If God Really Loves Us, Why Does God Stay Hidden?
The Search That Feels Empty
You’ve tried. You’ve prayed, read, asked questions, and sat in silence hoping for something—a sign, a feeling, a quiet certainty that God is real and cares. But nothing comes. It isn’t that you’re angry or refusing. You’re honestly open. Still, belief just won’t arrive. Should that surprise you if a perfectly loving God exists? The philosopher J. L. Schellenberg (born 1959) thinks your experience points to a powerful argument against God’s existence. He calls it the argument from nonresistant nonbelief.
The Core of Schellenberg’s Argument
Schellenberg starts with a simple thought. If God exists, God is the greatest possible being. And the greatest possible being, he says, would love perfectly. Now ask yourself: what does perfect love do? If someone loves you perfectly and wants a personal, conscious relationship with you, they wouldn’t hide from you—not if you’re able to connect and you’re not pushing them away.
Schellenberg breaks this down into careful steps. First, a perfectly loving God would be open to a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with every person who is capable of it. Being open means God never does anything that makes such a relationship impossible for someone who is willing to try. It means the door is never locked from God’s side.
Second, to get started in a conscious, two-way relationship, you have to believe the other person exists. You can’t have a real, aware relationship with someone you think isn’t there. So if God wants you to be able to enter that relationship, you need to believe God exists—unless you yourself, through your own resistance, have shut the door.
Now the key question: are there people who are capable of a relationship with God, who are not resisting God, and yet don’t believe? Schellenberg thinks the answer is clearly yes. He points to honest seekers who remain atheists or agnostics, to whole cultures that lived for centuries without the concept of a personal God, and to many secular people today who have simply never found convincing reasons. If even one such person exists, Schellenberg concludes, then a perfectly loving God cannot exist. Nonresistant nonbelief, he argues, is the fingerprint of a universe without God.
Could God Have a Good Reason to Hide?
Many theists have tried to show why a perfectly loving God might permit nonresistant nonbelief—at least for a while. Maybe God wants you to choose freely, without being forced by overwhelming evidence. If God’s reality were as obvious as the sun, your love might feel automatic rather than freely given. Perhaps God lets some people go through a season of doubt so that, when they do believe, their love and commitment are deeper and more truly their own.
Other suggestions appeal to moral development. Staying in nonbelief for a time might help you develop intellectual virtues, like careful thinking and perseverance. Or it might prevent you from relating to God out of fear or a desire for social approval rather than genuine love. Some propose that God allows the uneven spread of belief and doubt to encourage people to help one another in their search, making the journey toward God a shared, meaningful project.
The challenge, however, is that no single reason seems to cover all cases. Different nonbelievers are in different situations. A child just becoming capable of a relationship with God might need one thing; a student who once believed and is now drifting away might need another. Still, theists can reply that several partial reasons, put together, might add up to a full explanation. This remains a live debate.
Maybe We Aren’t in a Position to Judge
Even if we can’t think of a satisfying reason God would permit nonresistant nonbelief, does that mean there is no reason? Not necessarily—according to a view sometimes called skeptical theism. Philosophers like Daniel Howard-Snyder (born in the 20th century) have argued that we simply aren’t in a good position to know all the reasons an all-knowing God might have. Imagine a young child getting a painful medical treatment. The child sees only the pain and can’t understand why a loving parent would allow it. But the parent and doctor know there’s a greater good the child can’t grasp yet. In the same way, our minds might be too limited to see the full picture of how nonbelief fits into a larger, good plan.
If that’s right, then we should be cautious. Not knowing a reason doesn’t make it reasonable to conclude there isn’t one. Many theists find this a helpful reply, though critics worry it might make us skeptical about too many other things—like whether we can trust our own reasoning at all.
What If You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Relationship?
Schellenberg insists that a personal relationship requires propositional belief—the mental state of holding that “God exists” is true. But other philosophers have pushed back. Maybe you can genuinely relate to God without that kind of belief. You might have non-doxastic faith: a trusting way of living and feeling that doesn’t boil down to believing a set of facts. Or you might have a kind of awareness of God’s presence that resembles knowing a person without being able to describe them. Think of the way you can feel a friend’s companionship without constantly thinking “my friend exists.”
If some form of awareness or faith is enough to begin a real relationship with God, then nonresistant nonbelief wouldn’t have to be a problem. The door could remain open even when propositional belief is absent. Schellenberg responds that such states are not as good as belief, and a perfectly loving God would not settle for an inferior foundation for the deepest possible relationship. But this, too, remains contested.
Why Are Believers Clustered Together?
Stephen Maitzen (born in the 20th century) points out a different puzzle: the geography of belief. In Saudi Arabia, over 95 percent of people are theistic; in Thailand, fewer than 5 percent are. Why? It isn’t that the Thai are twenty times more resistant or in greater need of growth. Social science explains the patchiness well—cultures and politics shape what people believe. But if God desires a relationship with everyone, wouldn’t we expect a more even spread?
Theists have replied in various ways. Some suggest that God’s timeline for offering a relationship might extend beyond this life, so earthly statistics aren’t the final word. Others propose that God works through the free choices of people over centuries, and because humans influence each other’s beliefs, uneven clumps naturally arise. Still, the demographic pattern gives many philosophers pause; it looks, at first glance, more like a natural human mess than the work of a perfectly loving God.
Why This Argument Matters to You
You might never read a professional journal article on the argument from nonresistant nonbelief. But if you’ve ever lain awake wondering why God seems silent, you’ve already felt the force of Schellenberg’s question. It pushes us to think hard about what perfect love really demands and whether a hidden God can still be a loving one. Both sides of the debate are trying to take seriously the experience of honest seekers. Neither side has a clear knockout blow. So the next time the silence feels heavy, you’ll know—you’re wrestling with a question that sharp minds have argued about for decades, and you’re exactly the kind of person the argument is about.
Think about it
- If you were God and wanted a relationship with every person, would you make your existence obvious to everyone? Why or why not?
- Can you have a real friendship with someone you’re not sure exists? What makes a relationship “real”?
- If scientists discovered that people in some parts of the world are naturally more likely to believe in God because of their culture, would that make religion less believable? Why or why not?
