Consider this fairly standard version of the argument from hiddenness:
If God exists, he produces everything that is necessary for a personal relationship with every nonresisting person.
Belief in the existence of x is necessary for a personal relationship with x.
So, if God exists, every nonresisting person comes to believe in God.
Some nonresisting person does not come to believe in God.
So, God does not exist.
I noticed today that (2) is just plain false. My example is a skeptic about other minds. You can take seriously the hypothesis that you are the only real person around, seriously enough that you do not believe the hypothesis false, and still have a personal relationship with other people. Surely Unger, in his phase of believing that people don’t exist, had personal relationships with them!
A perhaps even better counterexample to (2) was given by one of my students. You can have a long-standing Internet-based personal relationship while taking seriously the possibility that the other person doesn’t exist (e.g., maybe you are interacting with a chatbot).
This observation doesn’t destroy the hiddenness argument. One might, for instance, replace (2) with:
- A personal relationship with x is incompatible with consistent disbelief in the existence of x
and then replace (4) with:
- Some nonresisting persons end up consistently disbelieving in God (e.g., due to their reasonable evaluation of the problem of evil, or due to low priors for theism).
But now (7) is less plausible than (4). One might well think that the evidence against theism is insufficiently strong to make it possible for a nonresister to disbelieve in God.
Alternately, one might replace the deductive hiddenness argument with a probabilistic one by noting that it’s a lot harder to have a personal relationship without belief in the other person, and it’s unlikely that a loving God would make it this hard. I think that’s not a very strong argument, but it is an option for the defender of hiddenness.
