Transcript: The hiddenness and silence of God is causing me doubts. Is there any advice or help you can offer, such as that God is silent now because Revelation has been completed with the New Testament? Thanks.

So, Mike, the hiddenness of God is simultaneously a philosophical argument against God’s existence or at least against God’s love. On the other hand, it is also a very emotionally heavy and influential argument. Often, the more philosophical arguments aren’t emotionally very impactful. I think a lot of times, you know, like I look at, say, the Kalam cosmological argument and think, “Oh, that’s a really good argument for God’s existence,” but I don’t know how much it strikes people’s emotions. I look at the moral argument and go, “Ah, that one hits people’s emotions and is intellectually strong as well.” So that’s interesting—this kind of hits both.

The hiddenness argument goes something like this—and I’m just gonna, I mean something like this; I don’t have a syllogism before me to present to you—but it goes something like this: “Hey, if God really loves people and he wants them to know him and he wants them to follow him, then he would make efforts to reveal himself to those people, right? So if you had a sincere non-believer—a sincere non-believer who was sincerely looking and searching for God but not finding God—that would perhaps prove that God doesn’t really love them and want them saved, because look, they’re sincere and they’re trying but they’re not finding. So there must be some fault in God because their motives, intentions, and methods are right.” This is the divine hiddenness thing—God’s hiding from this person, this hypothetical person.

There are a few ways to poke holes in this argument, okay? Logically speaking, I think one is to challenge how much sincerity is really going on in this person. While they believe they’re sincere—I’m not saying they’re knowingly being deceitful about how sincere they are in their searching for God—there can be lots of things going on in the heart of a human where they feel they are sincerely looking. I’ve seen atheists who bring a divine hiddenness argument, and the way they do it, it’s as though the argument was an afterthought to their atheism. They say to me how sincere they are—I’m not saying every atheist is like this; I’m merely giving one example of one way this can play out. They say, like, “Hey, I’m gonna spend a little time really praying, really going to church, even really maybe singing worship songs, as a way of later being able to say, ‘Hey, I sought the Lord, I really tried, and that confirms my atheism one more time.’” Perhaps the agenda here was a way of proving themselves right about God all along. This is entirely possible—this is how human psychology seems to work.

What I’m suggesting is divine hiddenness requires a certain kind of person that may not exist. Against this is quite a number of people who suggest and give their testimony that they did seek the Lord and they did find him. They did cry out to God, and he did answer. They did open the word of God, they did start praying, they did start attending church or something like this, and they started seeking the Lord, and then their lives were radically transformed. And every one of those testimonies would seem to be an argument against this divine hiddenness thing.

The problem with the divine hiddenness argument, though, is not the logical aspect of it, because I can easily say, “Hey, humans have all sorts of layers of desires and wants. We may be sincere on one level but insincere on another. We might be in bondage to sin. Our blindness right now in seeking God might be due to past sins we’ve committed that have brought us to that blindness, so we might be actually reaping the blindness of our own decisions and we’re blaming God for that inability to see him.” I can say all those things, but what really makes this one hard, Mike, is that what I’m doing is I’m talking about your buddy Joe. I mean, in your head, like I’m talking about your friend Joe who told you, “I want to see God; I want to know,” and used this not just as, “Hey, pray for me; I want to see God,” but used this as an argument against God’s existence.

I mean, you can almost—here’s a way to test, maybe for an atheist: If you’re sincerely seeking God and you really want to find him, why are you using your so-far lack of finding him as a way of arguing for others to not believe in him? This shows there’s something going on here other than just a sincere seeking.

So my thought is, the hard part is that people then make it personal. Mike’s not talking about this logical argument about God and His existence or whatever; Mike’s talking about me—he’s attacking me personally. By making the argument depend upon my—if I’m the atheist—depend upon my sincerity and my integrity, I then come into, currently in our culture, a very advantageous position for arguing where I get to say, “Anyone who disagrees with me on this hiddenness thing is attacking me personally. They’re attacking my sincerity, they’re attacking my integrity, they’re attacking my story, they’re attacking my life, my lived experience.” And that alone is incredibly persuasive for people, especially in our current culture.

For that, I go, “Okay, well, let’s just acknowledge what’s going on here. You’re turning the existence of God into a—either I agree with you that you have good reason to think God doesn’t exist, or you see it as personally attacking you because you’ve based your argument upon your own integrity and your own sincerity and the thoroughness and purity of your own search for God.”

The bottom line, though, is I don’t think, Mike, that this should stumble you in your walk with God. Have you sought the Lord and found him? Why would you stop believing in him because someone else says that they seek the Lord and don’t find him? I would question the accuracy of those claims. They would say I’m personally attacking them—at least, they potentially would—and I’d be okay with that. I’d be like, “Well, you brought it up—you’re the one that laid out your sincerity as the rule by which you will test God’s existence. I’m saying I don’t think that’s a trustworthy rule.”

See original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bIYND1XedY