Well, yeah there are ways of responding to all of these objections. It's not as though a number of objections are put forward and now we all have to fold our tents and slink silently away. There's a way of responding that hiddenness arguer can use in each case. So how would we respond to the first of the three objections, or objection types, that I mentioned in the hidden resistance argument? Well, an interesting feature of that objection is that if it has any force at all it really has very wide applicability and applies across categories. Across categories of believers and nonbelievers. In fact, Peter van Inwagen, in the very discussion I alluded to, was inclined to say that he himself as a believer had all kinds of hidden resistance, no doubt, to the demands of God. Well, but then if it's the kind of thing that even believers feel, why should we focus on this as the cause specifically of what looks like nonresistant nonbelief? We need something that's going to be plausibly viewed as a cause. In this case, resistant cause of non-belief. And especially when you have examples of people, at least some people, among those who appear to be nonresistant nonbelievers who really don't look like they're resisting God. They may, in fact, be former believers. Take former believers for example, people who used to believe in God and they've been worn down-- they don't want to be--they want to continue believing in God. They may still be part of a moral community. They may in fact continue to impose on themselves significant moral demands. So many of the things that the hidden resistance sort of argument appeals to don't even apply to them. You need some sort of theological background assumption to be able to press the point any further beyond that stage and of course, we're doing philosophy here, when the hiddenness argument is put forward is in a philosophical context, then we should be able to refute it, if at all, with philosophical considerations. But another really important point that has been overlooked quite a lot, I think it's finally sinking in and that's why this kind of argument isn't made very much anymore. It's that nonresistant nonbelievers come in many different forms and have appeared at many different times. It's an important thing. It's not only people right now who are in doubt, or who disbelieve, and who have thought about the evidence and now have to somehow back that up that it's really because they're looking at the evidence if they're nonbelievers. No, it's also people who existed long ago in the history of evolution. We've had members of our species who existed long before theistic traditions arose. Long before people were even able to really look squarely in the face of this concept of God, distinct from nature, who has created the world, who has created us, who has all power, all knowledge, all goodness, all love and is inviting us into a relationship and so on. There have been lots of people in the past who just didn't even have that concept. Are they nonbeliever? Clearly so, they don't have the belief that God exists. Are the nonresistant nonbelievers? Clearly so, because they can't so much as frame the idea for themselves and so how could they be resistant? All right. So here you see how it's so important that we notice how the argument as it were moves from above, not from below. It's moving from reflection on the nature of God and that allows the problematic consideration to emerge from that reflection. So in thinking, even the nature of God, you gradually get to see that it's nonresistant nonbelief, in whatever form it takes, that's problematic and that's why we can now use that to respond to this sort of hidden resistance objection. When we notice that the category of nonresistant nonbelievers includes these people who exist that is as it were predoubt or predisbelief, we see that that objection really has no force at all. So that's, I think, an adequate response to the to the first sort of objection. The second one which says that saying that God has to always be open to relationship with us, isn't that sort of demanding or extravagance? Well, we're talking about perfect love here. We're thinking about a being who is unsurpassably loving. And so when we think about beings in our own experience, people we know whom we think of as loving us, all right, and it's in these human relationships of love that our concept of love emerges and gets the meaning that it has that we use when we apply it to God. When we think in these ordinary context, I mean, can you imagine somebody of whom you would say that she really loves you, can you imagine somebody like that who isn't always open to relationship with you in the minimal sense that I've described, you know, not being closed? Can you imagine somebody who loves you but is closed to relationship with you? That should strike us as pretty odd. It seems to me... Now it might be that at some earlier time, we were willing to let people get away with different sorts of behavior than today after some cultural evolution we're inclined to do. I mean, we've come to see that love has these relational implications. It used to be, perhaps, that you could be at some distance from someone and still be thought of as loving because you have had benevolent inclinations towards them. I think there are kinds of things that come into play here. For example, the way in which in the history of God talk there's been a tendency to think of God in masculine terms, think of God as Father and so on and in the not too distant past we were inclined to allow males and fathers to be somewhat distant. But if we think about what we have reason to believe about the nature of love, right now trying to avoid the influence of those sorts of factors, won't we say that somebody who loves you is going to be open to relationship with you so long as it's possible to absorb the consequences of that sort of openness and bringing those consequences into harmony with the flourishing of the various parties to this relationship and the relationship itself. There's a kind of principle there, I call the Openness Principle, I've just enunciated it, let me say it again, If A Loves B, then A will be open to this kind of relationship with B, insofar as A is able to accommodate the consequences of such openness, bringing them into conformity with the flourishing of both A and B and of any relationship that might come to exist between them. Now, you say to me, "Aha! You've put a qualifier on openness.", and indeed I have. And there are some odd situations in human life where, perhaps, it's not the case that A is able to accommodate all the consequences of openness. If somebody, for example, gives up her child for adoption because she thinks she's not a fit parent, or he thinks he's not a fit parent, or whatever it might be. Could be that you'd want to say, "Well, she still loves”, or, "He still loves this person.", even though no longer, but it's again because they're unable to accommodate the consequences of openness and when you think about God that's not going to be a consideration. God is in so much better position to accommodate all the consequences. So when we apply that openness principle thinking about God, we're not going to have the kind of result we have with human beings. Alright. So I've been talking about how we might respond to the objection that we shouldn't think that God, if loving, is going to be always open to relationship with us. I've, so far, got at least to the point where you might be inclined to say, "Well, other things being equal so long as God can absorb the consequences, God will be". So that would be enough to take care of the second objection but it sets us up for the third one which says, “oh, but there could be special reasons leading even God to be temporarily non-open to relationship temporarily to allow nonbelief”. Perhaps because of some great good that couldn't otherwise be achieved. So now we come back into the vicinity of those moral arguments we we're talking about a little bit earlier. So how can we respond to this? How can we apply the openness principle here? Well, one thing we can do is we can think about how God, being God, is able to produce goods of the same type without sacrificing openness to relationship. So if you think that so long as God is able to accommodate the consequences and is able to, as part of that, produce goods that are of the same type as the goods that are said to require hiddenness, well, we shouldn't expect God to retreat, to not be open to relationship with us. So what about that first one of moral freedom? Well you can think of moral freedom as a type of good and there are many many different ways of tokening that type of many different sorts of moral freedom. Imagine that there really are people who are as impressionable and as sensitive as we were talking about earlier, who would find it difficult to do what is wrong If they believed that God exists who can punish or reward them for either doing what is wrong or are resisting that urge. Suppose that there are people like this, I mean, there's a question about why there should be people like that. You might have the person who's responding to hiddenness argument will sometimes be extrapolating from what we see around us but that assumes that if God exists, God is going to create us or people like us and why it's supposed that? But suppose we go along with that assumption and say there will be at least some people like that. So, we grant that they're not free to choose to do what is wrong. But there are all kinds of ways of exercising moral freedom you might still have the opportunity to choose to do the kinds of actions that philosophers call supererogatory. Actions that are above and beyond the call of duty. Actions that aren't required of you and so, the same sorts of considerations wouldn't apply, right? You wouldn't be thinking, "Well, I’ve got to do this or God's going to punish me." No, it's not an obligation so it's not the same kind of thing. So I have a choice, I still have a choice even if I'm one of those shrinking violets we're talking about, I still have a choice whether I'm going to pursue great great noble goods, supererogatory goods, making something really special and noble of myself or sink into the couch. I still have that kind of choice between that sort of moral virtue and moral mediocrity, you might say. That's moral freedom so why isn't that something that would substitute for the kind of freedom that is allegedly that we're assuming is taken away by God not being hidden. Well how about that other moral argument, Andrew Colson's argument about self-sacrifice? That's an interesting argument, as I said, and in fact it refers to a kind of supererogatory action that we greatly admire. And the idea is, well, we just can't really do that. But what's so admirable about that sort of action? Presumably it's got a lot to do with the courage that is evinced when somebody does that sort of action, when you sacrifice yourself, sacrifice your life and you're not doing it just you know impulsively in the way that some people apparently do this without thinking, but you choose, you exercise great courage in giving up your life for the sake of some great good. Maybe the life of another. Well it could very well be that the kind of fear that would cancel courage or diminish the kind of courage that can be exhibited, could be that that fear would be made irrational by belief in God. But it's another thing to say that it would just be absent because of your belief in God. Fear, as human beings, suppose we're talking about beings that are somewhat like us, that's what the objection has got us doing, so think of it being somewhat like us, we have a very powerful self-preservation instincts, and those we should expect still to be immobilized, still to be causing fear even if you believe that God exists. I'm not sure I can see how fear would be that greatly diminished, and so I can't see that there'd be a significant difference between somebody who does that sort of action, between the kind of courage it is called for doing that sort of action reflectively, not believing in God, than somebody doing it who does believe in God. Something else to remember in this neighborhood that will help to make that point persuasive is that when we think about believing in God, we must be careful to realize we're just talking about belief in God. We're not talking about a sense of God's experiential presence. People sometimes conflate those two, I've seen that over and over again. And so, it could be that if somebody has this reassuring sense of God's presence in the moment when they make a very difficult choice, that choice is actually not going to be that difficult. It could be that they're just sort of rolling along and in this powerful sense of God's presence they can do anything. Okay. All right, maybe that's the case. I suppose that's the case. That's a very different scenario from which somebody simply believes that there is a God--you know, just has that extra intellectual item. Believing that there is a God, as a hiddenness argument tells us, they're able to do all kinds of things entering into a relationship with God, if there is indeed a God. But I don't think that it has the power to prevent somebody from requiring courage to sacrifice a life. If we think it does, we may be conflating belief with a sense of God's experiential presence. So that's at least an initial response. There’s much more in the literature, but an initial response to the three types of objection we talked about earlier.
