Conversations with an Atheist April 15, 2007
The Hiddenness of God Psalm 88
THE PROBLEM OF HIDDENNESS
Anthony Flew, a famous British Atheist philosophy, once told a parable. Yes, atheists tell parables too. Let me read it to you.
Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer said, “Some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener,” says the believer. So they set up a wire fence and electrified it. They patrol with bloodhounds. But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden he loves.” At last the skeptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”
There we are. That is the question Flew poses and a fundamental question of all atheism. Why doesn’t God simply make things clearer? Why doesn’t God simply split open the heavens and end the guessing game?
An Atheist might say, “If I were God, I would make it more obvious that belief in God is the correct belief. I would let people see it more clearly. You cannot simply say, “Look at creation” because creation has both flowers and weeds, as Flew noted. Creation is beautiful sunsets but it is also the Tsunami of Dec. 2004. The evidence of ‘creation’ is self-defeating. If God created me for a relationship with him, and if ultimate true life is dependant upon a relationship with him, and if that relationship is based on faith, why doesn’t God make the basic conditions of faith available to everyone? God could simply step in to the creation and say, ‘I’m God and Jesus is my son resurrected from the dead. Believe it and live.’ If God did that, millions of people would become believers and be saved from an eternal damnation. God could do that and it would save millions of souls. Yet God chooses not to do it and allow those souls to go to an eternal perdition.”
Calvin and
In the history of philosophical discussion, this issue has been called the Deus Abscondus question.
INSUFFICIENT SOLUTIONS
Some theologians have suggested that God is invisible because God is transcendent. God cannot be seen in nature because God is above nature. Others have taken the opposite tact. We cannot see God because God is omnipresent. This is strange because you would think that if something is everywhere, it would be visible to everyone. But the suggestion is very clever. In order to see anything, you have to be able to see also where it is not. Things have to have borders to be visible. God has no border so God cannot be distinguished from not-God. But this almost strikes close to pantheism.
Others have suggested that God simply cannot be seen because God is a spirit. God doesn’t have a body. God is, to use the technical term, incorporeal. Because God doesn’t have a body, God cannot reflect light and cannot be seen.
These all fail because, whatever God they define, is not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is first and foremost, a doer. God acts in human history. So the question still remains. Regardless of who or what God is, why doesn’t God do more? If Christian and Jewish tradition is correct, God could theoretically do these things, and in the process, bring countless million people to salvation.
PASCAL’S SPIRITUAL GESTALT
Blaise Pascal, the great French thinker of the 17th century, came up with a very clever answer to this problem. He argued that the hiddenness of God was a relational matter. Sometimes something is hidden for one person but very clear to another. It depends upon how you look. A spiritual kind of eyesight is necessary to see God. How many times have you, man, tried to find the mustard in the refrigerator, and after 10 minutes of agonizing scrutiny you are convinced that you are absolutely out of mustard. Then your wife comes along and says, “Here it is right behind the ketchup.” And you moved that ketchup bottle three times and didn’t see the mustard.
Maybe that is true for a person’s search for God. God is there but people have some sort of blinders on their eyes. People in a sense blind themselves and don’t think about God very much because they want to be happy and don’t want to be bothered. While this may be part of the answer, it cannot suffice.
Why? Remember that even very spiritual people struggle with this issue. St. Anselm, the great medieval theologian, a person who thought one could have a priori, ontological certainty about God’s existence, also wrote
I have never seen thee. O Lord, my God. I do not know thy form. What must I do, O Lord, an exile far from thee. What shall thy servant do, anxious in the love of thee and cast out afar from thy face. . .Thou art my God and thou art my Lord, and never have I seen thee. . .I was created to see thee, and not yet have I done that for which I was made.
And if that isn’t good enough, think about the Psalmist in Psalm 88. There is simply no easy resolution to that Psalm. The Lament ends in complete agony with not even the typical final benediction or statement of trust or assurance. Or the cry of dereliction of Ps. 22, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” The problem in finding God isn’t only a problem for the skeptic. Even faithful believers have their dark night of the soul.
A PURPOSE FOR HIDDENNESS
At this point, many Theistic philosophers have taken a different turn. Again, this turn is first in Pascal but also in other more recent theological writers. The problem isn’t with the nature of God (transcendent, incorporeal, invisible) or with human nature, but with the very purposes of God. In other words, God has a specific purpose in making the world the way it is.
John Hick, a British theologian says,
God desires our faith response to be free, and uncompelled. A direct, unmediated, unambiguous manifestation of God would be overwhelming, and would compel obedience.
You know the picture. You’ve done this before. You’re driving along the highway and you know you are going way too fast. But you don’t like driving the speed limit and enjoy the thrill of the road. Suddenly you look in the rear view mirror and you see a state trooper right behind you. He’s not got the siren going, he’s not pointing at you to pull over. He’s just there you the two of you lock eyes. If you are like me, your foot goes to the brake and immediately you are staring at the speedometer. Within two seconds you are driving the posted speed.
Are you doing this because you want to be a good citizen and respect the laws? Because you realize that your recklessness endangers other drivers? No. You simply do not want to be caught. Your compliance is hardly free anymore. It is compelled. It isn’t very meaningful.
God could be the cosmic cop; there all the time in the rear-view mirror of life keeping you from sin. The fact is, God is not. God could make you do right, but it would be for all the wrong reasons. God refuses to be the cop in the rear-view mirror. A direct manifestation of God might make people believe, or even stop sinning, but it wouldn’t change their nature. Their morality would hardly be morality any more than it is moral to drive the speed limit with a policeman in your rear-view mirror. God wants faith and moral justice to be freely chosen. If it is freely chosen, then the option for unbelief and immorality has to also be completely available.
THE TREE AND NICODEMUS
I think this is one way to explain the existence of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden. God could have simply made the tree of life. But this would compel righteousness because there would have been no real option. The God of the scriptures is committed to protecting the option clause. Pascal again wrote, “God desires to move the will, not just enlighten the mind.” The only way for our will to be moved is for unbelief to be a real, live option.
There is another interesting NT collaboration of this; the famous story of Jesus and Nicodemus. You know, Nicodemus is a rabbinical leader who comes to Jesus at night. He seems to want to do a little philosophical theology. He says, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher sent from God. For no one can do these signs you do unless God were with him.” He actually lays out a firm logical case. In fact, in terms of formal logic, his argument is called modus tollens. Premise, conditions, conditions fulfilled, conclusion. What does Jesus say? You would think he would be excited! “Modus tollens! Nice job, Nick! You figured it out. Where did you study logic? Good thinking.”
No, Jesus says something that makes no sense at all. He starts talking about being born again! This is very odd. Did Jesus just not hear the guy? Is he being rude? Maybe Jesus just isn’t in the mood for a philosophical debate? Maybe Jesus isn’t interested in armchair philosophy period. You better ask the question of the heart because faith will involve a complete life-change for you. You must be born again. As Pascal said, “God desires to move the will, not just enlighten the mind.” Nick came wanting to discuss theology and Jesus came to call the Nicodemus’ of the world to a whole new life.
THE PROBLEM AND THE PRIDE
So what does this have to do with the problem of the hiddenness of God? Everything! God created a world that is religiously ambiguous for a reason; to protect your freedom to say no to the God who created you and loves you. God will protect the option clause; the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. God wants you to be able to say “No!” to him, so that when you say “Yes!” it actually means something.
Pascal believed that God had created enough reasons for faith for those who are inclined to believe (flowers in Flew’s Garden) and enough reasons for doubt for those inclined not to believe (weeds in Flew’s Garden). God created this world to protect your freedom.
He describes the attitudinal difference between those to whom God is revealed and those for whom God is veiled. The difference is, according to Pascal, not so much faith as humility. To find God requires a pre-rational shift in your thinking that moves you from self-reliance and religious indifference to contrition and humility.
COMING
I started with Anthony Flew and I want to conclude with him. Parenthetically, Anthony Flew recently has converted to Theism. He’s not a Christian (grew up Methodist and knew CS Lewis ) but he says he has more respect for the idea of divine revelation than before. Still, he believes in God. In January 2004, Flew informed Gary Habermas that he had indeed become a theist. While still rejecting the concept of special revelation, whether Christian, Jewish or Islamic, nonetheless he had concluded that theism was true. In Flew’s words, he simply “had to go where the evidence leads.” “I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that.”