Divine Hiddenness: Do Some People Not Find God Because God Doesn’t Exist?

Author: David Bayless
Category: Philosophy of Religion
Wordcount: 1000

If God exists, wants us to know him, and has the power to reveal himself to everyone, then why do so many people claim to not experience God or find what they consider a good reason to believe there’s a God? Why does God appear to be hidden from so many people?

Perhaps the reason is not because God exists and is in some way concealed, but, instead, because God does not exist: that’s why some people who seek God do not find God.

This reasoning is what’s called the “Divine Hiddenness Argument.” The argument maintains that God’s hiddenness is incompatible with his divine nature, so the fact that God seems hidden from many of us is best explained by the fact that God does not exist.^[1] 

Here we’ll examine this type of argument and some of the most important responses to it.

1. The Argument

The Hiddenness Argument begins with the common understanding that God, if he exists, is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful.^[2] 

The argument then claims that if God is all-loving, he would care deeply that his creatures believe that he exists. As a result, it would be unacceptable to God if any reasonable individuals failed to believe in him; a truly loving creator would want to form relationships with his creatures—which can’t happen if they are ignorant of his existence.^[3] Also, God wouldn’t want anyone—reasonable or not—to die in a state of nonbelief, lest the departed miss their chance to go to heaven.^[4] 

The final step is to observe that there are and have been people who philosopher J.L. Schellenberg calls “nonresistant nonbelievers”: reasonable people who are open to belief in God, and responsibly consider the evidence for God’s existence, yet do not believe in God.

These considerations suggest an argument like this:

1. If God exists and is all-loving, then God would want people to know that he exists.
2. If God would want people to know that he exists, then this knowledge would not be difficult or impossible for people to attain.
3. But this knowledge is difficult or impossible for some people to attain: God is hidden from many reasonable people.
4. So, therefore, God doesn’t exist.

To simplify: if God did exist, he would not be hidden in a way that results in many people reasonably believing that he does not exist; but there are such people, so God does not exist.^[5] Even more simply put, God is hidden to many people when it seems he should not be. 

2. Three Responses

Let’s review some responses to this type of argument.

2.1. Denying Premise 1: Belief in God Doesn’t Matter

One response involves arguing that God wouldn’t care whether people believe in him or not: a loving God would want what’s best for people, whether they believe he exists or not. People believing in God just wouldn’t matter for anything important: God’s insisting they believe or else would be petty. 

2.2. Denying Premise 2: Hiddenness Promotes Some Greater Good

A second response proposes that by concealing himself God might achieve some greater good that he couldn’t achieve if he were widely revealed.^[6] God might entice some people to more fervently seek him by not clearly revealing himself to them. ^[7] God might hide himself to respect our autonomy as moral agents: if everyone were vividly aware of his presence, we might avoid wrongdoing out of fear of divine punishment, not a desire to do what’s right.^[8]

These responses are dubious: if people finding God is good, it’s unclear why it would be better for people to find him after a chase instead of finding him more immediately. And many people do not find God after carefully seeking him, hence the Hiddenness argument.

And we already know that we might be punished in various ways by the law and social condemnation. But that doesn’t undermine our autonomy, so it’s unclear why knowing that God might punish us would have that result either.

So it seems unlikely that God couldn’t achieve whatever goods he desires while also making himself known; if he couldn’t do this, we might wonder why he lacked this seemingly possible ability.^[9] 

2.3. Denying Premise 3: There Are No Nonresistant Nonbelievers

A third response is to reject the claim that there are genuine “nonresistant nonbelievers,” and argue that such people must be guilty of ignorance, self-deception, negligence, or stubbornness, and so they aren’t really reasonable in not believing in God.^[10]

This response is hard to accept. There seem to be reasonable people who do not believe in God, as anyone who has spoken with thoughtful, informed, and fair nonbelievers can attest. It is also unclear how the insistence that all such nonbelievers are unreasonable could be supported with strong evidence.

2.4. God’s Will Is Inscrutable 

A final general response submits that we finite creatures are in a poor position to discern the motives of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator.^[11] Can a toddler guess why her parents take her to the doctor or daycare center? No, but the parents have good reasons for their actions, even though the toddler can’t understand them. This response claims we’re like toddlers relative to God, and so shouldn’t hope to understand why he hides himself from some of us.

In response, although our understanding wouldn’t compare to God’s, that doesn’t mean we’re totally incapable of predicting that he would and should reveal himself. Our predictions are not always accurate, but they arguably can’t be that wide of the mark. And if we are so ignorant here, it’s hard to understand how people could be confident in any of their expectations about God.

3. Conclusion

If there are seemingly reasonable people who do not find good evidence for God’s existence, that might weaken the claim that it’s rational to believe in God. In other areas of inquiry, when reasonable people seek but don’t find, that’s some evidence the thing they are seeking doesn’t exist.^[12] So the Hiddenness Argument is important to those who think they have found God, and those who find they haven’t.

Notes

[1] Two other common names of this type of argument are the ‘Argument from Reasonable Nonbelief’ and the ‘Argument from Divine Hiddenness.’ This type of argument began with the work of J.L. Schellenberg. Schellenberg (2006, which is an updated version of his 1993 book) is his earliest presentation of a Hiddenness Argument. More developed versions of the argument are found in Schellenberg (2007) and Schellenberg (2015).

[2] See The Concept of God: Divine Attributes by Bailie Peterson. The Hiddenness Argument aligns with the traditional monotheistic understanding of God as the greatest conceivable being. St. Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033-1109) focused on the the concept of God as the greatest conceivable being: see Anselm ([1078] 2001), p. 7 and The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God by Andrew Chapman.

It may be worthwhile to ponder if considering God not as all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but as very-loving, very-knowledgeable, or very-powerful makes any important difference to the argument.

[3] See Schellenberg (2006), pp. 38-40 and Schellenberg (2015), pp. 41-42 for elaboration of these points.

[4] Theodore Drange emphasizes this in his Hiddenness Argument in Drange (1996). For discussion of arguments that most or all people would go to heaven, see Hell and Universalism: Could God Sentence Anyone to Eternal Punishment? by A.G. Holdier.

If people must (at least) believe that God exists to go to heaven, that so many people, present and past, have been part of religions that do not involve believing in God’s existence would be repugnant to an all-loving God. The uneven distribution of theistic belief throughout the globe is a sociological fact on which Stephen Maitzen builds a Hiddenness Argument in Maitzen (2006).

[5] The Hiddenness Argument is thus a version of the “Argument from Evil,” since people not believing in God is proposed to be an evil or bad thing, at least from many theistic perspectives, and thus there’s the question of why, if God exists, God would allow that to happen. To raise the issue another way, if God would create the best world he can, or even choose to create a world among the best worlds, and such a world would include all reasonable people believing in God, there’s the question of why in our world there are many reasonable people who do not believe in God. For discussion see, The Problem of Evil: Is Suffering Evidence that There is Not a God? by Thomas Metcalf and The Problem of No Best World by Kirk Lougheed

[6] A similar response to the argument from hiddenness is given to the problem of evil, namely that we might not be in a position to reasonably discern whether there is or could be a greater good that would justify God allowing various types of evils: this type of response is called  is known as “Skeptical Theism,” since skeptics deny that we have a type of knowledge. This is discussed in section “4. Evil Is No Evidence?” in Tom Metcalf’s The Problem of Evil: Is Suffering Evidence That God Doesn’t Exist?

[7] This is an approach derivable from various suppositions found in Pascal ([1670] 1995), e.g., that humans are “miserable” without God.

[8] This sort of response is developed in Moser (2008), e.g., pp. 20-21.

[9] See Schellenberg (2015), pp. 109-112.

[10] This response is pressed in Henry (2001) and Henry (2008).

[11] For a representative presentation of this response, see McBrayer and Swenson (2012).

[12] That some people have religious and mystical experiences, and other people do not, is a central concern about whether such experiences justify religious beliefs. See Richard Swinburne on Religious Experience by Matthew Sanderson and “Properly Basic” Belief in God: Believing in God Without an Argument by Jamie B. Turner for discussion. On the general issue of how to respond to disagreements between seemingly reasonable people, see The Epistemology of Disagreement: How Should We Respond When People Disagree? by Jonathan Matheson.

References

Anselm. Proslogion, with the replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Translated by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001: 1075-78. Originally published in 1078.

Drange, Theodore. “Arguments from Evil and Nonbelief.” 1996. Published on The Secular Web.

Henry, Doug. “Does Reasonable Nonbelief Exist?” Faith and Philosophy 18 (1), 2001: 75-92.

–– “Reasonable Doubts about Reasonable Nonbelief.” Faith and Philosophy 25 (3), 2008: 276-289.

Maitzen, Stephen. “Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism.” Religious Studies 42 (2), 2006: 171-191.

McBrayer, Justin and Swenson, Philip. “Skepticism about the Argument from Divine Hiddenness.” Religious Studies 48 (2), 2012: 129-150.

Moser, Paul. The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. tr. A.J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. Originally published in 1670.

Schellenberg, J. L. Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, with a New Preface. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006. Originally published in 1993.

–– The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism. New York: Cornell University Press, 2007.

–– The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

For Further Reading

Howard-Snyder, Daniel, et. al. (2022). “Hiddenness of God.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Teeninga, Luke. “Divine Hiddenness Argument against God’s Existence.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Related Essays

The Concept of God: Divine Attributes by Bailie Peterson

Atheism: Believing God Does Not Exist by Nathan Nobis

The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God by Andrew Chapman

The Problem of Evil: Is Suffering Evidence that There is Not a God? by Thomas Metcalf

The Problem of No Best World by Kirk Lougheed

Hell and Universalism: Could God Sentence Anyone to Eternal Punishment? by A.G. Holdier

Richard Swinburne on Religious Experience by Matthew Sanderson

“Properly Basic” Belief in God: Believing in God Without an Argument by Jamie B. Turner

The Epistemology of Disagreement: How Should We Respond When People Disagree? by Jonathan Matheson

Revision History

This essay was originally posted on May 5, 2016. It was revised and updated by the Editors of 1000-Word Philosophy and reposted on June 8, 2025.

About the Author

David Bayless, MD, holds BAs in physics and philosophy from the Samford University Fellows Program, and is a Resident in Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic School of Graduate Medical Education in Rochester, MN. His non-medical academic interests include philosophy of religion, social psychology, and the philosophy of dreaming. He believing that the study of philosophy and other humanities can enhance the quality of medical research and patient care.

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