Divine Hiddenness
If God wanted a relationship with us, why isn't his existence obvious?
The objection, at its strongest:
- A perfectly loving God would want everyone to be able to know him.
- If he wanted that, he could make his existence unmistakable.
- Yet many sincere people search and do not find; the world looks the same whether or not God is there.
- Therefore the loving God of theism probably does not exist.
In response:
- Overwhelming proof would coerce. A God who blazed across the sky would compel assent the way a proof of arithmetic does, leaving no room for a free turning of the heart. Love that cannot be declined is not love. A degree of hiddenness may be the necessary space in which a real "yes" becomes possible.
- Hidden is not absent. The claim is not that there is no evidence, but that it does not force the will. Contingent existence, the intelligibility of nature, moral obligation, and conscience are all pointers: enough to seek by, not enough to bully.
- Disposition shapes sight. Knowing a person is not like reading a gauge; it depends on the posture of the one seeking. Scripture frames God as found by those who seek him honestly, which is a different epistemic situation than detecting a distant object.
- The search itself is data. The very longing that fuels the objection — that things ought to be more clear, more just, more whole — is itself difficult to explain if there is nothing answering to it.
Aquinas grants the core of the objection — God's existence is not obvious to us — but explains why: what is most knowable in itself can be least evident to minds like ours, so it must be reasoned to rather than simply seen:
A thing can be self-evident in either of two ways: on the one hand, self-evident in itself, though not to us; on the other, self-evident in itself, and to us... Therefore I say that this proposition, 'God exists,' of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject... Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by His effects.
In plainer terms: that one line — "the predicate is the same as the subject" — is the key. Aquinas is saying that for God, to be and to exist aren't two separate things: existence isn't something God has, it's what God is. So "God exists" is a bit like saying "the existing one exists": true by its very nature. The catch is that we can't see God's nature directly, so this built-in truth doesn't feel obvious to us; we have to arrive at it the long way, through the things God has made.
On knowing God through his effects rather than face-to-face, see The Five Ways.