Questions About God's Hiddeness

Transcript Questions About God's Hiddeness

Kevin Harris: Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. This is the podcast of ReasonableFaith.org. We are continuing to answer some questions that we get at ReasonableFaith.org and some today dealing with God’s hiddeness or divine hiddeness – why isn’t God more obvious? In fact, a host of questions today that we want to get to. Dr. Craig, good to have you back in the studio. It seems that an atheist writer is known for writing this argument against God. J. L. Schellenberg. This questioner asks,

Is that a fair statement of the argument against God from divine hiddeness?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think that would seem to capture it.

Kevin Harris: The writer says,

This writer goes on to say,

Address some of this.

Dr. Craig: I guess I would say that it is not true that if God exists, reasonable unbelief does not exist. What I would say is that if God exists then unbelief that separates one from God would not persist. I think there can clearly be moments of unbelief but there would not be persistent reasonable unbelief until death. At some point in the process, God will bear witness to himself to that individual in such a way that unbelief that separates one from God would become unreasonable. So if he says reasonable unbelief exists, I could be happy to say, yes, temporarily. But ultimately persistent unbelief is not reasonable and that is because of the inner witness of God’s Spirit that he bears to his own reality. It doesn’t need to be through external evidence and argument. Certainly many people are born into situations in the world where they don’t have the advantage of argument and evidence that tips the scales in favor of Christian belief. But I don’t think that is necessary. For an omnipotent and all-loving God it would be easy for him to provide inner witness of his reality to persons such that if they persist in unbelief until death they are doing something quite unreasonable. In fact, Alvin Plantinga would say they are rationally dysfunctional. He would say their cognitive faculties are not functioning properly.

Kevin Harris: By the way, Paul Moser is a Christian philosopher, and he and Schellenberg have done a lot of exchanges on this. So if you really want to see a rigorous back and forth and really the arguments spelled out, then look up the work of Paul Moser as he interacts with Schellenberg’s arguments on the hiddeness of God.

Dr. Craig: One of the things that I disagree with Paul on, however, is he has a tendency to depreciate the importance of argument and evidence for theism and for Christian theism in particular. He is very ill-disposed toward the arguments of natural theology. He tends to think that they lead away from God in that they don’t inculcate the proper heart attitude toward God. It seems to me that that just doesn’t necessarily follow. Certainly, one could approach the arguments for God’s existence with intellectual pride and a lack of humility and openness to God. That is certainly true. You can do intellectual game playing with these arguments. But I’ve known far too many people, and I think Scripture testifies to the fact, that for a person with an open mind and open heart the arguments and evidence can be the means by which the Spirit of God draws that person to a repentant faith and a humble knowledge of God and an acceptance of who God is. [1] So there doesn’t need to be this unnecessary playing off of argument and evidence against this more personal relational approach to God. It is a both-and.

Kevin Harris: Well, yeah, it is.

Dr. Craig: What he is saying is you don’t need evidence and argument for the existence of God in order to come to God. I think that is quite right. But he seems to go even farther to say arguments and evidence for God’s existence are positively deleterious for coming to a knowledge of God. They are almost an obstacle, in a sense, because they mislead you. They kind of guide you down the wrong path rather than the path of humility and personal relationship. They treat it more as a kind of cognitive problem to be solved. That just seems to me to be an unnecessary dichotomy. I know plenty of people for whom this has been an honest heartfelt search and for whom the evidence has come as a tremendous relief because they have been able to make a rational step in putting their faith in God.

Kevin Harris: Paul Moser has helped me a whole lot in understanding hiddeness of God type arguments because it is a common objection. Carl Sagan brought it up. Certainly when you look at the life of Paul in Acts 17 and 18 and you look at how Paul used arguments and evidence as well, you are certainly out of biblical bounds if you completely denounce that.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. It seems to me very clear that the practice of the apostles in dealing with Gentiles in particular was through appeal to God’s handiwork in nature as evidence that God exists. So I think biblically, Paul [Moser]’s view doesn’t pass muster.

Kevin Harris: One more followup from this same questioner:

Dr. Craig: I don’t think that that is the proper understanding of that last passage. That last passage is meant to say that those who have not seen the risen Christ themselves (like Thomas did) and yet who believe on the basis of the apostolic testimony to these events are blessed. So John is not in any way depreciating the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. On the contrary, he is saying we have the apostolic testimony to these events and the beloved disciple who wrote the fourth Gospel emphasizes that, “I have borne witness to these events. I know what I am talking about. Therefore we can have confidence that this has occurred.” What I think the writer is correct to point out is that while this is sufficient, it is not necessary. There are plenty of people in the world – some illiterate peasant living in Laos for example – who has no resources or time or education to look at the historical evidence for the resurrection.

Kevin Harris: He doesn’t have the internet so he can’t go to ReasonableFaith.org!

Dr. Craig: No! And yet he is perfectly rational to believe in the resurrection of Christ because of a personal relationship with the risen Lord himself. So John says in his epistle that, “If we received the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater. . . . He who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself.” [2] There John is talking about that inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. He says if we receive the testimony of men (that apostolic testimony) to these events, how much greater is the inner testimony of God himself to his Son. So while these arguments and evidences are not necessary for belief to be rational, indeed I think obligatory, nevertheless they are sufficient. I would say something similar about the passage in Luke. It is not necessary to have the evidence for the resurrection in order to believe that Jesus has risen. Most Christians down through history haven’t had the benefit of being able to do an historical investigation of the evidence for the resurrection. Nevertheless they rationally believed on the basis of the Scriptures and their experience with Christ.

Kevin Harris: In light of what you are saying here, it seems that perhaps there are different eras that need more intellectual stimulation or more intellectual argument. [3] Like in the first century, there seemed to be a lot of apologetic work, and in our century there seems to be a lot of necessity of work in this area. Maybe in other centuries not so much? Francis Schaeffer, for instance, said we are about to enter that time when pre-evangelism (that is, apologetics) are going to be more necessary when perhaps before World War II not so much.

Dr. Craig: I think you are making a good point in that a person who is raised in a cultural milieu which is shaped by Christian values is going to be open to the Gospel in a way that a person who is thoroughly secularized will not. When you speak on a university campus in Europe, the prevailing conviction is so secular and so deeply anti-Christian that it is difficult to even get a hearing. Whereas in the United States for the most part Christianity can be still heard as an intellectually plausible option for folks today. So it will be true, I think Kevin, that in certain cultural contexts one’s preaching of the Gospel will be more effective if it is coupled with some sort of intellectual defense of the faith.

Kevin Harris: Let’s conclude then just by looking briefly at the first passage that he brought up, and that is if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead. Let’s put that in context a little bit. I don’t see how that mitigates against arguing for the resurrection like Paul did.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. It most certainly did.

Kevin Harris: It just seems to me it is saying if you are faithful with what you are given you will be given more. But if you are not faithful with what you are given, even that will be taken from you. That is true in relationships and in business and practically anything. I don’t see the point here of how this passage would point to not arguing for the resurrection.

Dr. Craig: It would at most show that belief in Christ could be justified on the basis of Moses and the prophets, and that you wouldn’t need to have evidence for the resurrection.

Kevin Harris: Especially in that culture that Jesus was speaking to.

Dr. Craig: Right. I think what the author there is trying to say is, “You Jewish listeners who hear the Gospel message or read this Gospel and you deny the truth of it; it is because of your closed hearts and your closed minds. You don’t even hear Moses and the prophets and their testimony to Christ, so it is hardly surprising that you reject our proclamation of his resurrection.”

Kevin Harris: Final question on divine hiddenness, Dr. Craig. The writer says,

And he lists a few.

Is he correct here? Do you think that that caused a lot of people to no longer believe in God since we weren’t as centric as we thought we were?

Dr. Craig: I doubt that when that Copernican discovery was made that that caused many people to disbelieve in God. That seems to be a modern retrospective analysis of the situation. In fact, on this Aristotelian Ptolemaic cosmology, the reason that the earth was at the center of the universe was because this is where the heavy dross sank. The earth was sort of the sink of the universe where the heavy crud would coagulate and sink, where the ethereal and spiritual elements were in the outer orb of the stars. So man’s being at the center of the universe wasn’t in a sense this exalted place. He was living in the sink of the universe and in being found out that he is not there after all is not something that would be apt to make people, I think, disbelieve.

Kevin Harris: He goes through a little grocery list of things that he thinks cause people to doubt God and increase the hiddenness of God to the extent that God doesn’t exist. He says,

We addressed this earlier in a podcast. [4] You don’t think you can make an airtight case that Paul and Jesus thought that, in light of their eschatological teaching.

Dr. Craig: No, I think that it is quite open that both Jesus and Paul thought that the time of Christ’s second coming was indeterminate and they didn’t know whether it would occur in their lifetime or in the lifetime of their hearers but they were prepared for this to happen. [5] And the size of the universe – well, these are the sorts of things that I think he is right that emotionally these may have an impact upon people because you do hear people like Carl Sagan and others cite these as reasons for unbelief. But then I am afraid we just need to distinguish between what constitutes a good argument and what constitutes an emotional disposition.

Kevin Harris: Exactly. It is like saying we found out we are not the center of the universe and there are trillions of galaxies. If anything, that moves me closer to God not further away from him. The majesty of God is just bigger than we thought. Why does that have to move us in the opposite direction?

Dr. Craig: When the psalmist looked up at the stars at night he said, “When I look at the stars and the worlds that you made, what is man that you are mindful of him?” [6] I think that awe of the psalmist is only increased by our discovery of the other nebulae and galaxies and galactic clusters that are just incomprehensibly distant. So my attitude is honestly quite different than the attitude of the person who thinks that this somehow makes it less likely that God exists. I think it extolls the grandeur and majesty of God and of his condescension to care for me as an individual. How you react emotionally to these things is probably person-relative and in any case doesn’t constitute an argument. I would love to see a good argument against the existence of God from the size of the universe. That would be a very interesting argument.

Kevin Harris: It would be. Let’s answer some more from Matt because some of these things that he lists are probably not only things that have dissuaded him from belief but he is also reflecting the attitude of people which can often be mistaken like we’ve been taking about – the size of the universe. He says,

What he is trying to do here is bypass the view that Genesis can be interpreted as long periods of time. He says, no, the most natural reading is that it is six 24-hour days. We’ve addressed that.

Well, the problem of evil. The fact that God seems so absent from our suffering.

Dr. Craig: That would be the hiddenness of God once again.

Kevin Harris:

We’ve talked about that – why aren’t there more sea partings and more direct miracles.

Dr. Craig: The thing that strikes me about these, Kevin, is that in all of these cases he is setting up a sort of expectation that he has for God, and then God fails to meet this expectation. I would say that rather than interpret this as casting doubt on God’s existence, it should cast doubt on these sorts of false expectations that you set up for God. I just don’t see any reason to think, for example, that we should be at the center of the universe, that the universe should be tiny, that we should be directly created by special acts rather than evolved, that earthquakes shouldn’t occur. I don’t think that these expectations are ones that we can realistically impose on God.

Kevin Harris: He says unanswered prayers are also an indication that God doesn’t exist, the hiddenness of God. Let me just say that I am so glad that God hasn’t answered half of my prayers. The things that I’ve prayed for that I am so glad, looking back, I am very glad he didn’t answer.

Dr. Craig: I addressed that question in the book Hard Questions, Real Answers; I talk a little bit about the problem of unanswered prayer. [7] Certainly there are things I think that we can agree that would count on the skeptic side, or the atheist side, of the balance. But I am convinced there are many more good things that are on the positive side of the balance, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments. These tip the scales of the evidence, I think, in the favor of theism. [8]