One of the most challenging objections to the existence of God is the problem of divine hiddenness. Closely related to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness asks “Where is God?”; “Why doesn’t God make His existence more obvious?”; “Why does God leave any room for doubt?” Surely God, if He existed, would not need apologists to make the case for His existence — couldn’t He have made it more immediately apparent? Related to these concerns is the problem of unanswered prayer. Why do so many peoples’ prayers go unanswered, often despite years of persistent prayer? The problem is even connected to the problem of evil, since one may ask why God apparently fails to show up to put an end to evil and unjust suffering in our world. These are indeed difficult questions that deserve to be taken seriously and thoughtfully considered.
So if your article doesn't persuasively refute the hiddenness objection, we can reasonably deduce that even after you tried your best, you couldn't show the alleged fallaciousness or illegitimacy of the hiddenness objection.
The Biblical authors also recognized and grappled with divine hiddenness. For example, the Psalmist asked “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Ps 10:1). Another Psalm likewise says “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:23-26). One could continue in a similar vein for some time.
Which is why you Christians are accomplishing nothing if and when you quote something in the bible in response to the divine hiddenness objection. The biblical authors offered nothing more serious than the persistence of their faith. Gee, God really exists, because nothin's gonna stop us now? LOL.
The problem of divine hiddenness is, in my judgment, one of the best arguments against the existence of God.
You are a 5-point Calvinist who says presuppositionalism isn't biblical. Your presuppositionalist brothers in Christ think you are sinfully deaf to the Holy Spirit, because neither the bible nor god will allow that some atheist arguments are "better" than others. Is there a reason why you don't just say "you can't account for the pre-conditions of intelligibility" and then wait to see the world come to a grinding halt? That's what your friends Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, James White, Jeff Durbin and Sye Bruggencate do. Does God want you all to disagree on how robust some atheist objection is? Does God want his followers to disagree with each other on whether presuppositionalism is biblically justified?
It has its most articulate and erudite defense, to my knowledge, in the work of Canadian philosopher John L. Schellenberg (see his book The Hiddenness Argument — Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God).[1]
The problem is particularly difficult on an emotional level. Schellenberg draws the analogy of a friend describing his parents: “Wow, are they ever great — I wish everyone could have parents like mine, who are so wonderfully loving! Granted, they don’t want anything to do with me. They’ve never been around. Sometimes I find myself looking for them — once, I have to admit, I even called out for them when I was sick — but to no avail. Apparently they aren’t open to being in a relationship with me — at least not yet. But it’s so good that they love me as much and as beautifully as they do!”[2] This analogy should give a sense of the impact of this argument, rhetorically and emotionally.
The analogy indicates that the only way you are ever going to justify pretending some "god" wants a "personal" relationship with us is if you radically redefine "personal", when in fact your solitary basis for doing so is to avoid having to admit the Christian religion is false. You know? This is sort of like radically redefining "billionaire" so a homeless destitute man can still "plausibly" claim to be financially secure.
While it may be admitted that the argument from divine hiddenness is one of the most perplexing issues for the theist to come to terms with, especially emotionally, the real question that needs to be addressed is that of whether it offers sufficient ground to overhaul the powerful cumulative positive reasons to believe that God exists and that He has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ. I will argue in this article that the answer is ‘no’.
Then you missed the forest for the trees. If God does not do what would fall within the parameters of "desire a personal relationship with us", then his existence is rendered irrelevant. A man with a bright orange hat no doubt truly exists somewhere in Sudan right now. But his mere existence is hardly sufficient to justify inferring that he wants to be in a personal relationship with you. Some neo-evangelical fuckheads will say the "personal relationship" stuff is merely the fruit of apostate Christianity, and true discipleship consists solely of prayer and obedience. But we call victory if we can justify ignoring the most popular version of theism/Christianity.
A Lack of Obviousness Does Not Mean Poor Evidential Support
Yes it does. The more obvious something is, the more evidential support there will be. The less obvious something is, the less evidential support. It is far from obvious that Bigfoot is a genuine cryptid, there is a remarkable lack of evidential support that this thing being a real animal. Your statement might be reasonable if you are talking about just any evidence that might blow in from any direction. But if you are talking about seriously "authenticated" evidence, then your maxim is most certainly false. How much of the evidence in favor of Bigfoot being a genuine cryptid, is seriously "authenticated"? The vast majority of BF fanatics are not willing to assert their claims under penalty of perjury, and one might be reasonable to say such unwillingness means the evidence in question is not properly authenticated. We might have higher standards of evidence than the average fool on the internet, but so what? Having high standards of evidence only means you are forced to come up with a seriously good case, it doesn't mean we are being "unfair". Otherwise, any guilty criminal suspect could complain the standard of evidence he is being forced to meet by the prosecutor's grilling questions on the stand is "unfair" and the standard "should be" lower. Not on your life. Furthermore, it is precisely the failure to have a higher standard that is responsible for many people being defrauded and conned. When we are dealing with an unknown and thus a possible fake, the only people who complain that our standards are too high are the fools who cannot justify their own lower standards.
Why does God not make His existence more obvious?
We say it is for the same reason the tooth-fairy doesn't make her existence more obvious. The only difference is that one is clearly limited to children, the other appears to be a fairytale intended for adults.
The first point I will make in response to this question is that God’s existence not being obvious does not entail that it is not well evidentially supported. We know from physics, for example, that a physical object like a table or a chair is comprised of mostly empty space. This is not at all obvious (in fact it would seem to be almost obvious that it is not the case) and yet we have good evidential support that it is so.
This means that "obvious" may be grounded in mere perception, or study. Before the age of enlightenment, a person would have been reasonable to think a chair was a "solid" object and to insist that the theory of the chair being mostly empty space lacked evidentiary support. Similarly, before the age of enlightenment, a person might have been reasonable to attribute certain natural phenomena to "god". What's "obvious" reasonably depends on the current state of knowledge.
One may reply that whereas we know scientifically that the chair is mostly comprised of empty space, we nonetheless still live our lives as if though it is not — our day-to-day choices and beliefs are not based on how we scientifically understand things to be, but how we experience them in our daily lives. However, I can think of counter-examples where we do act against what we feel in accord with the available evidence, even when we are putting our lives on the line. For example, despite being a frequent flyer, I get anxious about being on an airplane. Even though I know rationally that flying is the safest way to travel (statistically, your odds of being involved in a fatal plane crash are less than 1 in 12 million), flying – especially in turbulent conditions – just doesn’t feel like it is safe to me. Nevertheless, I frequently overcome my fear of flying by stepping onto an airplane, often for very long distances. In that case, I am literally committing my life to what my rational faculties tell me, and disregarding what my emotions and feelings tell me, because I know that generally my rational faculties are a more reliable gauge of what is actually true than my feelings.
Statistics don't tell you what is actually true, that's why they change all the time. All they do is highlight trends. You've heard the expression "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics".
Someone recently asked me why God cannot be more like the force of gravity, which we experience directly. However, while we do have direct experience of the effects of gravity, it is not immediately obvious what causes things to gravitate towards the ground.
The point is not being able to figure out the mechanism, but being able to prove that some such mechanism must obviously be present to account for the phenomena. God could cause severe headache or body ache to all persons when they are 1 minute away from committing a crime. We would then notice that those who wish to commit crime exhibit this trend, and we could deduce a moral creator from it even if we couldn't fully explain how the non-physical god manages to influence the movement of physical things like neurons.
The law of gravity was not articulated before Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Indeed, in attempting to explain why unsupported bodies fall to the ground, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put forward the idea that objects simply moved towards their ‘natural place’, the center of the earth (which in Aristotle’s cosmology was the center of the Universe), and that objects fall at a speed proportional to their weight. So perhaps gravity is less ‘obvious’ than one might think (though something which nonetheless enjoys strong evidential support). I would argue that the evidence of God is all around us, so we do in a sense experience God in a similar way to how we experience gravity. Just as we observe the effects that gravity has all around us but do not see the gravitational force that actually causes those effects, we also see the many things that God has made all around us, even though we do not see the being who actually caused those things to exist.
Not at all. Science continues coming up with sufficient purely naturalistic explanations for phenomena previously unexplainable. Abiogenesis is next on naturalism's hit-list.
One may still object here that it should not take us a lot of work to discover that Christianity is true. Rather, the truth of the gospel, granting what is at stake, should be readily apparent. I shall return to this objection in due course. However, I will note here that I do not think God requires more than it is reasonable for a serious enquirer to give to an issue of this much importance.
Then because I can reasonably justify ignoring the gospel, that is the point where your apologetics break down, and thus the point where you walk away defeated.
Some enquirers are better placed than others, and God looks for us to exert ourselves according to the light we have been given.
You must be talking solely to Christians, you cannot just sneak in what you think is a biblical "truth" (we are accontable to God based on how much "light" he has allowed to us) and expect it to be found persuasive by a non-Christian.
I have heard, for instance, many stories of Jesus revealing Himself to people in dreams and visions in Muslim-majority countries, presumably since those are parts of the world where it is harder for people to otherwise hear the gospel. In the west, we have ample access to the gospel and to the tools needed to do our due diligence in investigating its claims.
But visions and dreams are more persuasive than historical evidence. How many people would be denying Christianity if God gave a Jesus-vision to everybody? You lose.
I think we have to trust the goodness of God,
Yup, you have no intention of addressing unbelievers at that point.
since presumably God, in his omniscience, knows what every person would have done had they had more evidence — i.e. whether they would have chosen to enter into a relationship with God or to reject Him.
So because Matthew 11:21 has Jesus saying earlier civilizations surely "would have" repented had they been allowed to see the miracles Jesus was doing for 1st century people, we are forced to the conclusion that even when God knows that more evidence "would have" resulted in more being getting saved, God will still withhold that evidence, i.e., God does not wish to save everybody, i.e., totally consistent with your Calvinism...thus making everybody wonder why the anti-Calvinist Dr. Frank Turek would ever let a person like you represent his crossexamined.org ministry. Maybe you are one of those "Calvinists" who think God wants to be surprised and find that several non-elect people managed to get saved anyway?
We know from plenty of Biblical examples that not everyone who is presented with conclusive evidence for God (whether by miracles, predictive prophecies, or direct manifestations) submits to Him.
Then Matthew 11:21 is a serious problem for you. Jesus said those earlier civilizations "would have" repented had they seen the miracles Jesus was doing. There is no "maybe" in Jesus' dogmatic words there.
If God knows that a given individual is not going to enter into a good, lasting relationship with Him, then why would God ensure the person believes?
But if God is all-powerful, he can cause the most incorrigably stubborn unbeliever to become a believer. The strongest biblical case in point is Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul had not previously repented, he was still whole-heartedly persecuting Christians when God allegedly decided to give him both theological barrels right to the face. If the biblical god is serious in his boasts that "all things" are possible for him (Matthew 19:26), then spiritually regenerating a determined atheist would be a piece of cake...just like keeping safe the toddler who refuses to move from the middle of the street is a piece of cake, because the power we have as their caretakers is greater than their stubbornness. Love requires that we force them against their wills when we reasonably foresee that allowing them to have their way will likely result in disaster.
Furthermore, Scripture also indicates that people are judged in accordance with the amount of light they have rejected (e.g. Mt 11:21-22; Jn 12:47-48).
Another proof that you are not addressing atheists or unbelievers, so that you cannot complain if such groups find your arguments pathetically weak.
Even many contemporary public atheists have essentially said that no amount of evidence could change their mind. For example, Richard Dawkins was asked in a conversation with Peter Boghossian what it would take for him to believe in God. Dawkins said that not even the second coming would be enough evidence. When Boghossian asked him whether any amount of evidence could change his mind. He replied, “Well, 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 when evidence is forthcoming.” It could, therefore, be seen as an act of mercy for God to withhold from them more evidence if they were going to reject it anyway and thereby bring upon themselves greater judgment.
But if God foisted on Dawkins that efficacious telepathy God boasts of having in Ezra 1:1, Dawkins would no more likely resist doing what God wanted than pagan idolator King Cyrus would resist conforming to what god wanted. Maybe we should change Romans 1:20 so that it says "God is without excuse, because when he really wants to, he can cause even the most stubborn unbeliever change their mind and become willing to obey the divine intent".
This adds yet further plausible motivation for God not to ensure that everyone had greater access to evidence for His existence, which would thereby render them more culpable.
Except that Jesus in Matthew 11:21 assured us that prior civilizations "would have" repented if they had seen more evidence. So from a biblical perspective, God is not withholding evidence because he wants to lessen their culpability...he is withholding evidence because he doesn't want them to repent.
This point has been independently made by Travis Dumsday in a paper in the journal Religious Studies.[3]
He is trumped by the word of God. That's enough to convince you.
This last point may be challenged by the skeptic by pointing to the existence of non-resistant non-believers. As Schellenberg puts it, “If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.”[4] However, I would contest that there is such a thing as long-term non-resistant nonbelief. My own view is that the evidence for Christianity is such that anyone who is fully informed and takes it upon himself to impartially examine it — with a heart open toward accepting God as Lord — will, in the long term, come to find Christianity to be true and well supported.
Perhaps your desire to continue believing in such a blind hopeless way about unbelievers explains why you reject a lot of debate invitations from them, like when you rejected mine for reasons that were outrageously irrelevant to the merits, see here.
In any case, human psychology, particularly at the subconscious level, is so complex that I doubt that it is demonstrable that any nonbeliever is completely nonresistant.
Your first concern is your bible, not human psychology, and there, God apparently wants people to think that his sovereignty over the choice-making abilities of human beings is aptly illustrated by the analogy of hooking a fish and forcing it to go in a direction it didn't wish to go. See "hook in your jaws" in Ezekiel 38-39. What is so unreasonable in taking that metaphor to mean God not only has the capability of forcing people against their will, he is also willing to actually do it? Bible inerrancy is rejected by most Christian scholars, so you can hardly pretend that an unbeliever is under some type of obligation to presume that the only interpretation of a bible verse that can possibly be correct is the one that harmonizes with everything else in the bible. There' nothing the least bit unreasonable in concluding that Ezekiel's hard determinism contradicts what other biblical authors believed.
Couldn’t God Have Given Us Stronger Evidence?
A related objection is that it is possible for the evidence for Christianity to have been stronger than it in fact is. Surely, if God existed, He would have given us the strongest possible evidence. However, I do not think that we need expect something that goes beyond perfectly adequate evidence for the serious inquirer.
I have no patience for this type of red-herring. We are not asking you whether the evidence available to the modern day atheist is "sufficient" to justify holding them accountable on Judgment Day. We are asking whether God could have provided more and better evidence. The answer is yes, and Matthew 11:21 ensures that God knew prior civilizations would surely have repented had they been given more evidence. But a better rebuttal would argue that your god's problem is not whether he could provide better evidence, but why he refuses to foist on today's idolators that coercive telepathy that he foisted on King Cyrus to ensure he would obey the divine will, Ezra 1:1. Whenever the bible asserts that God made somebody willing, or "stirred up their spirit", they ALWAYS do exactly what he wants them to do. Yes, we need to change Romans 1:20 so it says "god is without excuse, he could avoid any need to bitch about people about sinning by simply preventing them from sinning".
Many atheists are under the mistaken impression that God wants people to believe in Him no matter what they are going to go on and do with that knowledge.
No, you are creating a completely fabricated problem: If God foisted his saving grace on everybody, they would not merely get saved...they would also use that knowledge in whatever way God wanted them to. God is without excuse.
It is never contended anywhere in Scripture that it is a commendable thing to believe in God yet reject a relationship with Him.
And it is never contended anywhere in Scripture that God might cause somebody to believe in him but still reject a relationship with him. The power that cause belief also causes willingness to enter a relationship. God is without excuse.
In the Old Testament, the Jews had no doubt that God existed – they had seen many miracles performed before their eyes – and yet they went off time and again into idolatry.
That analogy doesn't work with atheists, because we deny that such Jews ever saw any miracles in the first place. That's why they found it impossibly difficult to fear YHWH enough to stay separate from the Canaanites.
Even those who saw Jesus’ miracles before their very eyes didn’t believe in Him (e.g. John 12:37) and wanted to put Him to death – e.g. see the reaction of many after Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11:45-53).
The bible correctly reports that some people thought Jesus' miracles were total bullshit...but it incorrectly reports that those miracles were genuinely supernatural. In this I violate standard of historiographical convention no more than does the jury who decides that some portions of a witness's testimony are truthful and other portions are lies.
The eighteenth century lawyer and Christian thinker Joseph Butler (1692-1752), in his Analogy of Religion, put forward the idea that our time on earth is a period of probation.[5]
You are a Calvinist. You think God's foreknowledge is exhaustive and infallible. In that case, there can be no "probation" because God is not waiting to see what we will do. If God doesn't think we are capable of doing anything other than what he infallibly foresees us doing, then our internal sense of unpredictability and autonomy is genuinely illusory...there was never any "if" about it in the first place, and therefore, putting us on "probation" in this life would be about as sensible as putting a toddler on probation in front of a trigonometry textbook to see "if" they will get the right answers. Only a fool would expect obedience when by other means he already infallibly knows it will never happen. Most Christians will agree with me that there is straight up irreconcilable contradiction between Calvinism's doctrine of God's revealed will and Calvinism's doctrine of God's secret will. Nothing is more dishonest than the Calvinist bitching at people for sinning, because Calvinism says their sins were in perfect conformity to God's will (secret will). The utter stupidity of such a God is clear from Paul's inability to coherently answer that problem in Romans 9:20.
For some people in particular the form that that probation may take is a form of testing whether they are willing to engage in the intellectual inquiry that is necessary to give themselves a fair examination of the evidence.
"whether"? If God already knows infallibly how they will react to the test, then its not really "probation", is it? If you know infallibly that an imprisoned man will rape soon after being put on probation, then your releasing him isn't really "probation", is it? Probation only makes sense when the person in charge has hopes that we will pass the test, and cannot the outcome beforehand.
An objection I sometimes encounter is that, if God exists, then there should not be any reasonable arguments against His existence at all. However, this complaint, it seems to me, boils down essentially to the dubious claim that, if Christianity is true, there cannot be any puzzles that require mental effort to work out.
The objection is wise, it shows that if God exists and yet it isn't obvious, then this God apparently prioritizes toying with people above seriously wanting them to avoid spiritual disaster. If God is playing hide and seek with us, either we are not in spiritual trouble, or this God is sadistic, because it is precisely this game that causes some people to allegedly endure eternal conscious suffering in an afterworld. Had God been a bit more serious, there wouldn't have been any hide and seek, God's will would have been as obvious as the existence of trees, and we have no right to pretend that the level of sin in that world would still be equal to the level of sin in the present world where this god desires to play hide and seek.
Another point to bear in mind is that many people are not even presented with these as puzzles that seriously compromise the evidence that they already have. For some people, working through the problem of evil is part of their probation here in this life.
Some would argue that insulating a child from rape is more important than some adult's "Probation" in this life. The only reason any fool insists that "God is an exception" are those who refuse to give up belief in god's "goodness".
And if they are diligent, they will work through it.
This is blind denial of the obvious truth that many Christians are diligent and yet don't work through it, and often de-convert.
Even if they cannot find adequate and satisfying answers to why there exists so much suffering in the world, they can learn to trust in the goodness of God, and find in the problem of evil insufficient ground to overturn the positive confirmatory case for Biblical theism.
We aren't using evil to disprove theism. We are using evil to disprove the doctrine of God's "goodness".
Either they will find adequate answers, or they will find enough positive evidence to make the fact of their inability to find those answers not, in the end, sufficient to undermine their faith.
Why Does God Require of Us So Much Work?
Again, you address only Christians. The unbeliever would never concede that god requires anything of anybody.
I often hear the objection that in order to really be compelled by the evidence for Christianity, one has to take a very deep dive into esoteric scholarship. Surely, if God were real, the truth of the gospel should be a lot more self-evident. Indeed, this is actually also an objection to my epistemology that I frequently encounter from some Christians as well – namely, that my hard line evidentialism implies that Christians cannot be rational in believing the gospel unless they become an academic and invest hundreds of hours in the study of the evidences for Christianity. Since not everyone has the aptitude and access to resources necessary to undertake such deep study, so the objection goes, this cannot be God’s normative way of imparting rational confidence to believers that the gospel they have entrusted is indeed true.
However, I want to be careful here to draw a distinction between what I call an explicit rational warrant and what can be called an implicit, or tacit, rational warrant for Christian faith.
Mere reasonableness of the Christian view cannot itself displace or disprove the reasonableness of the atheist view, because two opposite viewpoints may possibly be equally reasonable. It's the reason why not all equally reasonable people on a jury will agree, so that they end up in deadlock. Reasonableness does not work the way accuracy does.
Every Christian, I would argue, can have at least an implicit rational warrant for believing that God exists and that He has revealed Himself in the Bible. Romans 1:20 teaches that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” The Greek word translated “without excuse” in this verse is ἀναπολογήτους (literally, “without an apologetic”). Furthermore, the Psalmist wrote that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” (Ps 19:1). I do not think the Scriptures are envisaging people having to do PhDs in astrophysics or molecular biology, or master probability theory, in order to see the hand of God revealed in nature. Every time we step outdoors and behold the things that God has made – especially living organisms – we intuit that things have been made for a purpose, even if we couldn’t explicitly express why that is the case. Indeed, throughout history, the vast majority of people who have lived have been theists.
And the vast majority of people in human history lived before the age of science. The progress of science is precisely why church attendance dwindles every year and Christians come back from college with liberal or no faith. If the internet had existed in the first century, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.
This implicit or inarticulate sense of the case for theism explains, I think, why some people come to believe that there must be a God when they hold their newborn child in their arms for the first time – they see the incredible design and elegance that is inherent in the process of development from a fertilized egg to a new born infant. They recognize, even if only implicitly and intuitively, that this is a process that required a high level of foresight to bring about – since it involved a high-level objective – which points to the involvement of a conscious mind in the programming of developmental pathways.
And the vast majority of people who behold their newborns, lack advanced education in abiogenesis and philosophy.
Those with an implicit rational warrant for belief in God may not be able to hold their own in a debate with a learned atheist scholar. This is why we hear so many ill-formulated attempted arguments for God that are along the right lines but not sufficiently nuanced to pass for sound argumentation.
But at least they tried. You? You don't even dare tangle with somebody who directly challenged you in a scholarly polite manner.
But I would argue that they nonetheless have sufficient rational warrant for their belief that God exists. Over time, as a believer matures, I would argue that the rational warrant for belief that was in the first place implicit should become more and more explicit and articulate.
Unfortunately, that cannot be the case, with all these older mature Christian apologists running around, who do not have cases for theism any more mature than the implicit warrant arguments you just mentioned. Turek's typical I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist lectures do little more than confirm to me that Christianity's best efforts cannot survive scrutiny. Although I have massive respect to him for being willing to answer random questions during Q&A.
In fact, even a biologist as staunchly atheistic as Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the double-helical structure of DNA) said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,”[6] Richard Dawkins similarly said at the beginning of The Blind Watchmaker that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose,”[7] Dawkins then spends the remainder of the book trying to argue, in my opinion unsuccessfully, that this design is not real but only apparent.
I have a tougher version of atheism. I don't argue God doesn't exist. I argue that God is irrelevant. By taking that position, not only do we spare the audience 90,000 pages of pointless ID back-and-forth, we jump right to the one thing that you couldn't prove even if necessary to save your life...that god is relevant.
People also have a moral compass and have an implicit sense that there are objective moral norms and duties in the world – something which makes much better sense if theism is true than if atheism were true.
Probably because most of them have not engaged in the study of moral philosophy. They are totally caught off guard by the "why is child rape wrong" or "why is causing sexual pain to a child wrong" questions and blindly commit to the notion that only "god" can explain why it is wrong.
Besides general revelation (i.e. what may be known about God from the created Universe), this sense of objective moral norms and duties also provides people with an additional witness, even if only implicit, to the existence of God.
Which hasn't accomplished much more in the world than causing Christians to disagree about abortion, gun control, mandatory minimum prison sentences, whether god wants Christians to transform the government into a Christian form of control, whether god still wants gay people to be executed, and the worst moral problem facing Christians: the immorality of adopting heretical theology, and Christians, even those limited to the Trinitarians, constantly point the finger of heresy at each other, no need to involve the Jehovah Witnesses or Mormons.
People can have a similarly implicit rational warrant for believing that God has revealed Himself in the Bible. This is not something that you need a PhD in Biblical Studies to discover.
I fail to see the point. The fact that all Catholics, Calvinists and KJV Onlyists believe in God does precisely nothing to dissuade them from condemning each other.
I think for many believers they read through the Bible and encounter the cumulative force of various prophetic passages like Isaiah 53, recognizing Jesus in them.
Sorry, the "servant" was nobody living 700 years later, it was Israel itself. Read all the passages from Isaiah 41 through 56.
They might not be able to express the argument explicitly enough to debate a learned Rabbi. But they nonetheless, I would argue, have an implicit rational warrant. Likewise, they might read through the New Testament accounts and perceive implicitly some of the hallmarks of verisimilitude, such as the criterion of embarrassment,
Yes, the NT statements that Jesus' biological family thought his miracles were purely naturalistic (Mark 3:21, 6:1-4, John 7:5) fulfill the criterion of embarrassment while staetments that Jesus did miracles do not, thereore, we have an objective basis to grant more historical weight to the skeptical position than to the believing position.
or unexplained allusions, or undesigned coincidences.
Will God protect me from dying and going to hell while I take the next year to sort through Lydia McGrew's wordy gossipy screeds?
They might begin to recognize the evidential value of the testimonial evidence we have in the New Testament in regard to events such as the resurrection.
Not if they previously concluded that Jesus' own family being skeptical of his miracles has more historical weight than testimony of resurrection "eyewitnesses".
Many of those categories of evidence are actually not at all hard to grasp and may be perceived through common sense.
This is what, I suspect, many Christians in fact are talking about when they say that they just know that Christianity is true. I think often-times Christians can confuse an implicit rational warrant for belief in Scripture (which is based on evidence) with some sort of mystical inner-witness that Christianity is true. For example, one may have an inarticulate sense of the power of the whole case for Christianity without realizing that it is, in fact, a rational response to a cumulative case argument.
So, where am I going with this? I would argue that discovering evidence for God is not actually that hard. Rather, it has been made artificially hard by bad scholarship and poor standards that insist that the simplest answer cannot actually be the correct answer.
"God" is not the simplest answer. If God is "infinite" then the "god" answer is the most complex possible answer, and must always violate Occam's Razor more than any purely naturalistic explanation.
This is true in science as well as Biblical scholarship. A lot of the ink spilled on these issues, therefore, is ink spent answering really bad arguments that should never have gotten traction to begin with but, because they provided an excuse for unbelief, they have become widely accepted and highly esteemed, even among academics who should know better.
If academics who should know better are deceived by such reams of spilled ink, that justifies the non-academic unbeliever to disregard those reams of spilled ink, whether those reams originate with unbelievers or Christians. I would like to know what book god wants me to read next, but how stupid would it be to seek the will of God from a person who doesn't have the first clue?
Where is God?
A common objection to God’s existence is that, if the God of Scripture exists, then He would be reasonably expected to still be working in the world today. The skeptic reasons, then, that the failure to observe God working in a tangible and detectable way in the world today should be taken as not merely evidence against Christianity but, more than that, as a defeater of any evidence that may be offered from ancient documents.
You fallaciously presume that because the ancient documents exist, unbelievers are forced to make a decision about them one way or the other. But that is your claim, and you cannot establish it.
I wonder though what sort of evidence the skeptic would accept as sufficient reason to think that God is still working in the world in a tangible way. Would it need to be a direct personal experience, or would he or she accept reliable testimony from others that they had the sort of direct personal encounter that he or she is seeking for?
Easy: either god doing today the same miracles as recorded in the bible (there would be far less skeptics if God did for them today what God did for Saul on the road to Damascus), or, I don't need evidence because God has simply chosen to change my attitude solely by coercive telepathy (Ezra 1:1). Apparently, apologetics is only "necessitated" because God is refusing to use his telepathic abilities to remove unbelief. Blame it on God, he could have done better.
Testimony, popular atheist protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is a valid form of evidence.
But there is no rule of historiography, heremeneutics or common sense obligating anybody to give a shit about matters solely limited to 2000 year old testimony. So when we disregard the resurrection testimony in the NT, we cannot possibly be unreasonable, as we aren't breaking any applicable rules.
And whether testimony is "valid" evidence is not decided by you, it is decided by the authentication standards of the person who bothers to listen to the testimony. Christians are forever disagreing amonst themselves as to just how authenticated the resurrection testimony is. Most Christian scholars refuse the fundamentalist believe that Matthew and John are the sole creators of the canonical gospels now bearing those names. Arguments that Mark 16 surely had an original resurrection appearance narrative have less to do with serious evidence and more to do with speculative trifling. Nothing in Acts indicates Paul was an eyewitness of a risen Jesus.
When any person makes a claim to have witnessed an event, there are three – and only three – categories of explanation for that claim. Those are (a) they deliberately set out to deceive; (b) they were honestly mistaken; and (c) their claim was actually correct. I think those broad categories of explanation are mutually exhaustive (though I can imagine some situations in which they might be at work in combination). As either one of the two former claims becomes less plausible as a result of the evidence one adduces, this leads to a necessary redistribution of the probabilities, leading to option (c) becoming more probable than it was previously.
Fair enough.
This, then, provides evidence confirming scenario (c). The greater the extent to which options (a) and (b), in any given case, are disconfirmed by the evidence, the greater support is enjoyed by option (c). This method can be applied to modern claims just as well as it can be applied to ancient ones. An individual’s track record of habitual trustworthiness and reliability can count as evidence against the hypothesis that they were deliberately setting out to deceive.
Except that you don't know the extent to which Matthew and John are responsible for the canonical text of the gospels bearing their names. So if you notice that they never made any historical mistakes, you don't know of that trend is a result of their own honesty, or the result of very early scribes correcting the mistakes similarly to how most Christian scholars think Matthew and Luke corrected Mark. And since dishonest deceptive people realize that surrounding their lies with nuggets of historical truth will cause most people to infer that the story "rings true", you cannot automatically deduce "honest author" from nuggets of historical truth in the gospels. This could also be a dishonest author who includes those nuggets to make led verisimilitude to the lies.
The plausibility of the hypothesis that they are honestly mistaken will depend on the particulars of the case.
I am not talking here about testimonies of healing that are easy to explain by some kind of sensory illusion or sleight of hand, or that plausibly would have gotten better anyway. I am talking about cases that seem to defy naturalistic explanation. Dr. Craig Keener has compiled a two volume set on claims of such miraculous occurrences.[8]
And I've already exposed what Keener wanted and didn't want to achieve in publishing that book. See here.
To take one example, he discusses a friend of his, Leo Bawa, the former director of research at Capro, a prominent Nigerian missions movement. One intriguing miracle (of several) that he told Dr. Keener about is that “among some tribes in Adamawa and Taraba State, I had instances where no interpreter was available and the Lord gave me understanding and ability to speak the people’s languages, a feat I never performed before or since after that incident.”[9] Keener notes that “Other accounts of this phenomenon exist, though many of these are secondhand”[10]. In a footnote, Dr. Keener elaborates[11],
“I have direct accounts in which others recognized the languages from Dr. Derek Morphew (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (April 30, 2008); Dr. Medine Moussounga Keener (Aug. 12, 2009, secondhand about Pastor Daniel Ndoundou); my student Leah Macinskas-Le (April 25, 2010, regarding her Jewish mother becoming a believer in Jesus because she understood the Hebrew prayer of an uneducated pastor’s prayer in tongues); Del Tarr, personal correspondence, Sept. 30, 2010 (noting three cases he has witnessed, including a recent one involving Korean; cf. also Oct. 5, 6, 2010).”
And all Christians who identify as Cessationist cry "foul". And the skeptics remind you that if theological accuracy is so critically important to us avoiding eternal concious torment in an afterword, then it is not for you to decide how high their standard for evidence "should" be. THEY are taking the risk. THEY are the only persons who can properly pontificate on how high the standard should be. You will balk at a very high standard that would make it almost impossible for any bit of Christian evidence to be good enough, of course, but can you be too careful when the risk is as high as today's fanatics insist it is?
I have heard about this sort of phenomenon from others as well, and it does not seem to be the type of thing that could be explained naturalistically.
Keener disregarded my challenge to make his best case.
I trust Dr. Keener and I presume that he trusts his sources since these are personal contacts of his (the fact that the phenomenon is multiply attested helps as well). So, it seems unlikely in these cases that Keener’s sources are all lying to him, and these also seem to be phenomena about which it would be quite hard to be honestly wrong.
I say they are all lies.
Now, one might object at this point that in this case the testimony is coming from someone whom they do not know personally. With public figures such as Dr. Craig Keener, though, one can, to a certain degree, evaluate whether this is someone who is likely to make stuff up.
He's a Pentecostal. He naturally seeks to justify modern day miracle claims.
This is true especially of high-profile scholars such as Dr. Keener since one can get a sense, through careful reading of their academic work, whether they are careful and reliable in their reportage of information.
Catholics are careful in their miracle reports...do you insist the bible is correct when it teaches taht God's doing a miracle through somebody means God is approving of their theology (John 10:37-38)?
You are also avoiding Deut. 13:1-5, which warns that even false prophets can do genuinely supernatural miracles. So if we cannot deny the miraculous element of some bit of miracle testimony, how much effort should we put toward trying to figure out whether the miracle-worker is holy or unholy? Should we cancel plans to take a child to a birthday party just so we can make more time to Google this bullshit? The answer would seem to be "yes" if Jesus was serious in saying spiritual blessings awaited those who gave up custody of their own kids just to make more time to follow him around (Matthew 19:29).
Dr. Michael Brown (another public figure and Biblical scholar) has also told me (on public record) about similar events to those described above, both that he was a witness to and testimonies of friends of his (including one individual, who was a cessationist and therefore not predisposed already to believe in miraculous events, who reported the incident to Dr. Brown in shock). The fact that this sort of occurrence is multiply attested by different credible sources leads me to think that something miraculous is indeed going on here.
And since it could still be from the devil, skeptics can be reasonable to just completely ignore it the way they completely refuse to personally handle very old unstable dynamite. If you can guarantee it won't blow up in our faces, we'll handle it. Deal? And yet you cannot make that deal. Paul was responsible for most of the Galatian Christian converts, and yet they apparently concluded that Paul's gospel blew up in their faces because they apostatized (Galatians 1:6-9).
I chose this particular category of miracle claim as an illustrative example since this is one type of phenomenon that seems to defy naturalistic explanation and also seems to be something that it would be very difficult to be honestly wrong about having witnessed.
And since miracle claims have helped motivate people to stay within heretical beliefs like Catholicism, there is so much risk involved in investigating this bullshit that it becomes reasonable to just avoid it completely.
There are also accounts from sober-minded people whom I trust of radical experiences of the presence of God (e.g. see this one from Paul Washer).
I'm not going to consider that unless God promises to protect me from dying and going to hell for the time it takes for me to investigate Washer's claim. Will God make that promise, and if he did, how would I know?
My question, then, to the skeptic is, as I said above, is the only type of evidence that may be admitted for God acting in the world today a direct personal encounter, or would one be prepared to accept testimonial evidence from other people?
I've already justified disregarding ancient testimony, and I've also proven that how high the evidentiary standard for miracles "should" be is nobody's call except the person who has chosen to investigate a miracle claim. Their standard might be higher than what typical historians recommend, but the risk of being wrong about the War of Troy is far less than the risk of being wrong about Jesus. Since you can never be too careful when the stakes are possible eternal conscious torment in the afterlife, the tougher standard is likely to be more reasonable.
If one is only prepared to accept a direct personal encounter but not testimonial evidence, I would argue that that is not a rational approach.
How rational is the approach that says I will change my mind and obey the divine will just as soon as God foists his attitude-changing telepathy on me like he did with pagan idolater Cyrus in Ezra 1:1? Would expecting god to use his abilities be so unreasonable?
On the other hand, if one is willing to accept testimonial evidence that such encounters do indeed exist, then I would ask what the qualitative difference is between the testimonial evidence that is available in the present day and that which is present in the 2000 year old documents we know as the New Testament. Presumably the same principles of evaluation would pertain to those.
I've already explained the problems and risks of bothering to become involved in trying to figure out which miracle testimonies are reliable and which aren't.
What About Unanswered Prayer?
As for unanswered prayer, this is a recurring thing that comes up in my conversations with ex-Christians – that is, that answered prayers do not seem to be distinguishable from chance and the act of prayer often feels like talking to the wall or the ceiling.
Exactly. Nothing fails quite like prayer. You'd achieve statistically similar results if your prayers had been directed to a barbie doll. You ask about enough things enoug times, you are going to eventually find yourself in circumstances that "answer" that prayer.
This feeling during prayer is something I can relate to myself experientially, so it is not simply a theoretical issue for me. If Christianity is true, however, this entails that prayer is legit. Our belief in prayer should not be predicated on our evaluation of our feelings while praying or on our later examination of the result of prayer.
Which is about as stupid as saying conclusions should not be reached on the basis of an examination of the evidence. When prayers fail, that counts.
To do this is not to evaluate prayer in a manner consistent with what Scripture teaches us concerning prayer.
You are definitely not addressing skeptics here, so you would be irrational to expect skeptics to find your worries about staying within biblical parameters the least bit convincing.
Nowhere in Scripture are we promised that prayer will be accompanied by an internal sense of being heard.
On the contrary, according to Mark 11:24, all prayer arising from confident trust and belief will be granted, and praying for God to give you an internal sense of being heard is certainly a reasonable prayer request, and cannot be likened to the idiot who prays for a really expensive car.
Rather, prayer is supposed to be accompanied by a conviction that our prayers are heard in Christ, since it is through Him that we have access to God.
But prayer in Mark 11:24 is about getting things, so you cannot circumnavigate around the problem of unanswered prayer by pretending that prayer is primarily about trusting in God.
We are also not in a position to determine whether something is providentially caused by God or not.
That's probably another reason why your Calvinism is laughed at by real Calvinists like James White. True Calvinism requires that all human choices were providentially caused by God.
The Biblical view is not to look around for obviously miraculous causes and give God credit for those only, while presuming non-miraculous events would have happened anyway. Rather, we should view God as sovereign and credit Him with providential control over all things. So greatly has a twenty-first century naturalistic bias permeated our thinking that we in fact often fail to give God sufficient credit for His daily providence.
Then your god has providential control over all things...one example being the "thing" we call sinful human choicemaking. The speed metal group Deicide already told you this years ago, but apparently, you need to be reminded of the obvious: blame it on god.
Prayer, then, should not be evaluated on the basis of a mystical sensation of being heard, or our impression of miraculous divine action in response to prayer. To do so is to judge prayer by a criterion which we were never given by God. How, then, should we evaluate the validity of prayer? We should evaluate it by the validity of the work of Christ and our faith in Him.
Then don't expect to ever notice when a failed prayer constitutes a valid reason to deny the possibility of divinely answered prayer.
If we are trusting in Christ then we have true and valid prayer.
You are making valid prayer much more narrow than Jesus did in Mark 11.
There is more that can be said, of course, about limiting our appreciation of prayer to when God says “yes” to a request, but my point here is simply that evaluating prayer by these standards is a problem from the start. Our belief in prayer stems from our beliefs in Christ and the two should never be separated. If we believe in Christ because of the evidence for His resurrection, then we are being inconsistent to fail to believe in prayer.
Tell that to the 8 year old Christian girl whose prayers for the rapist to stop raping her go unanswered.
Another thing I will say about prayer is that there is, I think, what I would call an epistemic asymmetry when it comes to prayer. An epistemic asymmetry is where making an observation might be strong confirmatory evidence for your hypothesis but not making that observation is only weak, or even negligible, evidence against it. To take an illustration, imagine I see a spider crawling along my desk as I sit here and type this article. That would be excellent evidence for the hypothesis that, somewhere in my apartment, there is a spider. But suppose I do not see a spider in front of me. That is only very weak, even negligible evidence, that there is no spider in my apartment (since there are many other places where a spider might be). That is an example of what I call epistemic asymmetry.
We break the epistemtic asymmetry by noting that we've been challenging Christians for centuries to come up with prayer answers that more reasonably imply the divine than some naturalistic cause, and you keep coming up short. There are billions of theists in the world. The law of large numbers is alone sufficient to explain why, if you go looking long enough, you will find a case of prayer that was answered in a very unexpected or "lucky" way implying "god".
So, how does this relate to prayer? I would argue that specific answers to prayer are relatively strong confirmatory evidence but apparently unanswered prayer is only comparatively weak disconfirmatory evidence.
If a little Christian girl is paying or God to make the rapist stop raping her, and that prayer goes unanswered, then we return to my main point that God is irrelevant. Normal people simply insist that rape is never justified, period, end of story. Only mentally deranged fools insist that rape can be justified is God is allowing it for the sake of a greater good.
The reason for this is that there could be many explanations for why your prayer went unanswered. Perhaps God, in his omniscience, said ‘no’ because He knows (better than you do) that what you asked for is not good for you.
Like, maybe it would be bad for the little girl if her rapist stopped raping her just as soon as she wanted him to.
Or perhaps there is unconfessed sin in your life. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that sin can hinder our prayer life. For example, Proverbs 28:9 says, “If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.”
So raise the age of the raped girl to 12, which is safely past what most consider the age of accountability. In this case, maybe God isn't answering her prayer to make the rapist stop immediately, is because she had sinned in the past, and the punishment via rape is not yet complete.
1 Peter 3:7 says, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” There could thus be any number of reasons why your prayer was not answered and it is not necessarily particularly improbable that, if Christianity is true, many of your prayers will not be answered in the way that you desired.
Leaving the raped little girl not a lot of reason to give a fuck about Jesus anymore than she gives a fuck about a mother who sometimes does and sometimes doesn't rescue her from danger.
We have plenty of Biblical examples of prayers going unanswered. David’s prayer for the life of his illegitimate child by Bathsheba was unanswered (or answered negatively, depending on how you prefer to classify it).
And your irrational god tortured David's baby for 7 days with a very painful condition before allow it to die. 2nd Samuel 12:15-18. Why don't you just conclude that because God is a just god, the reason he tortures babies to death is because he thinks they "deserve" it, the way he thinks they "deserve" to be born stained with original sin? If God's ways are infinitely mysterious, can you really put it past god to place culpability where no human would dare? If God punished Jesus despite Jesus not "deserving" it, I think your moral goose is cooked, buddy.
The same is true of Jesus’ prayer that the cup might pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Right...the second person of the Trinity requesting to avoid doing the will of the first person of the Trinity. Matthew 26:39. Is it sin or not sin when you know the Father's will and you still ask to be excused from it?
In the latter example, Jesus’ prayer included the qualifier “If it is possible…” And the answer was, “No, that can’t happen.” It would probably be classified as the most spectacular unanswered prayer of all time by the atheists, except for what happens afterward with Jesus being raised from the dead.
If Jesus knew the prayer could never be granted, why did he bother making that prayer?
The answered prayers, on the other hand, depending on their level of specificity, can in principle be relatively strong confirmatory evidence for Christianity. Even if you cannot point to specific examples in your own life, there are writings by other people that would potentially document such examples (presuming them to be accurately reported). For example, George Müller (1805-1898) was a Christian evangelist and the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. There was a time when the orphanage at Bristol had run out of bread and milk.[12] Müller was on his knees praying for food when a baker knocked on the door to say that he had been unable to sleep that night, and somehow knew that Müller would need bread that morning. Shortly after, a truck carrying milk broke down, directly in front of the orphanage door. There was no refrigeration. The driver begged Müller to take the milk, which would go bad if it were not consumed. It was just enough for the 300 children in the orphanage.
When you give me all the evidence pertaining to that story, I'll evaluate it for reliability. Deal? Or did I miss that bible verse that says the unbeliever has an obligation to investigate every answered-prayer allegation that comes down the pike?
Conclusion
To conclude, while the problem of divine hiddenness is, on first inspection, a thorny issue, further analysis reveals it to be not as weighty a concern as it first appeared. Given the existence of plausible explanations of divine hiddenness (e.g. God’s knowledge, in His omniscience, of how different individuals will respond to the evidence of His existence), I would argue that the problem of divine hiddenness, though a complete answer eludes us, is not sufficient to overturn the extensive and varied positive confirmatory evidences of Christianity.
Dr. Jonathan McLatchie is a Christian writer, international speaker, and debater.
And he rejects scholarly politely worded challenges. See here.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree (with Honors) in forensic biology, a Masters’s (M.Res) degree in evolutionary biology, a second Master’s degree in medical and molecular bioscience, and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Currently, he is an assistant professor of biology at Sattler College in Boston, Massachusetts.
Christians believe Jesus told them everything they need to know to get saved and grow spiritually at a rate acceptable to God. Jesus never expressed or implied that he wanted any of his followers to use any of God's time in their lives to achieve educational prominence in the study of earthly phenomena. Think of all the preaching and discipling McLatchie could have done if he had foregone worldly pursuits and had become content to just preach and teach 'da bable.
Dr. McLatchie is a contributor to various apologetics websites and is the founder of the Apologetics Academy (Apologetics-Academy.org), a ministry that seeks to equip and train Christians to persuasively defend the faith through regular online webinars, as well as assist Christians who are wrestling with doubts. Dr. McLatchie has participated in more than thirty moderated debates around the world with representatives of atheism, Islam, and other alternative worldview perspectives. He has spoken internationally in Europe, North America, and South Africa promoting an intelligent, reflective, and evidence-based Christian faith.
That's exactly why I have high hopes for my own future public counter-apologetics tours. If McLatchie can so eaisly miss the forest for the trees, I suspect it is because a better justification for divine hiddenness cannot be made.
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