RT Article
T1 Divine Hiddenness, Greater Goods, and Accommodation
JF Sophia
VO 56
IS 4
SP 589
OP 603
A1 Teeninga, Luke
LA English
PB Springer Netherlands
YR 2017
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1569314330
AB J.L. Schellenberg argues that one reason to think that God does not exist is that there are people who fail to believe in Him through no fault of their own. If God were all loving, then He would ensure that these people had evidence to believe in Him so that they could enter into a personal relationship with Him. God would not remain ‘hidden'. But in the world, we actually do find people who fail to believe that God exists, and their nonbelief does not seem to be due to their resisting God. I argue that if there are valuable goods brought about by God's hiddenness, then even if each of those goods might obtain without hiddenness, God would have a sufficient reason for remaining hidden so long as enough of those goods would be made sufficiently more valuable because of God's hiddenness. If this is the case, then the existence of ‘nonresistant nonbelievers' in the actual world does not entail that God does not exist.
K1 Atheism
K1 Divine Hiddenness
K1 Greater Goods
K1 Nonresistant Nonbelief
K1 Theism
DO 10.1007/s11841-016-0561-x