Truth Unites - Divine Hiddenness: My Response to Alex O'Connor

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Gavin Ortlund responds to @CosmicSkeptic Alex O'Connor on the argument from divine hiddenness. See Alex's dialogue with Lukas Ruegger from "Deflate" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vc1AiY_0Ts See Alex's debate speech from his debate with Jonathan McLatchie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu2hvtR5-5M Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

This video is going to be my response to the problem of divine hiddenness, which I'm going to argue is currently the most pressing and intriguing challenge to theism. Because I find this so fascinating and so important, I've worked really hard on this video. I've read a number of books and articles specifically to make this video. It's all, I don't know. I think, I mean, I don't think I'll do anything more with this, so we'll see. And I've written a lengthy script, I've chiseled it down to be as organized as it can possibly be. So as long as this video is, every part has been labored over and organized carefully. I also think the response I'm going to give drawing from Kierkegaard and Pascal is somewhat unique, so I hope this video will serve everyone who watches it.

Even if you're unfamiliar with kind of the philosophical discussion, I think everyone can relate to this argument. If you've ever wondered something like, if God is real, why isn't his existence more obvious to people? You know, why isn't it more clear? Why is it so murky and ambiguous and so forth? If you watch to the end, you'll get a detailed overview of what this argument is and some of the possible responses. We'll go in three steps. First, I want to describe the argument and why it's so interesting, why it's so important, in my opinion, using clips of one proponent who might particularly enjoy watching Alex O'Connor. He's a YouTuber.

He's talked a lot about this argument. Second, we'll address the history of the argument. Is it a new argument or an old argument? That's kind of interesting. That'll be very relevant. third, I'll give three theses by way of response. The key is the third one. So you can skip to that one if you just want the meat.

But here's essentially what I want to argue. Number one, although God's revelation is not so overpowering as to remove all ambiguity, it is adequate for the person who perseveres in sincere openness. And number two, it is plausible that God has morally sufficient reasons for giving, only adequate rather than overwhelming revelation of himself. Okay, let's dive in with the description of the argument here. The most succinct way I can boil it down is to ask this question. How can an all-loving and personal God allow for non-resistant non-belief? We'll define those terms in just a second. So in the philosophical literature, this argument is often traced back to this really important

1993 book by John Schellenberg. We'll be referencing this book a lot as we go, but especially even more than that, his 2015 follow-up. He starts off the 2015 book like this. The existence of God invites our belief less strongly than it would in a world created by God. In many places and times, and for many people, God's existence has been rather less than a clear fact. And according to the hiddenness argument, this is a reason to suppose it is not a fact at all. Some see this argument as the most powerful argument for atheism alongside the problem of evil. Some people see this. It has kind of an interesting relationship to the problem of evil. Some people want to see it as one aspect of the problem of evil, but I think a good case can be made for seeing it as distinct, almost

kind of like a parallel argument to the problem of evil. Now, since this argument is relatively new in its kind of technical life, there's naturally less responses to it, and so that's part of my excitement to make this video. I'm going to put up on the screen how Schellenberg puts his argument as a syllogism in his older book. You can pause and read this if you want, but I want to note that the argument has changed a bit over the years. There's other versions of it. And just for conceptual clarity, what I want to do is put it up really simply. I'm not doing this to try to caricature the argument, but just try to make it clear up front. You could say, one, if a perfectly loving God exists, non-resistant, non-belief would not occur. Two, non-resistant non-belief does occur.

Three, therefore, a perfectly loving God does not exist. There's more to this, and we'll define these terms as we go, what's going to be really important is to get into what is divine love and what is non-resistant non-belief. So to explicate this just a little bit, let me share a little bit of how Alex O'Connor puts it. The non-resistant non-believer is the person who has no objection to entering into a relationship with God and in fact desires it. And this would be someone like myself, I think, like if it's there, I'm here for it. I really am. I'm open to it. That is I'm non-resistant to this belief in God. And so the reason we add that non-resistant clause is to prevent somebody from saying, well, maybe you're just sort of hardening your

heart or something like this. As long as there is a single example, just one, of a truly non-resistant non-believer, then it seems that the theist needs to explain why it is that God would hide his face from them, or at least give us plausible reason to think that there could be such a reason. And here's how he states it in a debate that he had. I moved into a house for a year with two devoutly Christian housemates, with the express intention of seeing if the obvious truth of Christianity and theism that people like to talk about can be found in the minutia of daily life. I have looked, in other words, in a great deal of places. I read Athanasius and Anselm. I read Augustine and Aquinas. I looked in Julian of Norwich

and Catherine of Siena. I looked at the sociological origin of religious belief in Dirkheim and Marx, and Freud and Young. I looked at religious experience in William James and Rudolph Otto. I've looked in the modern works of people like Ed Faser and Bill Craig and Michael Murray and Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga. I've looked in poetry. I've looked in the Psalms. I've looked in Job. I've looked in Ecclesiastes. I've looked in Dostoevsky. I read C.S. Lewis. I listened to worship music. I prayed. I studied the gospel. I even got an actual degree in theology from a university. And nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not once, not nearly, not ever, not even briefly have I experienced anything that speaks to the existence.

of a god in the universe. Now, unfortunately, there were a lot of uncharitable responses to Alex's comments from theists, and I just want to encourage people not to psychoanalyze other people. That's not productive or helpful. I think it's better to just take Alex's words at face value. And I really like him. I enjoy listening to him, so I'm going to try and engage with him respectfully, and I hope is he feels honored by the way I make this response video.

Here's another clip. Of course, I'm an atheist, right? I think that this is sort of interesting from a philosophical perspective, but if I were a Christian, I would think that this is not where I would expect to find the focal point of the Christian faith. This is supposed to be about a relationship. I think, look, if God has not revealed himself through prayer or reflection or through religious experience, it'd be very bizarre indeed for me to kind of put my eye down a microscope, look at like a particular way that an atom wriggles or something. You go, oh, there he is.

It would be a very strange place for him to reveal himself. And so I wouldn't expect. So when I say that sort of the natural theological arguments that they're argumentatively sound, I think they are. But they don't move me. And I don't think they move a lot of people. And I think if you ask people why they convert to Christianity or to theism from atheism, very rarely do they report that it's because they sat down and read a particular argument in the Blackwell companion to natural theology. Sometimes that is part of a wider picture. Okay.

So these comments from Alex get at why I find this particular argument so refreshing and interesting. It's a bit more of a human and relatable argument. For me, someone who has kind of an existentialist bent, I appreciate how this argument seems interested in real life. You know, it takes the pressure a little bit off of purely abstract reasoning, and it's sensitive to how life actually works and we actually make decisions. Like the problem of evil. The problem of divine hiddenness is kind of, you could say it's both local and global.

You know, it's both emotional and personal as well as kind of philosophical. And, you know, everybody can relate to this. Everybody can relate to this problem. Here's how one of the characters puts it in one of John Updike's novels. If God wanted his tracks discovered, wouldn't he have made them plainer? Why tuck them away into odd bits of astronomy and nuclear physics? Why be so coy if you're the deity? Who can't relate to that question, right? Or who can't relate to this scene in The Gray where Liam Neeson's character cries out to God and hears nothing in return?

Show me something real! I need it now, not later, now. Show me and I believe in you till the day I die. I swear, I'm calling on you. What honest person can't admit we've had moments like that in our life, you know? Every honest believer has that poignant anguish at times where there's an unanswered prayer, and a lot of times it collapses on you like an avalanche, where God seems so elusive and unavailable right when they're suffering in crisis.

And honest believers have often been through that and can admit that. Now, later in the video, I'll share a journal entry of mine in my own struggle with this argument. But first, back to Alex. You know, I think there's a great deal of good evidence in terms of what is argumentatively sound.

You know, the fine-tuning argument, you can make responses to it, but yeah, it's a powerful consideration. Why are the content so finely tuned? The argument from reason seems to be a powerful, sort of undercutting, reason to sort of distrust our very reasoning faculties on atheism, these kinds of things. I think they are powerful argumentatively in a kind of academic sense that they're easy to defend

and difficult to argue against. I really appreciate these reasonable concessions about theistic proofs, and I would ask viewers to bear those comments from Alex in mind as we go forward. That is the particular mentality that I'm addressing in this video. If someone is watching this and they think theism is completely stupid and not even worth engaging, then this video really won't be addressing that person. I'm interested in this video in engaging someone who's kind of uncertain. You know, they can kind of see it both ways and they think it's kind of ambiguous.

Does God exist or not? You know, they're not sure. And so this is another reason why I find the hiddenness argument a little more intriguing, a little more interesting. It's a more modest and reasonable argument. some of the more aggressive expressions of atheism have a kind of fundamentalist flair to them. The divine hiddenness argument is more careful, and I think that's to its credit. Schellenberg, let me reference how he ends this whole book. It's absolutely fascinating.

He emphasizes that the argument is only against traditional theism, a personal god, as envisioned in like the Abrahamic religions, for example, it's not against the broader category of which that is one species. of belief in some kind of supernatural entity, what he calls ultimism. So, in fact, the whole book ends on a kind of mystical, quasi-religious note. He says, we may have only dipped our toes so far in an ocean of religious possibilities. And he basically concludes the whole book saying, once you know traditional theism is wrong, then you can explore what ultimate reality really will be like.

That's the final sentence of the book that's on the screen right now. So I find this more interesting and a little less triumphalist, a little more open-minded, you know, and I find that helpful because the question of God is the most important question in our lives. It's not helpful when theists and atheists pour scorn and contempt upon one another. We should actually try to help each other and serve each other because there could be nothing more important than the topic of this video. Broadly, you know, the question of God and faith. Here's a particularly good turn of phrase from Alex.

I don't like to think of divine hiddenness as a response to theism, as much as I like to think of theism as a response to divine hiddenness. And here are Alex's final, very powerful comments in that same dialogue. Show Alex, which finally, you know. All I'm asking for is something just like what Paul experienced. I tell you, Justin, if I experience, even just in the form of a flash of light, like St. Paul, although, you know, dubious circumstances, I have to say, but even something just like that, just once, one time.

Listen, here I am and then gone. I could live on that for the rest of my entire life. Just, just, because a lot of people say, well, one reason why God is hiding himself is because if he made himself, you know, constantly present in your life, it would like have, be like having a father figure staring over your shoulder. I agree, but I'm not asking for God to sort of hold my hand through this lived experience. I'm asking once. Just, and not even, not even for like an overwhelming religious experience with a big waterfall and,

you know, I fall to my need, but just, just enough to form a belief that he exists. If I can have just that just once, then I'll become the most prolific Christian apologist that you've ever met. Okay, now before I dive in and give my three theses in response to Alex, I want to do one brief section of the video. There will be timestamps, so you can skip this if you don't want it. But this is important. And I want to basically point out that divine hiddenness is an ancient problem. In its academic life, in its life in philosophy journals and so forth, you could think of it as 30 years old, three decades old, going back to 1993. to the Schellenberg text. But, and certainly, I mean, there's no doubt that the argument has flared up.

In the modern world, this argument is really hot right now, and that's one reason I find it so intriguing. It really dovetails with the purpose of my channel. So the purpose of my channel is to try to promote assurance in the gospel and to alleviate intellectual anxiety. And this argument taps into the anxieties of the modern world. It seems perfectly suited. especially among like millennials and Gen Z. There's so many people who have this sense of perplexity at religious pluralism, at the glut of information produced by the internet.

So many things about the modern world just make it hard to know what is the truth, and we feel stuck. Lots of people feel like that. Divine hiddenness argument kind of taps into that, I think. But, so in other words, divine hiddenness argument is new in crucial respects, but it's actually also a part of the human

it's actually also a part of the tradition of faith. In the Judeo-Christian tradition specifically, this is a theme of scripture. You think of Job, you think of lamentations. You know, in other words, what's new is the implication for atheism, but the problem itself of divine hiddenness is not new. Think of the Psalms, Psalms of Lament, over and over. I'll put up some examples on the screen. You can see where the Psalms, and this is part of Israel's worship,

and they're saying, God, where are you? Why have you forsaken me? Suffice to say that the emotions from that scene in the movie The Grey are not a new feeling. That's not a new emotional struggle. I'll never forget preaching through Psalm 88, perhaps the darkest of all the Psalms, and it ends by simply saying, darkness is my closest friend. It suddenly hit me in my sermon prep that this is a poem. It's carefully crafted, and it's designed for liturgical use for worship. This is not a random Israelite just venting in his journal. This was a part of Israel's faith. At the end of his classic study of divine hiddenness in the Old Testament, Samuel

Valentine notes, the experience of God's hiddenness appears to have been an integral part of Israel's faith from an early period. Divine hiddenness is also a theme of historic theology. Some have called Blaze Pascal, the great 17th century thinker, the great theologian of the hiddenness of God. Pascal pointed out the ambiguity and drama of a partial veiling and partial unveiling is a specifically, characteristically Christian claim. This is the drama of Christianity,

a God who sort of sneaks into his creation as one person within it, and he doesn't come with fanfare and trumpets, he comes into a manger with the donkeys. What do the prophets say about Jesus Christ? That he will plainly be God? No, but that he will not be recognized, that people will not believe that it is he, that he will be a stumbling block on which many will fall, etc. Let us not then be criticized for lack of clarity since we openly profess it. Pascal was fond of quoting Isaiah 4515, which speaks of God as a hidden God. And then he said, this is why Scripture promises that those who seek God will find him. What would be the point of seeking God to find him if he's completely undeniable. And he talked about how God is not like the Noonday Sun. You know, this is part of the way God has set up the world. We'll come back to Pascal later. We'll also mention John of the Cross's idea of the Dark Night of the Soul a little later. But let me mention two other examples more recently that are about this idea that the hiddenness of God is a part of faith.

C.S. Lewis. One of my favorite books of his. I love C.S. Lewis. But one of my favorite books is His Grief Observed. He wrote this book in the final years of his life, two to three years before he died, and he was so raw in his articulation of the problem of divine hiddenness and the acute psychological anguish that had put him in that people didn't believe he could be the author, because it was initially published under a pseudonym, and people thought, surely, a seasoned, famous Christian apologists couldn't struggle that much. Mother Teresa of Calcutta's journal entries were published about 10 years after her death, and they contained passages like the following. Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me, the child of your love, and now become as the most hated one.

The one you have thrown away as unwanted, unloved. I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer, no one on whom I can cling. No, no one alone, the darkness is so dark. The problem of divine hiddenness is not something that weak believers experience. It's something that the strongest of believers experience, and it's replete throughout Scripture, in fact, to push it one step further. The central moment in Christianity is an experience of divine hiddenness. Jesus's crucifixion, but more specifically the so-called cry of dereliction, where perhaps in the blackest moment of all, Jesus quotes Psalm 221 saying, God, why have you forsaken me? Can you imagine what it would be like to hear that? You know, there's this poignant scene in the book, Peralondra, where a character

has to go fight another character called the unman, basically, it's a demon inhabiting an evil character, and the demon impersonates the cry of dereliction. He quotes it, and Ransom realizes, he's not quoting, he's remembering. It's very poignant scene, you know. So just think about this. Even if Christianity is false, surely that moment, Jesus crying out those words on the cross, is the most poignant experience of divine hiddenness in all history. even if you say Christianity is false.

I mean, surely Jesus existed. Most people don't doubt that. Most people don't doubt that he was crucified. So divine hiddenness was the pinnacle experience of suffering of Jesus. So, you know, all that is just to try to set us up here to say two things. Number one, that none of this answers Alex yet. We're not into the answer yet. Okay.

We're just getting historical backlog. But it does two things. Number one, it honors and legitimizes Alex's concern. his argument. Whatever else we say, the one thing we can't say, the one thing we know we can rule out right out of way, right away, is any dismissiveness toward this issue, any glibness, complacency, formulaic answers that lack compassion. All of that will be disastrous. This argument, and Alex and his articulation of it, Schellenberg and others, puts its finger on a real human struggle that every honest person should be humble before. Second, because the problem,

of divine hiddenness is acutely agonized over in the tradition of faith without leading people to deny God's existence. That really only starts mainly in the 20th century, a little before with like Nietzsche, for example. That raises a question. Traditionally, historically, how did people of faith harmonize divine hiddenness and divine love? And to develop that, here I offer three theses. The first two are more cautionary. They're just designed to kind of put a foot in the door and keep the conversation going. The third one is the is this more substantive one. The thesis one, the problem of divine hiddenness, especially in its stronger deductive forms, tends to over-centralize and sentimentalize divine love while under-emphasizing other divine attributes like divine transcendence. Let's call this thesis

the expectations about divine love thesis. So if we take this premise, that if a perfectly loving God exists, then there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. The concern that I would like to articulate here in this thesis is not just with the truth of the premise, but also more probingly with how we could ever measure whether that is true. To put it simply, who gets to decide what a perfectly loving God will do? Here's how Alex puts it in his debate. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving, something I'm pretty sure Jonathan agrees with. Premise 2. If a perfectly loving God exists, non-resistant non-belief does not occur.

Premise 3. Non-resistant non-belief does occur. 4. Therefore, no perfectly loving God exists. And the conclusion from the first premise is that therefore there is no God. A loving God, like the Christian God, would surely not refuse any willing person from developing a relationship with him. And so if somebody is truly non-resistant and open to receiving God's grace, we should expect them to receive it. Now, with this phrase, perfectly loving, a certain set of expectations is being placed upon God. As Michael Ray puts it, the problem of divine hiddenness, like the problem of evil, is fundamentally a problem of violated expectations. But I think more caution is needed in setting these expectations.

Like the problem of evil, when it's stated in a deductive form, as Schellenberg, for example, puts it, it's problematic because it assumes to know what God would do. But given that God is infinite and we are finite, it wouldn't actually be surprising at all for God to relate to us in ways that are surprising. And it may well be that there are reasons for divine hiddenness that we can't currently see or fully see. There's a danger in demanding that God show love to us and be open to relationship with us on our terms and on our time scale. We need to be a bit more tough-minded about how divine love will function, and we need to allow for a divine love that is capable of surprising us, even bewildering us at times. In fact, depending on how

tight the expectations are set, there can be a danger of a certain level of presumptuousness in how we are putting expectations on God. For example, earlier we noted how Schellenberg's book concludes on a kind of mystical note. So he references an ocean of religious possibilities. he even allows for a transcendent reality that could include some personal elements. He says, quote, perhaps such a reality would even in some way include personal elements. It need not be impersonal, though if the ism is false, it could not be defined by them. So this is a very specific conclusion to draw. The ultimate reality, he thinks, could include personal elements but not be defined by personal

elements. Why cut it off there? Why set the boundaries just there precisely? What kind of person is being ruled out here? What kind of personal elements could be involved? How does he know this? You know, this is actually an act of faith in human intuition to conclude from the problem of divine hiddenness that this specific kind of transcendent reality is ruled out, especially because the intuitions that inform the divine hiddenness argument turn out to be pretty modern and pretty Western. As we've noted, very few non-Western or pre-modern people have been persuaded that divine hiddenness amounts to a good

argument against the existence of God. So why should we assume that modern Western intuitions about the nature of divine love are right and Eastern and pre-modern intuitions are wrong? The ancient Hebrew mindset about divine love, for example, involves kind of a more ambiguous state. So it takes Psalm 139. Alex mentions Psalm 139 a great deal in his debate. Where can I go from your presence? Or where can I flee from your spirit? This poem in its entirety is given by the NRSV a title, The Inescapable God. It's a message of bold reassurance to the believer, reminding them that since God is present everywhere, pervading every inch of our universe, he is in the happiest sense possible. Inescapable.

But the same person who wrote Psalm 139, Where Shall I flee from your presence, also wrote Psalm 22, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In the ancient Hebrew mindset, there's enough complexity to allow for both, Psalm 139 and Psalm 22, a God who is both ever-present and loving, while also transcendent and incalculable. So if God is indeed both, transcendent and loving, more humility is needed in our expectations of what God will do. As Joseph Minich puts it, God's revelation is about God's rather than humanity's goals. And it is not humanity, therefore, who determines what a fitting amount of clarity might be. Humanity's purposes may well be at odds with those of God.

So let me give a metaphor to show this. In his book, Schellenberg uses the metaphor of an adopted child looking for her biological mother, and the biological mother is in the area and knows that the child is looking for her, but doesn't take any action. And this is taken to be like a hidden God. Now, as we'll get into a bit later, I don't think that's fair because there's disinology here in that the mother is not reaching out to the child, but we would say God is reaching out to us adequately, though not overpoweringly, as we'll get into more, through conscience, through creation, through Christ, for example. So again, we don't think God is completely hidden. But we'll get to that later. Leave that aside for now. Here's the point for now. Here's a different metaphor you might

consider. Do you remember the character Old Man Marley in Home Alone? At the beginning of the movie, Kevin is terrified of him because his brother Buzz says that he is a serial killer called the South Bend Shovel Slayer. But later, Kevin discovers that his expectations were wrong. He's actually a benevolent character, and at the end of the movie, he saves Kevin from the wet bandits. Okay, kind of a childish example. I love the movie Home Alone. But there's a genuine point here, and that is, if we can have false expectations about what a loving person will do when it comes to other human beings, how much more is that possible with an infinite God? Old man Marley was loving, but plausibly he had no obligation to make sure Kevin knew that right away.

It became apparent with time. Similarly, in our lives, there's a narrative element to the problem of divine hiddenness. Our lives are not over yet. We haven't seen everything yet. We're not infinite. We don't necessarily know how it's all going to shake out. So just as we need to adjust our expectations to plot changes in a movie, so also in this world. Now, please understand what I've said thus far is very modest.

I'm just trying to knock this argument down a few pegs, especially when it's stated as a deductive argument. And this second thesis will be even more modest. Thesis two, the problem of divine hiddenness, especially in its stronger deductive forms, exaggerates or speaks with unwarranted confidence about non-resistant non-belief. Let's call this point the non-resistant non-belief naivety thesis. Okay, now this point is going to apply to Schellenberg more than Alex. Schellenberg puts his argument as a deductive argument, that is an argument in which the premises entail the conclusion,

and he speaks very confidently of it, especially in his 2015 book. Now, I'm not going to be arguing that there is no non-resistant non-belief right here. Non-resistant non-belief is the position of those who are open to believing in God, and capable of believing in God, but don't believe in God. But I do want to say, I think Schellenberg and perhaps others exaggerate the degree of that. Schellenberg sees that as very common. He almost sees non-resistant, non-belief as kind of the default.

So, for example, in the ancient world, before Abraham, say 10,000 years before Christ. He speaks of people in that time, and he says, these are people who don't believe in God, and how could they be resistant? It's not even possible, since resistance of God presupposes thinking about God, in their whole picture of the world is shaped in such a way that thinking about God just won't happen. But I think this is problematic. Schellenberg appears to be assuming that until monotheistic Abrahamic religion arose, people could not have had a sufficient knowledge of God to be resistant to that knowledge. That is very far from clear. Many particular individual ancient people

did have a conception and even ancient religions of a supreme deity, even a creator deity, who was superior to all the other deities. So there is that. Now Schellenberg anticipates that and he says, yeah, but he quotes Robin Wright's work to the effect that, yeah, but this supreme deity didn't control the other gods. But the thing is, you don't need to have perfect knowledge of God in order to have enough knowledge of God to be resistant to that knowledge. You could be wrong about whether the high God or the supreme God controls other gods and still be living in resistance to that entity. More basically, Schellenberg arguably focuses only on special revelation here to the neglect of general revelation through creation and conscience, which often yield a dim or

indirect knowledge of God, but nonetheless a genuine knowledge of God that can be resisted. The theologian John Calvin spoke of the sense of divinity that is planted in the human heart. It's possible to have knowledge of God through conscience. We're going to talk a lot about conscience in this video. And you can have a relationship with God, including potentially resistance to God, without necessarily consciously thinking about God, certainly not without thinking of imperfectly, with perfect theology. And that would apply not only to ancient people, but to modern people as well.

Now, this might seem strange, but a lot of very good philosophy. philosophers have argued for this. Michael Ray says, it is possible to participate in a relationship with God without knowing that one is doing so, and indeed without knowing or even believing that God exists. You might wonder, well, how can that work? Well, here's how C. Stephen Evans puts it, using an analogy. Suppose I am in a dark room and suddenly come in contact with a furry animal. The animal is, in fact, my dog, and thus I am aware of my dog through the sense of touch. However, it is clearly possible that I might not recognize my dog as my dog, or even, as a dog. I might mistakenly think he is some other dog or even that he is some other kind of animal. I think that something similar is true in the case of God as well. It is possible to be aware of God without being aware of God as God. Now if this seems like a cop-out, okay, consider the fact that God is unique as our creator. He's not just another visible object within our world. So it shouldn't be shocking if our relationship to God and our knowledge of God is also unique in some ways, perhaps more inward and personal in some ways.

For example, Christians believe that we're constantly relating to God in the most intimate way possible through conscience, and we can resist him and know him at that level. Here's how William Wainwright puts it. If I don't believe that God exists, I can't respond to God under that description, but it doesn't follow that I can't respond to God. In the symposium, Plato argues that our response to goods is or can be a response to the good. According to traditional Christianity, however, God is the good. When the non-believer responds to the good she sees, she may therefore be responding to God himself.

Now look, someone can make a counter-argument. They could say, no, no, no, you must have explicit and conscious knowledge of God in order to be resistant to God. You could argue for that, but so often that seems to be simply assumed. more caution is needed in claims about non-resistant non-belief. Schellenberg, for example, talks about how, well, a lot of modern people come to doubt in God because of an infusion of new information and therefore that can't be motivated by resistance, but that doesn't follow at all. You could totally disbelieve in God because of new information and it still be the result of

resistance or there still be some elements of resistance in it. If that seems unduly cynical, consider this statistic that Alex mentions. There are people who come to this debate with their minds already made up. There are people who want it not to be true that God exists, and in fact wouldn't submit to that truth even if it were true. There was a recent poll run by the Atheist Experience YouTube channel, which I know, Jonathan, you're a fan of, which asked, if there was a god, would you worship it?

To which an astonishing 85% of respondents said that they would not. Now, 85% is a high number. But, of course, Alex sees himself differently. He sees himself as a non-resistant, non-believer, and he piles up lots of experiences that he's had and, you know, living with certain people who are believers, reading certain books, and so forth. All of those things are admirable.

I really respect Alex for doing those things, and I could see how they could be personally convincing. But again, I think more caution is needed about leveraging from non-resistant non-belief to an argument for another person. Claims about non-resistance are ultimately claims about a state of mind which are unverifiable. Just as, you know, in my life, I've experienced not overpowering, but some genuine things that have incumulative weight with other things, increased my confidence that God does exist, his provision in my life, a sense of his presence at times.

Again, it's not been overtly miraculous all the time, but that's been my experience. Just as I wouldn't leverage that experience to someone else to try to say, therefore, you have to believe, because it's just in my experience. The non-believer shouldn't leverage their own claims of non-resistance to someone else in a kind of conclusive argument. Not only do we not have certain knowledge about the state of mind of someone else, I think if we're honest, we might even be uncertain about our own state of mind. It's possible to not know whether you're fully resistant or not, or perhaps to find that your state of mind is conflicted. Maybe it's 60-40, you know, maybe one part of you is resistant to God and another part isn't. Maybe I could be emotionally

open to God when I'm depressed, but resistant to God when it comes to surrendering control of my finances. Maybe it could oscillate back and forth. Many of us who are believers have this experience that we're, you know, maybe on Tuesday I'm more open to God, but by Thursday I'm trying not to think about him, you know. The reality is we are very complicated. This topic is deeply personal. We're not totally objective, we're not even totally self-aware, so we need more caution about how much we are going to leverage from a claim of non-resistance. Again, I think the realm of conscience could provide a good analog for the complexity of this. Consider how we relate to goodness. It's extremely common for human beings to be resistant to some good thing while not consciously thinking that they're

resisting. Most of us don't say, I'm choosing evil right now. We find a way to rationalize it, to justify it. We might deceive ourselves into thinking, that's not so bad, you know, well, similar dynamics can occur in our relationship with God if he does exist. We'll talk more about conscience later, but the point is just to notice two very modest things. Schellenberg's assumption that we cannot know God unless we have explicit beliefs about him is questionable, and it's naive to say that we can speak with confidence about non-resistant belief in ourselves, certainly in others. Here's one third consideration before we move on to the next thesis, and that's it's also problematic to assume that we have no control over our beliefs.

This is a part of claims of non-resistance. You know, Alex at one point was kind of saying, look, I don't know why I don't believe. It's a good question, right? And the claim is frequently made among proponents of the divine hiddenness argument that we simply can't help our beliefs. Schellenberg puts it plainly saying that believing is involuntary. But again, I think more caution is needed. Human psychology is more complicated than this. We may not be able to control our cognitive beliefs,

but our will and our behavior and even our relationships do have some degree of influence upon them. Augustine taught that volition precedes belief, and a lot of modern psychologists would agree with that. We're not just at the mercy of our beliefs. So like as a metaphor, consider your friend at work tells you that he wants to get a divorce, and his reason is, I don't believe that my wife loves me. And you're friends with him and you've vacationed with them before, and you don't think this is true. And you build a decent case against him. You say, look what she did for your anniversary.

Look at the birthday party she threw for you. Look at the way she talks about you. Look at the way she's been faithful to you. And the husband responds by saying, well, I just don't believe it and I can't help my beliefs. At a certain point, you might feel compelled to invite your friend to consider his responsibility to act in accordance with the data, even if his subjective interpretation is unpersuaded. Or here's a little more of an urgent metaphor. You work at a restaurant with someone and you're closed together on Friday nights,

and each time you're the last two in the restaurant cleaning up, and they drink too much alcohol each time before they drive home. And you start to notice this and you confront them and you say, look, you shouldn't drink and drive. You're putting other people at risk. And they say, well, I just don't believe that I am doing anything wrong. I'm not resistant. I just don't believe it. I can't help my beliefs. Now, you probably have to kick things up a notch and say, look, you're not just at the mercy of your beliefs. Let me show you some

sociological data about what happens to your brain when you're drinking and then driving, and maybe you could show them charts and graphs about how many people die each year from that and that kind of thing. And at a certain point, again, they have a responsibility to respond to the data. Now, those are just metaphors. I'm just, I'm not trying to apply them directly. to anybody. I'm just trying to make a very simple point that we're not just at the mercy of our beliefs. And similarly, when it comes to God, we do seem to have some pretty strong testimonies that God or something like God is probably out there. And we might get to a point in considering them where we say, look, maybe I don't feel belief all the time, but I have a responsibility to start

acting in response to the data. I won't really get into these points in this video. I've done other videos going through arguments for the existence of God. I often like to put them into the categories of creation, conscience, and Christ. I like that because it puts it at different levels. Emmanuel Kant spoke of the starry host above and the moral law within, as two different testimonies for God. I like that because they're very diverse testimonies. One is very inward and personal, the other is very kind of distant and so forth. God has, according to Christianity, God has revealed himself in both general corporate historical ways, like through Jesus, as well as in specific and personal ways, like through conscience.

And I'm not going to make arguments for that right now. I actually think these theistic arguments are pretty compelling. I remember going through my own process of studying them and just being amazed. You know, take the fine-tuning argument. It's just astonishing that the physical constants of our universe are so precisely set, such that our world is life-permitting. It seems like the main candidates for that would be design, necessity, or chance. And it doesn't seem to be necessary.

We can easily imagine our universe being different. But chance also seems just so arbitrary. I remember reading through the literature on this and being amazed that the top alternatives to the fine-tuning argument yielding God is the outcome is the multiverse theory. There's just many universes and we happen to be in the right one. And I thought that is just as much of an act of faith. You know, we can't prove that either. Or take the argument from contingency.

This is very intuitively powerful. It really does seem to make sense that there's some kind of uncaused first, cause. That's very intuitively powerful. You listen to the responses to that. A lot of these responses, they're not, or take the moral argument. I did a video on this a few months back, surveying how academic philosophers try to account for objective morality apart from God. And I just pointed out, these are very explanatorily brute. They all boil down to just saying that's just the way it is. I'm not in this video trying to defend those theistic proofs. If someone else wants to dispute those, that's fine. We can have that discussion.

But I already mentioned how Alex acknowledges there's some degree. of plausibility to these. So the appeal that I'm making in this video is this. If you become convinced that the existence of God is more probable than not, you're not simply at the mercy of those remaining doubts. A reasonable course of action could be to act on that probability and then persevere in sincere openness while you're taking that action. More on that in the conclusion. Okay, now please hear me. These first two theses have been very modest. We've mainly tried to just knock the argument from Divine Hiddenness down a few pegs, showing that as a deductive argument that requires the conclusion, it's overstated. But we haven't yet necessarily given a really

full or satisfying answer. So Alex O'Connor could say to me at this point, okay, fine, given the danger of naivety about non-resistant non-belief, and given the problem of expectations about divine love, it's possible that God exists, but why should I or anyone else take it as probable. In other words, even if the problem of divine hiddenness doesn't work as a deductive argument, why doesn't it work as, say, an abductive argument that is an inference to the best explanation? Fair enough. So now let's get to the heart of the matter. Thesis three, it is plausible that God has morally sufficient reasons for revealing himself in just the way that he has. In other words, it's plausible that a partially hidden, partially revealed God is actually a good thing, maybe even

the best possible way for God to reveal himself to us. Let's call this the hiddenness has some perks thesis. So as an entry point, let's consider alternative ways that God could reveal himself to us. Suppose God were to do a miracle every day at 5 p.m. where the clouds formed the words, I am God, I exist. Would this be the ideal way for God to relate to us? Or suppose we could think of lots of scenarios like this. One of the ones Kirkcichard gives is suppose the incarnation that when God became a man in Jesus Christ happened and the man was six yards tall. Just super giant, you know. You can think of lots of things like this, where God reveals himself in more overpowering

and overtly miraculous ways. The question is, is that better than how it is now? Is it the case? That the clearer the evidence, the better. I want to give two reasons why it's plausible, why that's not the case. overtly miraculous scenarios like that aren't necessarily better than a partially hidden revelation. Number one, a partially hidden revelation is better for us. And number two, it's more in line with the divine nature. First, a more overtly miraculous revelation would plausibly not be good

for us. So to explicate this point, we'll get into Pascal and Kirkregard, and here's where I'll share my own testimony. I can remember struggling with the problem of divine hiddenness when I was in college. I discovered existentialist philosophy, and I deeply resonated with its emphasis upon being hurled into existence, but ill-equipped for existence. And just the bizarre, the preposterousness of this scenario, you know, I didn't choose to be born, but here I am, and now I have to decide how to live. And what I need to live my life is some kind of certainty, but that's the one thing I don't have. Every effort to understand life produces something less than certainty. One night I wrote this in my journal, the only thing worse than the pain of life is, its utter randomness. We are hurled into consciousness and struggle without any explanations or answers

to accompany them. Life is like a test we are forced to take, the answers of which are impossible for us to know. The blanks with which we fill in the questions of life are at best guesses, and usually merely unexamined prejudices. Life is like a battle which we are forced to fight, but the objective of which is unclear to us. We are hurled into the contest, but unsure of what is required of us. We sense that we must strive, but we are unsure to what end we strive or by what means the great dilemma of life is not its failure or pain, but its uncertainty and chaos. I finally had a breakthrough, and it was in this consideration. What if that very state of affairs exists for a reason? What if this very anguish is productive in some respect? In my reading

of Christians who spoke most eloquently about the nature of faith, I discovered that these were the ones who also best understood the angst of the human situation, especially Blaise Pascal and Sorin Kierkegaard. Pascal described the preposterousness of the human condition that results from divine hiddenness. It's very similar to how I was feeling. He said nature presents to me nothing, which is not a matter of doubt and anxiety. If I saw nothing there, which revealed a divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion. If I saw everywhere the signs of a creator, I would remain peacefully in faith, but seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied. He's basically saying, I wish with all my heart that it was one or the other, either clearly

in favor of God or clearly against him. Kierkegaard, similarly talked about the anxiety of the uncertainty about the ultimate question. I contemplate the order of nature in the hope of finding God and I see omnipotence and wisdom, but I also see much else that disturbs my mind and excites my anxiety. The sum of all this is an objective uncertainty. But both of them ultimately says, say, that's what we need. A partially veiled and partially unveiled revelation of God creates the best conditions for genuine relationship with God in the long run. Kirkegaard compared this to his own writerly strategy of indirect communication. One of the things I've written a lot about with Kirkegaard is how he writes with all these pseudonyms and just how fascinating that is, and he does

that to try to arouse the reader's subjectivity. Well, interestingly, Kierkegaard thinks that God communicates indirectly as well. He compares God to an elusive author, saying no anonymous author can more cunningly conceal himself than God. He is in the creation and present everywhere in it, but directly he is not there. Nature is indeed the work of God, but only the handiwork is directly present, not God. Then he compares God to an elusive author, and he goes on to say, you know, if the incarnation happened with someone who was six yards tall, that would get our attention, but he says that wouldn't be good for us. For both Kirkagard and Pascal, life is not just a philosophical problem to be solved.

Life is better understood as a drama or romance or adventure, which must necessarily have angst and struggle. Life is the coming to be of the soul, and a full unveiling would not meet that need. In fact, sometimes it would be counterproductive. Pascal points out that our fundamental need in relation to God is not ignorance but sin. A full unveiling wouldn't touch that. He says, God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will. If God gave perfect clarity, we might be convinced but not be softened.

We might know God but relate to him in pride. And God is interested not just that we believe in him, but why we believe in him, how we relate to him. For Pascal, a true relationship with God requires humility, and that is better served by the diligent searching that is involved in a partial revelation than it is by the complacent awareness that would be brought about by a constant bombardment of direct miracles. Quote, it is not only right but useful for us that God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his wretchedness without knowing God.

So you see there this idea that there's something productive that is happening in this process of God being not fully unveiled before us, like he will be on Judgment Day, for example, according to what Christians believe. So you think about it like this. If God were to write out in the sky, I am God believe in me through the clouds or dirt or something like that, would that really produce virtue and charity and patience and character in our hearts? Is that really what we need? The mystic John of the Cross famously developed this idea of the dark night of the soul. He said, since the intellect cannot understand the nature. of God, it must journey and submission to him rather than by understanding. Now, Schellenberg talks

about this, and he sees this as a valid category for someone who already has a relationship with God as a kind of secondary hiddenness, but he says, well, but it can't work for someone who's not yet a believer. But I think that response lacks imaginative sympathy. Why limit the possible value of a dark night of the soul only to someone who already has a relationship with God? Plus, as most of us think that everyone has some kind of relationship with God already. Again, the limitations seem a bit presumptuous. How could someone know that? You know? The Dark Night of the Soul is good for this person, but it isn't good for this person. It seems like that's going beyond what we could know. Now, I realize how frustrating this can be. Someone might be out there thinking,

I just wanted to be clear, you know? But think about it in terms of other human relationships. So common metaphors for divine hiddenness in the literature are a parent, a surgeon, or a lover. Using the parent imagery, we can just observe that psychologists tell us that it's imperative for an infant's development, that the parent not always be present to immediately meet every need. The infant needs to grow through the absence of their parent as well as through their presence. A parent who's constantly present is not good for the infant. or in adult relationships, you can find similar dynamics, even apart from relationships in all of life. Most happiness and truth comes to us through experiences that involve surprise and surrender and risk.

Think about romance. If you're trying to win a girl over that you like, you don't just tell her your full intentions the first time you meet. That would probably freak her out. There's a process, and that relationship will be ambiguous at points. There will be drama. There will be angst. A demand for immediate certainty would be counterproductive to the overarching goal. Similarly, a genuine relationship with God does not issue forth from intellectual certainty.

It's something that happens in the deepest core of our being. What if relating to God is a little bit like falling in love? In that case, it would be counterproductive if God wrote John 316 in the clouds in the sky every afternoon. This is how Kierkegaard is talking. He's talking about how faith is the highest possible human passion take what romance feels like and then multiply it infinitely. Faith must involve a sense of surrender. He says the individual must feel the peril of lying upon the deep,

the 70,000 fathoms in order there to find God. He says if you arrive upon a complete factual certainty of Christianity, you lose the very condition into which faith can come into being. Now just to explicate this, let me develop his famous parable of the king and the poor maiden. So he says, imagine there's a king. And the king falls in love with a poor maiden who lives in rags, but he just falls head over heels in love with her and can't help it. And he realizes, how do I tell her I love her? And his advisors want him to just command it by power. But he realizes power cannot command love. So his advisors say, well, in that case, just elevate her to your

position. Shower her with gifts, dress her in purple and silk and make her a queen. But he realizes that actually isn't love either. How will I ever know if she loved me for me or she loves me just because of what I gave to her? So what he finally decides to do is this. He takes off his crown, he relinquishes his scepter, he lays aside his royal robes, and he becomes a peasant. He became as ragged as the one he loved so that she could be his forever. It was the only way his raggedness became the very signature of his presence. This is what Christians believe God has done in the person of Jesus Christ. We believe this more humble revelation is what a perfectly loving God would do, because it is the best way to woo us into relationship with himself. An incarnate God who comes in obscurity and dies upon a cross

is actually better designed to meet our deepest need, our deepest problem, namely our moral resistance to God, than a God who writes, I am God in the clouds every day at noon. And therefore, a perfectly loving God who desires relationship with us would plausibly do the former, dying on the cross, rather than the latter, writing out his name in the clouds. And that kind of revelation makes sense if many human beings actually hate and scorn God and don't want relationship with him, which, looking at history and looking around the world today is a plausible state of affairs. Pascal, again, if God had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing

himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence as he will appear on the last day. This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency that he wished to deprive them of the good that they did not desire. There is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. So think of someone who absolutely hates God. They want nothing to do with God. Is God obligated to overpower? rejection of him by reining down miracles. This would not be a desirable state of affairs. This would result in what some call thin theism in which a person begrudgingly admits God because of a miracle,

even while they don't desire to believe in God. Plausibly, if God were to bombard someone with super obvious miracles like this, the only outcome would be heaping up further judgment upon that person. So in that kind of scenario, God's hiddenness could be an expression of his patience and his non-pushiness. Now look, I am not saying it's always like that for atheists, although you heard the 85% statistic earlier. But I think there's lots of people who are sincerely struggling. I'm not saying that's true. What I'm saying right now applies to everybody. Of course not. But there are some who admit nothing could make me believe. You know, Richard Dawkins would be in this category. He was asked by an atheist philosopher what it would

take for him to believe in God, and this is what he said. What would it take for you to believe in God? Well, I used to say it would be very simple. It would be, you know, the second coming of Jesus or a great big, deep booming bass, pull ropes and voice, saying, I am God and I created. But even if there was this booming voice and the second coming in clouds of glory,

the more probable explanation is that it's a hallucination. conjuring trick by David Copperfield or something. When he was pressed a little further and asked basically what would convince him, amazingly he said these words, I'm starting to think nothing would, which in a way goes against the grain, because I've always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind what evidence is forthcoming.

So a perfectly loving God need not overpower someone like that. If someone is going to say no matter what happens, it's a hallucination, God need not, you know, just bombard them with miracles. that actually would not be a good state of affairs. Now, someone could say, oh, well, that's just, you know, that's resistant non-belief. That's Dawkins. I'm not like that. I wouldn't say it was a hallucination.

I'm non-resistant, okay. But are we so sure that if God gave us perfect clarity, we would respond with repentance? Schellenberg, in his response to Pascal, seems to assume that if God truly revealed himself without any sense of hiddenness, it would never lead to pride. Surely an experience of God, a loving holy God, would not inspire such a response in anyone. But this, again, seems very naive. I mean, we're aware, as we look around the world, there's lots of insincerity. There's lots of people who aren't seeking the truth. How do we know?

All the time in other areas of life, like in the moral realm, human beings do engage in self-deception and insincerity all the time. Pascal says, if I had seen a miracle, they say, I should be converted. they imagine that such a conversion consists in a worship of God conducted as they picture it like some kind of exchange or conversation. True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed. We should not too glibly assume that conversion and submission to God is an easy thing to do. This is no light matter. This is the deepest thing in our lives that will take all of our courage. So we should be cautious and assuming that we know how we would respond if God were to give us a lot of miracles.

It's interesting that in scripture, miracles often don't induce repentance and love for God and moral change. Think of Pharaoh hardening his heart more and more with each passing plague. Or consider the crowds following Jesus, not because they want to follow him, but because they want the food. Or think of the parable of the rich man in Lazarus in Luke 16, where the rich man is in agony and he begs Abraham to go warn his brothers. And he hears this response. If they don't hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead. It's hard to know when and where that is wrong. There could be plenty of people who might say, like Dawkins, no matter what, I won't believe. But there's another reason why it is plausible that God might only give a partially

clear revelation of himself. And that is not only is it plausibly not good for us to give a full revelation, but it's more in line with his own nature to give a partial revelation. So just to draw this out, suppose someone says, look, I just want something clear. I just, I don't need writing in the sky. I just need something that is clear. Okay, the question is, what would that thing be? What specifically do we want? Kirkegaard talks about how God's nature as an absolutely unqualified being makes this complicated. He says, if God were to reveal himself to us in some kind of scientific way, that wouldn't be a genuine revelation of God. And it's a fair question to ask, you know, how can the one who's infinite and infinitely other come to us in some kind of

undeniable, readily understandable package? One expositor of Kierkegaard puts it like this. For Clomachus, that's one of his pseudonyms, it is not that an objective revelation of God by God would be misleading. The problem is that it would not be God revealing God's self. what would it be like for the absolutely different to reveal itself as such? You might say, you know, you could say, because God is transcendent, he must be partially hidden. The very category of transcendence implies hiddenness. Expecting a sort of direct communication with God is a bit precarious because of who God is. He's not just one thing among others, like a rock or a pencil or some physical object.

You can, you know, a finite relationship, a relationship between one finite thing and another finite thing is completely different, in fact, infinitely different from the relationship of a finite thing to an infinite thing. And plausibly, any manifestation of God that is direct or visible has at least equal potential to mislead us with respect to who God is. Then the revelation God has already given us through creation, conscience, and Christ. Some have argued that the most direct encounter with God we can possibly have in this current life is through conscience. The relationship between the individual and God, the God relationship is the conscience. Sometimes people speak of conscience as a form of divine illumination, a kind of direct contact with these transcendent moral truths. And you might say, well, I would prefer a miracle to conscience.

Miracles would be clearer to me than conscience. But not only might that not be good for us, it might not be a better way. revelation of God. Here's how Travis Dumb's Day puts it. One might think that the burning bush or some other dramatic miracle would provide more immediate, compelling contact with God, but in a sense, that is not so. The transition from direct awareness of eternal righteous laws to an awareness of an eternal and righteous lawgiver is potentially quick and easy. The transition from a direct awareness of a burning bush and a voice issuing from it to an awareness of an eternal and righteous lawgiver behind the voice would require more steps. That's really true if you think about it.

You know, a burning bush could be an angel, could be a demon, it could be a hallucination, it could be someone deceiving you. It's not obvious that a burning bush or some kind of miracle like this would be a better or more direct testimony of God than conscience. Now again, I realize this can be frustrating, but I have to emphasize this point that we shouldn't expect this to be easy. What Pascal and Kirkgard are trying to get us to see is this is the great question of life. Of course it's going to be hard. Of course it's going to involve struggle and drama. Every great story does.

Think of at the end of the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund Dantes conceals his identity, and there's a purpose to that. There's drama with that, you know? If he just showed up and announced everything clearly, much of the drama of the story would be drained from the plot. What if faith and the struggle involved with it is the greatest drama of all? In that case, we shouldn't expect it to be easy. So to conclude, I ask this question, what should we do with all of this? Suppose someone's kind of stuck in the middle still and they're saying, okay, yeah, maybe all that's possible, but how do I know what to do?

Here's my conclusion. First I'll just summarize what we've said in this video. We've basically summarized the hiddenness problem. We noted its importance in the current cultural moment and its ancient roots. And then we gave three theses against it. The expectations about divine love thesis, where we often make expectations. about how divine love should function, and those are questionable. We talked about maybe God is more like Old Man Marley and Home Alone. How could you know? Second, the non-resistant non-belief

naivety objection. There's often naivety about non-resistant non-belief, leading to an exaggeration of it or overconfidence about it. We don't need explicit knowledge of God to resist him. We don't know for sure when others and sometimes even ourselves are resisting him, and we can influence our beliefs to some extent. And then thirdly, we've given the hiddenness has some perks thesis, that it's plausible that God may have good reasons for giving us merely an adequate revelation, but not an overpowering revelation, a partial unveiling, but not a full unveiling. And those two reasons are, number one, it's better for us, and number two, it's more conducive to who God is as God. So here's my final thought. What do we do with all this? I would say,

we have to make a choice. To use Pascal's imagery, ultimately all of us have to wager with our life on this most important question. We're going to wager on something. Even if someone says not thinking about it is my decision, that itself is a kind of decision. And again, for the person who simply thinks there's no reason whatsoever to believe in God, you know, this whole video really isn't addressing that. We need to start further back and talk about arguments for God and that kind of thing. But this video is addressing the person who's genuinely uncertain, who sees some evidence, but is also perplexed by God's hiddenness in trying to figure it up. Maybe they're 50, 50, maybe they're 35, 65, maybe it's changing back and forth.

You know, a lot of people are like this right now. For such a person, what's the best decision to make? What's the best, what's the wisest wager you can make with your life on the most important question of all? The mega question, the God question. I implore you to wager on faith. Wager on God. You might say, well, but I can't force myself to believe. I can't conjure up faith. I can't just

decide that. One thing we can do is act as if we did believe. You can persevere in a sincere pursuit of God. You can pray every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. God, I don't know if you're out there, God, but if you are out there, show yourself to me, like that, for example. That is actually a rational way to live your life if you're 50-50. If you're stuck in the middle, or even if you're 45-55, you know, or even if you're, let's say you're like 20% open to it, it's still rational to kind of keep exploring it, to keep thinking about it, keep an open mind about it, keep knocking on the door, maybe pray those prayers. God, if you're real, show yourself to me. That is a rational way to live because of what Pascal's wager emphasizes, namely what is at stake. If you're wrong

in that wager, the loss to you is finite and maybe even relatively slight. But what if it's true, you know? What if this world is just a preparation for eternity? What if beyond the bounds of the physical realm, there is an endless reality out there that will go on forever? What if there is an ocean of joy that is possible to the human soul? Such a possibility begs for further openness, further striving, further searching. One of Pascal's briefer entries in his Ponce simply reads, Thus, an heir finds the deeds to his house. Will he say, perhaps, that they are false and not bother to examine them? This is what I love about Pascal.

He's putting the focus on the practical. We all have to decide something, and he's trying to help us see how important this is. You know, this is our situation in relation to the possibility of God. This is the question. There couldn't be more at stake. What is hanging in the balance is infinite. Why not wager on God if you're 50-50? You might say, well, then I'll just be.

endlessly stuck with 50-50 uncertainty and angst. I have to give my testimony that in my experience, when you give yourself fully to what you think is the best decision, you know, there is an element of the will involved with faith. If you say, you know, I actually think the best way to spend my life is to commit myself to God, to seeking God, to serving God, to loving God. In that posture of faith where you make that commitment, there is a kind of peace and certainty that comes in. And if God exists, That's actually his promise that you won't stay forever in angst. Jeremiah 2913, you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Let me leave you with this scene from C.S. Lewis's that hideous strength. Favorite scene in all of literature, maybe. Oh, I'll probably cry when I read it.

It's so good. The character, Mark, is imprisoned, and he's being psychologically tortured. The evil characters are trying to convert him to evil. At the climactic moment, he has a crucifix brought out to him. And with the threat of death, he is ordered to trample on it. insulted. Now, Mark is an atheist, but the sheer helplessness of the crucifix gives him pity. Lewis writes, Mark found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way, neither is a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition, but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and been executed thus. It would be ridiculous to die for a religion one did not believe. This man himself, on that very cross, had discovered it to be a fable,

and had died complaining that the God in whom he trusted had forsaken him, had in fact found the universe a cheat. But this raised a question that Mark had never thought of before. Was that the moment at which to turn against the man? If the universe was a cheat, was that a good reason for joining its side? Supposing the straight was utterly powerless, always and everywhere certain to be mocked, tortured, and finally killed by the crooked. What then?

Why not go down with the ship? And so to everyone watching this video, I say as well, suppose God's hiddenness did mean his non-existence, why not go down with the ship? Why not wager everything on the possibility of God? There is so little to lose and so much to gain. That's the conviction that I have given my entire self to, my entire life to, and I invite others to join me in the same. I've never once regretted it. And the more I've given myself to that conviction, the more peace and joy I feel about it. And it enhances not only the prospects of eternity, but every minute I live in this world. So that's the best shot I got.

I can't believe I've finished without my camera dying. Let me know what you think in the comments. I would love to do further dialogue with Alex if he ever wants to. He's a big YouTuber, maybe better things to do with his time. But I would love to talk with him and do a debate or dialogue on this if he ever wants to. And I hope for others this video will be helpful. Let me know what you think in the comments.