Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God

Along with the problem of evil, divine hiddenness presents one of the most important philosophical challenges to religious belief. Theists and nontheists alike grapple with the question of why God’s existence isn’t more obvious. The aim of this book is to formulate the problem of divine hiddenness as an evidential argument. A central theme is that we can make progress understanding the epistemic import of divine hiddenness if we model the hiddenness argument using Bayesian methods. One advantage to using evidential tools to frame the topic is that theists can agree with some of the core ideas that motivate interest in the topic: such as, that it is surprising that God’s existence is not more obvious than it is. This is a thought with which theists can agree-without being pressured into atheism. The approach allows individuals on both sides of the issue to find more common ground.

Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God advances discussion on several fronts. It uncovers various difficulties that arise in selecting which hiddenness facts to focus on and relocates disagreement to evaluation of the significance of the evidence. A central hiddenness fact concerns the distribution of theistic belief. One result of examining this data in the context of an evidential argument from hiddenness is that some facts which are typically advanced as challenges to theism-such as that there is non-belief-can turn out to have a different impact when we look at more robust data.

The book as a whole raises an important methodological question: can there be evidence against God for theists? While some theists have taken a hard stance against claims that anything is evidence against God, this work suggest theists are better off conceding that some phenomena are evidence against God, and that theists should be open to the possibility that divine hiddenness is among such evidence.

Charity Anderson, Associate Professor, Baylor University

Charity Anderson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her research is in epistemology and philosophy of religion, with a focus on topics such as fallibilism, epistemic modals, epistemic norms, evidence, and religious epistemology. Her work on divine hiddenness has won several awards, including the Marc Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion.