At the close of a two-part revisitation of hiddenness themes recently published in this journal, I say that successfully to answer the hiddenness argument, critics will need to do better – will need to seek ‘criticisms much more subtle and sophisticated – and more attentive to the actual structure and content of that argument – than any we have seen to date’.Footnote ¹ The criticisms of Poston and Dougherty might, I suppose, be called subtle and sophisticated, but they are certainly not attentive to the actual structure and content of the hiddenness argument. Moreover, when the adjustments needed to secure their relevance are made, the criticisms in question turn out to be as unconvincing within a non-theological context of enquiry as other relevant criticisms canvassed in those earlier articles of mine. Naturally enough, I therefore consider them unsuccessful.

The problems in the Poston/Dougherty [hereafter PD]Footnote ² piece begin early, with the claim that the hiddenness argument includes a premise that is critically ambiguous. This claim is false. Here is how the authors state the premise supposed to be ambiguous:

• (7) If God provides access to the benefits of a relationship with Him to all who are willing, then reasonable non-belief will not occur (185).

And here is how they present the previous premise of the hiddenness argument:

• (6) If a perfectly loving God exists, He will provide access to the benefits of a relationship with Him to all who are willing (185).

Now as all of my writing on this subject confirms, my actual claim about what a perfectly loving God would do is not (6), but rather,

• (6*) If a perfectly loving God exists, all who are non-resistant always can, just by trying, participate in explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God.

And the premise about belief is not (7), but rather

• (7*) If a perfectly loving God exists, all who are non-resistant always believe that God exists.Footnote ³

And (7*) is not ambiguous in any of the ways claimed by the PD piece. Evidently, if all who are non-resistant always believe that God exists, then it is indeed at every time and not just at/by this or that particular time that non-resistant nonbelief will fail to occur. Furthermore, if God ensures that creatures can, just by trying, participate in an explicit relationship – and here note my repeated use, in connection with this notion, of such terms as ‘personal’, ‘intimate’, ‘mutual’, ‘reciprocal’, etc., and my repeated reference to such things as conscious experience of God's loving presence and a response thereto of worship – then clearly nothing short of genuine belief and belief de dicto will do, which is to say that the distinctions between genuine belief and the authors' misleadingly labelled partial belief (which, given its compatibility with a confidence level below 0.5, need not be belief at all) and between belief de dicto and belief de re are irrelevant to a determination of what the hiddenness argument says or might plausibly be read as saying.

Now perhaps we can deal with these misunderstandings in the PD piece by translating what the authors have to say about (7) into an objection to (6*). Their new way of putting their central point, were they to set aside the mistaken ideas about ambiguity and focus on the correct interpretation of the hiddenness argument, would presumably involve the suggestion other writers have tried: that (6*) is too strong, and that because of this the hiddenness argument is prevented from moving on to (7*) or any other premise or conclusion. Why would Poston and Dougherty say is it too strong? Because when we notice the many ways in which one can construe ‘God has a relationship with creatures and they with God’, we can see that a perfectly loving God might very well rest content with a mode of relationship involving considerable uncertainty about the existence of God on the part of creatures, perhaps involving belief de re instead of belief de dicto – a relationship growing over time into something more like the relationship entailing belief de dicto emphasized by the mistaken (6*).

But why do Poston and Dougherty think that a perfectly loving God might rest content, for protracted periods of time, with making available one of the weaker non-explicit sorts of relationship that their paper takes pains to describe (no clear hearing of God's voice; no conscious experience of divine forgiveness and support; no assurance of God's loving presence)? Why think that argument leads us here – especially in the midst of a flood of evidence from relationships all around us, and from the language of love, that even a passably loving mother or sibling or friend will spontaneously reach out to the beloved in a more explicit manner – a manner that, of the available options, apparently only (6*) reflects? (I refer to the evidence I have developed in detail in other writings, to which the PD piece owes us some response.)

One PD answer is simply a general point about benefits: the more we fill out the idea of a non-explicit relationship with God, the more we see that it can be quite beneficial and meaningful for the creature (191, 192, 194). However, it is evident, as suggested above, that explicit relationship far outshines implicit. In any case, a perfectly loving being would value explicit relationship with the ones loved not just on account of the benefits that might thereby be conferred on the beloved but for its own sake. The mother or sibling or friend whose love we admire does not value explicit relationship with us just because it is good for us, standing ready to withdraw if something non-explicit should prove nearly as good! So there is no good reason for non-explicitness and hiddenness here.

On occasion, the PD piece suggests that an intellectually attractive feature of non-explicit relationship is the room it leaves for development: if creatures start out relating to God through belief de re or something similar, then there is room for them to grow into the more explicit form of relationship (190, 193). Now the possibility of development is indeed important. But let's think for a moment about what explicit relationship with God could be like, focusing on the concepts involved, in order to see whether development of the relevant sort really is precluded by it. The idea of such relationship is the idea of acquaintance and interaction – through such things as trust and responsiveness to the variable content of religious experience – with the greatest possible personal being, unspeakably beautiful and rich in every conceivable aspect. And given the infinite richness and depth of any God there may be, explicit relationship with God would have to be capable of an indefinite degree of development, with always more to discover and overcome for anyone who participated in it.

The PD piece, perhaps unduly influenced by familiar religious conceptions (there is a reference to Christian revivalism (194)), seems to assume that explicit relationship with God would be one-dimensional and static, and that the development God would desire for us must therefore somehow be fitted in prior to such relationship – but if we look at things from only a slightly non-conventional slant, we will see how opportunities for such development must in a multitude of forms arise as the explicit relationship progresses. What cause grounded in the need for development could there be, then, for anyone ever to be prevented from so much as beginning such a relationship?

This brings us to some additional points in the PD piece about specific benefits – and developmental benefits – associated with implicit relationship. To these points now falls the task of discovering some philosophical warrant for the authors' evident preference for a broad disjunctive account of divine–creature relationship. But I am afraid that the task is left unfulfilled. Consider first the several points somewhat hurriedly sketched at the end of the PD piece (195–196), which basically repeat what others have said about such things as appropriate religious affections and moral authenticity and unknown ‘goods of mystery’, and with no attention to how the ‘accommodation strategy’ developed in my latest missives on this subject (the strategy of showing how various alleged reasons for temporary inculpable non-belief can be accommodated within a developing, explicit relationship with God) and my argument about the question-begging nature of the ‘unknown goods’ idea might be – and indeed already have been – brought to bear in a refutation of those reasons. These points simply reintroduce considerations of a sort to which I have already responded in the papers just mentioned, instead of in any way engaging those responses. So nothing new is invited from me here.

That leaves us with precisely one possibility, which is touched on at the end of the PD piece and more fully developed earlier on, namely an argument about the alleged religious value of doubt. According to this argument,

This argument seems to be the argument in which the authors place most stock; it is also developed in the context of an attempt to address my accommodation strategy: they claim that the good they have in mind here is one that ‘essentially depends upon precisely the presence of epistemic distance’ (189), and so is not capable of being realized or made up for in other ways, as my accommodation strategy would be required to claim. Let us therefore see whether this move is more successful than the others we have considered and rejected.

It is not. The particular experience of this-world Christians who fall into doubt and then feel themselves longing for God and gradually returned to belief does indeed essentially depend on hiddenness, but why suppose that if God creates it must be this world – a world including those Christians – that results? Is it not rather question-begging in the present context to suppose such a thing? The authors claim that the accommodation strategy does not apply here, but they have not adequately considered how it might be applied.

Take, for example, their response to my oft-repeated suggestion that there is a second level of hiddenness that could only operate within divine – human relationship, analogous to what has been called ‘the dark night of the soul’. What the authors say is that the experience of darkness I cite is not always one in which belief is in fact preserved (188) – that is, that in the actual world belief is not always preserved through it – overlooking that I am talking, not about what actually happens in this world, but about what God might do in a world somewhat analogous to ours. Obviously, God could see to it that the larger context was such that the experience never removed evidence sufficient for belief, even if that's not always the way things go in the actual world. (Given an interruption in the sense of God's presence, creatures would be forced to depend on past experience, to remain true to it; and this past experience, together with awareness of the past and present experience of others and of non-experiential evidence, could be made perfectly sufficient for belief in the absence of resistance – and this without removing the occasion for longing, since the sense of God's presence is gone.) Again, why suppose that God's creative options are restricted by the features of the actual world, unless one is tacitly assuming that the actual world is created by God and thus begging the question against the hiddenness argument?

I'm afraid the authors do seem to make this sort of mistake fairly regularly, and the result is not exactly such as to advance discussion of the hiddenness argument. Perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about here appears near the end of their paper: ‘In the final analysis, Schellenberg's argument fails because it envisions God as requiring too much: explicit, highly confident belief at all times. Fortunately, God is more generous. The Christian tradition attests that God will accept far less, He will “meet us where we are”’ (196).

When I first saw this passage I was truly startled. How could it be thought that the hiddenness argument depicts God as requiring belief of anyone and thus as ungenerous – with the implication that if the hiddenness argument were right about God, God would be leaving some – namely inculpable non-believers – out in the cold, since they are unable to come up with what is required? (Up is down and down up here.) After all, what the hiddenness argument clearly says is that God would generously offer belief – and the explicit relationship made possible thereby – to all, and so there would be no inculpable non-believers in a world created by God. But then I saw that once again there is this tendency to assume that God exists, and that whatever is being said about God must apply to the actual world – even when that comes in the context of an atheistic argument! Why else would it be supposed, when someone like me claims that God would favour explicit relationship, that those in the actual world who don't have what it takes to participate in such relationship are going to be left out? How could what God wants be too much unless creatures are unable to deliver it, and how could they be thought unable to deliver it unless we are thinking about our world instead of the world the hiddenness argument says would exist if God existed, in which all who are non-resistant believe?

What has happened here, I suggest, is this. Two sorts of enquiry have been confused: (1) theological enquiry into what sort of relationship a loving God would make available should such a God exist in a world like ours, which includes much inculpable non-belief; and (2) philosophical enquiry into whether a loving God could exist in a world like ours, given the fact of inculpable non-belief. Answers that are convincing when addressed to the question of (1), which permits the assumption that God exists and that somehow our world's existence is compatible with the existence of a loving God, may not be convincing when addressed to the question of (2), which permits no such assumption, instead requiring a close look at what love entails and a willingness to follow where the argument leads, even if that is to atheism. What the passage quoted above clearly suggests is that where the authors of the PD piece find their answers convincing and the hiddenness argument unconvincing, they are (perhaps unwittingly) being drawn into the ambit of (1). Whatever the case, as the discussion of this reply makes clear, their answers are quite unconvincing when considered in the context of (2).