedent cognitive commitments. Perhaps, moreover, we can truly come to know God only if we acknowledge our unworthiness of knowing God. It may thus be illuminating to ask about the attitudes of people inquiring about God. What are our intentions in having knowledge of God? Do we have a bias against filial knowledge of God? Do we resist knowing God as personal Lord who lovingly holds us morally accountable and expects grateful obedience from us as children of God? Hebraic theism disallows God's being trivialized in the cognitive domain. In filial knowledge of God, we have knowledge of a supreme personal subject, not of a mere object for casual reflection. This is not knowledge of a vague First Cause, Ultimate Power, Ground of Being, or even a Best Explanation. It is rather convicting knowledge of a personal, communicating Lord who demands full grateful commitment from all recipients. Such convicting knowledge includes our being judged, and found unworthy, by God's morally profound love.
Critics will object that God's presence is too ambiguous, at best, to merit reasonable acknowledgment. Surely, God owes us more miraculous signs and wonders, whatever God’s redemptive aims. Why does not God entertain us, once and for all, with some decisive manifestations of God’s awesome power? It would not cost God anything, and it may vanquish nagging doubts about God’s existence. Surely, a truly loving God would use miraculous powers to free us from our doubts. God's redemptive purposes, many will therefore object, do not exonerate God from the charge of excess restraint in manifestation. If God exists, God is blameworthy for inadequate self-revelation.
N.R. Hanson complains about the absence of observable happenings that establish God’s existence. “There is no single natural happening, nor any constellation of such happenings, which establishes God’s existence....If the heavens cracked open and [a] Zeus-like figure ... made his presence and nature known to the world, that would establish such a happening.”9 Hanson observes that nothing like the Zeus-event has ever occurred so as to recommend theism to all reasonable people. He thus concludes that theism lacks adequate warrant for universal acceptance.
We should distinguish morally impotent and morally transforming miraculous signs. Morally impotent miraculous signs can surprise and entertain people but cannot transform their moral character. Morally transforming signs, in contrast, change one's moral character toward the moral character of God. People often seek mere entertainment from visible phenomena, whereas God seeks our moral transformation from the inside out. For our own good, God is not in the entertainment business regarding our coming to know God. Isaiah 58:2 portrays the Hebraic God as complaining about the Israelites that “day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.” The New Testament likewise discourages our seeking after morally impotent signs from God. It promises, however, a morally transforming sign to genuine seekers after God, seekers actively open to moral transformation toward God's moral character. Since this sign is a definitive sign from the God of morally serious love, we should expect it to manifest the character of God: namely, God’s morally serious love. The New Testament confirms this expectation, explicitly and repeatedly. Paul, for example, notes: “Hope [in God] does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts via the Holy Spirit given to us” ( Romans 5:5 ). (See 1 Corinthians 2:4-16 on the role of the Spirit in Paul's epistemology.)10
The presence of God's morally transforming love is the key cognitive foundation for genuine filial knowledge of God. Such love is a foundational source of knowledge of God (cf. Colossians 2:2; 1 Corinthians 8:2-3; Ephesians 3:17-18.) It is real evidence of God's reality and presence. This love is a matter of personal intervention by God and the basis of a personal relationship with God. It is the distinctive presence of a personal God. So the filial knowledge in question rests on morally transforming divine love that produces a loving character in genuine children of God, even if at times such people obstruct God's transformation. This transformation happens to one, in part, and thus is neither purely self-made nor simply the byproduct of a self-help strategy. (I say “in part” given the role of human free will in seeking and responding to God.) This widely neglected supernatural sign is available (at God’s appointed time) to anyone who turns to God with moral seriousness. It transforms one's will not only to have gratitude, trust, and love toward God but also to love others unselfishly. Thus: “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another.... Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 3:14, 4:8, NRSV). So we need to learn how to apprehend, and to be captured by, God's love for all of us, not just truths about God's love. Neither God nor God's love is a proposition or an argument. God and God's love are much deeper, even inexhaustible mysteries.
The evidence of God's presence offered by character transformation in God's children merits serious attention. It goes much deeper than the comparatively superficial evidence found in entertaining signs, wonders, visions, ecstatic experiences, and philosophical arguments. We could consistently dismiss any such sign, wonder, vision, ecstatic experience, or argument as illusory or indecisive, given certain alterations in our beliefs. In contrast, genuine character transformation toward God’s all-inclusive love does not admit of easy dismissal. It bears directly on who one really is, the kind of person one actually is. Such transformation cuts too deeply against our natural tendencies toward selfishness to qualify as a self-help gimmick. It thus offers a kind of firm evidence resistant to quick dismissal.
An all-loving God would make God’s presence available to humans at God’s appointed time. God’s presence, however, need not exceed the presence of God’s morally serious love or be available apart from morally serious inquiry and seeking. In particular, God’s presence need not include miracles irrelevant to moral transformation toward a character of morally serious love, even though God may use such miracles as attention-getters. An all-loving God can properly make confident knowledge of God’s existence arise simultaneously with filial knowledge of God. Accordingly God is exonerated from the charge of irresponsibly refraining from entertaining signs, so long as God reveals God’s presence to anyone suitably receptive. Hanson's use of the Zeus-example overlooks these considerations. In fact, it trivializes God's actual aim. As all-loving, God aims to bring unloving people to love God and others, even enemies. One could not have a more difficult, or a more important, task.
God’s self-revelation of transforming love will take us beyond mere historical and scientific probabilities to a firm foundation of personal acquaintance with God. As Paul remarks, in our sincerely crying out “Abba, Father” to God (note the Jesus-inspired filial content of this cry), God’s Spirit confirms to our spirit that we are indeed children of God (Romans 8:16). We thereby receive God’s personal assurance of our filial relationship with God. This assurance is more robust than any kind of theoretical certainty offered by philosophers or theologians. It liberates a person from dependence merely on the quagmire of speculation, hypothesis-formation, probabilistic inference, or guesswork about God. Such assurance yields a distinctive kind of grounded firm confidence in God unavailable elsewhere. God thus merits credit even for proper human confidence in God (cf. Ephesians 2:8). So humans who boast of their own intellectual resources in knowing God have misplaced boasting. God as Gift-Giver offers the proper confidence we cannot muster on our own.
5. Conclusion
Why, then, isn’t God more obvious? The question suffers from a misplaced emphasis. It should be redirected. Why do we fail to apprehend God’s loving reality and presence? God is hidden only in God’s unique superhuman love. Recall our opening statement of Russell’s reply to God: “God, you gave us insufficient evidence.” In God’s presence, we do well to question ourselves rather than to blame God. In our pride, we often overlook God’s ways of humble love. If our hearts are willingly attuned to God’s self-giving transformative love, God will be obvious enough. We thus need proper eyes to see and ears to hear the reality of God. To that end, we need to call on the Lord, who alone can empower our cognitive and moral appropriation of the things of God. The Hebraic God of love will then answer in love. All things will then become new, under God’s powerful transforming love. Instead of embracing atheism, then, the wise person will seek God with all due diligence and self-sacrifice. So “taste and see that the Lord is good” indeed.
2. See “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker (February 21, 1970), p. 29, cited in Al Seckel, ed., Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1986), p. 11.
3. For detailed discussion of truth-indicators, see Paul Moser, Knowledge and Evidence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and idem, Philosophy After Objectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 4.
4. On the scriptural data, see Samuel Balentine, The Hidden God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), and Samuel Terrien, The Elusive Presence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978). For broader discussion, see Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser, eds., The Hiddenness of God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. For helpful discussion of this theme, see Bernard Cooke, God’s Beloved: Jesus’ Experience of the Transcendent (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), especially pp. 1-24, 103-9.
6. On this theme, see D.M. Ross, The Cross of Christ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1928), and Timothy Jackson, Love Disconsoled (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7. See Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 130.
8. On the important theme of volitional weakness, see Timothy Savage, Power Through Weakness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Gene Davenport, Into the Darkness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988).
9. N.R. Hanson, What I Do Not Believe and Other Essays (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), p. 322.
10. See the discussion of this passage in Richard Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox, 1997). See also the broader epistemological discussion in Paul Moser, Why Isn’t God More Obvious? (Atlanta: RZIM, 2000), and Moser, “Epistemology, Idolatry, and Divine Hiding,” in Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser, eds., The Hiddenness of God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Nobody gives a rats ass.
Might I suggest today is a lousy day to clog up the server with this philosophical debate material?
Might I suggest today is a lousy day to clog up the server with this philosophical debate material?
Because it's a lousy day, server-wise, this is a marker so I don't lose this later.
Jason, just curious: have you read Francis Schaeffer or C.S. Lewis on the predestination/free will question? They really do get right to the nub of the problem.
By all means!! (Suggesting it several times will help underscore how strongly you feel.)
Traffic may be a problem ... one that is only EXACERBATED by repeated postings of the same articles, polling crap, breathless vanities and 'breaking' election news (none of which really matters much until polls are closing).
I don't think the fact some of us are carrying on as normal despite our nation's special day should unduly swamp the server but feel free to do everyone a favor and resist the urge to respond. I wouldn't want you responsible for "clogging up" the latest posts with a response to this when you could ooh (or ahh, as the case may be) over the latest exit poll in Numnuk, USA.
By all means!! (Suggesting it several times will help underscore how strongly you feel.)
Traffic may be a problem ... one that is only EXACERBATED by repeated postings of the same articles, polling crap, breathless vanities and 'breaking' election news (none of which really matters much until polls are closing).
I don't think the fact some of us are carrying on as normal despite our nation's special day should unduly swamp the server but feel free to do everyone a favor and resist the urge to respond. I wouldn't want you responsible for "clogging up" the latest posts with a response to this when you could ooh (or ahh, as the case may be) over the latest exit poll in Numnuk, USA.
Nobody gives a rats ass.
You know ... this makes for a far better FIRST reply on a second thread than 200th reply on the initial thread. Nice shooting, Tex.
And thanks for a highly mystical response whose spirit (and speed) belies its letter.
HTML fix BTTT
That attunement must admit the loss of something and the acceptation of that loss. A child's trust of a parent is natural, but a certain independence kicks in--the child as individual desires to authenticate freedom. Only when that freedom is understood in a context of weakness or loss does it make sense again to attune our hearts.
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