Is God Hiding? Or Are We?

J.L. Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument goes something like this:

1. A perfectly loving God would never allow reasonable unbelief about His existence.

2. There are instances of reasonable unbelief.

3. Therefore, a perfectly loving God does not exist.

There are many that consider this argument to be a strong defeater of Christianity, but there’s a critical issue with the notion of reasonable unbelief. What exactly qualifies as reasonable unbelief? Schellenberg seems to suggest that it refers to cases where someone sincerely seeks God but does not find sufficient evidence to believe in Him. But here’s the thing that people often get tripped up on: “sufficient evidence” isn’t about providing evidence that compels belief. Instead, it refers to the amount of evidence necessary to make one culpable for their unbelief. To be culpable, someone would need to have sufficient evidence to reasonably conclude that God exists but reject it out of willfulness or neglect (probably a bit of both). This raises an important question: how do we verify that anyone is genuinely not at fault for their unbelief? We don’t have direct access to their experiences, reasoning, motivations, or attitudes.

When we think someone is in a state of reasonable unbelief, it’s usually because they say they are. But that’s a subjective claim, not objective proof. And here’s the deeper problem: how can any of us know that we’re in a state of reasonable unbelief? We might believe it, but belief is not the same as knowledge.

Consider this: could we be fooling ourselves into rejecting something we know to be true? Schellenberg himself acknowledges in his writings that humans are incredibly adept at self-deception. We can convince ourselves that we don’t believe something, especially if accepting it would be uncomfortable, embarrassing, or challenging. For instance, someone might reject belief in God because accepting His existence would require painful self-reflection or significant changes in their life and values.

One might object that sincere seekers are not culpable because they earnestly try to find God. But how do we measure sincerity? Without objective criteria, sincerity remains a subjective and unverifiable claim. The potential for humans to deceive themselves about their own sincerity further complicates this issue.

This epistemic uncertainty undermines the second premise. If reasonable unbelief cannot be objectively verified, it cannot serve as a strong foundation for a philosophical argument. The very possibility that humans might deceive themselves about their own unbelief casts doubt on whether reasonable unbelief exists at all. Consequently, the concept’s epistemic shakiness alone is enough to defeat the second premise and collapse the Hiddenness Argument.