Divine hiddenness: part 1 (recent work on the hiddenness argument)

Schellenberg, J. L.

doi:10.1111/phc3.12355

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Schellenberg (2005a, 208) responds, but his use of the term "conscious" rather than "explicit" in more recent forms of the argument rebuts their contentions more conclusively. See Schellenberg (2005b) for a reply to a different set of objections.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting to Know a God You Do Not Believe In: Panentheism, Externalism, and Divine Hiddenness

Cawdron¹

2021

Zygon

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J. L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument is one of the key contemporary justifications for atheism and has prompted numerous responses from those defending the plausibility of belief in God. I will outline a recent counterargument from Michael C. Rea, who claims that relationships with God are far more widely available than Schellenberg assumes. However, I will suggest that it invites a response from proponents of the hiddenness argument because it leaves some nonbelievers unaccounted for. I will rectify this by suggesting that a model of panentheism in which God is embodied in the cosmos allows all, including all nonbelievers, to have a relationship with God. I will then claim that semantic externalism and externalism about beliefs can enable nonbelievers to get to know this God. I will then challenge the hiddenness argument by suggesting that these relationships can accommodate the key motivations behind Schellenberg's insistence on personal relationships without requiring subjects to recognize that they are in a relationship with God.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting to Know a God You Do Not Believe In: Panentheism, Externalism, and Divine Hiddenness

Cawdron¹

2021

Zygon

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“…They cannot accept God's love without being cognitively committed to God's love being there to be accepted by them. John Schellenberg has made similar claims in his defence of the argument for atheism from divine hiddenness, querying for example, ‘how could you be grateful for what you have experienced as a gift of God's grace or vacillate over how to respond to your sense that God is calling you to a higher level of moral commitment or do any other thing involved in a conscious reciprocal relationship with God if you do not believe that God exists?’ (Schellenberg (2017), 2). Schellenberg's answer is that you cannot.…”

Section: Accepting God's Lovementioning

confidence: 99%

The transformative power of accepting God's love

Byerly

2021

Rel. Stud.

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This article develops an account of some of the central features involved on the human side in adopting a richly accepting orientation towards God's love. It then builds a conceptual and empirical argument for the conclusion that accepting God's love can enhance a person's mental health and can indirectly enable a person to cultivate or maintain moral virtues – whether or not God exists. Importantly, the article contends that these transformative benefits are available to both believers and agnostics, and an original secondary data analysis is offered to support this conclusion in the case of agnostics. The article explains how this transformative value of accepting God's love may serve as the basis for a novel pragmatic argument for theistic religious commitment.

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“…Realizing that I could not address all of these and wishing to enable a reasonable treatment of those I did include, I decided to break my survey into two parts. Part 1 (Schellenberg, ) looked at recent philosophical work on the hiddenness argument for atheism descended from my book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Schellenberg, ). Now, in Part 2, I consider recent work not easily seen as belonging to that stream of discussion but related to it by family resemblance—work on arguments about hiddenness other than my argument, some of them quite new, and work that, though sometimes applied to my argument, more decidedly than any that came before seeks insight on a range of hiddenness issues from theology, raising a number of methodological issues as it does so.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Divine hiddenness: Part 2 (recent enlargements of the discussion)

Schellenberg

2017

Philosophy Compass

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Offered here is Part 2 of a two-part critical survey of recent work in philosophy on divine hiddenness. Part 1 surveyed recent development of the discussion initiated by my 1993 book on the subject. Here, I examine some related work that expands the scope of the hiddenness discussion. Some of the enlargements take further the discussion of Stephen Maitzen's work on the demographics of theism. Others introduce new hiddenness problems and ways of dealing with them. A third category of new work urges theological constraints, of one sort or another, on hiddenness reasoning, thus raising new methodological issues. | INTRODUCTIONThis is the second of two articles critically surveying recent work on divine hiddenness in philosophy. More than 60 papers and books dealing with hiddenness themes have appeared in the past six years, since an earlier survey article of mine was published (Schellenberg, 2010). Realizing that I could not address all of these and wishing to enable a reasonable treatment of those I did include, I decided to break my survey into two parts. Part 1 (Schellenberg, 2017) looked at recent philosophical work on the hiddenness argument for atheism descended from my book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Schellenberg, 1993). Now, in Part 2, I consider recent work not easily seen as belonging to that stream of discussion but related to it by family resemblance-work on arguments about hiddenness other than my argument, some of them quite new, and work that, though sometimes applied to my argument, more decidedly than any that came before seeks insight on a range of hiddenness issues from theology, raising a number of methodological issues as it does so. | NEW WORK ON THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF THEISMTen years ago, Stephen Maitzen expanded the number of hiddenness issues to be considered by arguing that the highly uneven or lopsided distribution of theistic belief in the world is much more likely on naturalism than on theism (Maitzen, 2006). This problem he called a problem about the "demographics" of theism. A recent reply to Maitzen comes from T. J. Mawson (2012). Maitzen had argued that responses appealing to free will are inapplicable to the demographics problem. But Mawson observes that neglected in Maitzen's discussion of free will is the fact that, through the exercise of free will, people can affect how much and where belief in God spreads, with an uneven

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Divine hiddenness: part 1 (recent work on the hiddenness argument)

Cited by 8 publications

References 23 publications

Getting to Know a God You Do Not Believe In: Panentheism, Externalism, and Divine Hiddenness

Getting to Know a God You Do Not Believe In: Panentheism, Externalism, and Divine Hiddenness

The transformative power of accepting God's love

Divine hiddenness: Part 2 (recent enlargements of the discussion)

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