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I can't recall a time when God—if He exists—has ever approached me in a clear and discernible way. If a loving God were real, wouldn't it make sense for Him to interact with us more directly? Imagine being told that your parents are incredibly loving, but they've willingly chosen to hide away in a bunker underground, never interacting with you in any noticeable way. Wouldn't that be logically contradictory, or at the very least extremely counterintuitive and puzzling? Isn't it reasonable to expect more interaction from loving parents, and even more so from a powerful, loving being?


Which God am I talking about? (Clarification given the close votes)

Culturally, I'm biased to envision a monotheistic, omnipotent God as portrayed in Abrahamic religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. However, to frame the question in the most general terms, let's define God as an extremely powerful and intelligent conscious being who created the universe. This being is also described as extremely good, which includes in particular being extremely loving and, therefore, He can be assumed to love us and want the best for us.

Conveniently, @NotThatGuy recommended this article, which includes the following (quote):

Most theists, in fact, do admit that love is a central concept in almost all of the world's religions. God is often directly associated with love, especially with agape. Theologians such as N.T. Wright suggest that our experience of love is itself a proof of God's existence. However, there are a few others (e.g. Brian Davies in the Thomist tradition) who suggest that the modern interpretation of what it means to say God loves human beings is incorrect, and so that God is able to be loving in a sense while actually willing disbelief. [emphasis mine]

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  • Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on Philosophy Meta, or in Philosophy Chat. Comments continuing discussion may be removed.
    – Philip Klöcking
    Commented Sep 4 at 22:23
  • 1
    What about the deist alternative? Some-"thing" transcendent exists that is in the vaguest sense “Godish” but it is so far from our sense of personality that ascribing any relations with it(her/him) is meaningless, including specifically the relation of love?. Your emendation: Culturally, I'm biased to envision a monotheistic, omnipotent God as portrayed in Abrahamic... is laudable in attempting to impartially assess your biases. But it doesn't help!! Most of the world's religions are closer to deism than to theism
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 7 at 4:14
  • @Rushi Feel free to post an answer from a deist perspective. I don't mind.
    – user77058
    Commented Sep 7 at 12:23
  • Thats hard to do... You see deism is not a real religion and when I say most religions are more deist and theist I am really forcing non Christian verities into the mold of Christian ontologies. As an example a more hindu formulation would be: "You can have a a personal God or an impersonal God. The personal God folks would say that the Divine Person is the highest; the impersonal folks would flip it round. there is no commitment within the Hindu fold which should take precedence."
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 7 at 15:20
  • When "translating" this into a Christian format the "personal God" would roughly translate into the Christian God, but the impersonal God really has no proper equivalent. Ive used "deism" as a poor approximation but its a bad approximation.Likewise Buddhism is quite agnostic. To fit that into theism/deism/atheism categores really doesnt fit. Likewise the Tao is "God-ish" kinda, sorta but these are really misfit categories
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 7 at 15:22

6 Answers 6

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Let's apply this to far less powerful beings: humans.

Let's say person A claims to deeply love and want the best for person B; however, when we look at A's actions we see:

  1. A never directly interacts with B
  2. Nobody else has ever seen A interact with B
  3. A could have stopped some bad/harmful outcome X to B, but did not stop it

More so, when we inform B that there is this person A who claims to love them deeply and want the best for B, B looks at us quizzically and asks "Who is this A? Never met them!".

In this case, I'd say we are justified in saying A is not being consistent with their statement.

Now, take A and give them omniscience and omnipotence, and it looks even worse!

As @Dcleve has pointed out, there are apologists out there who can rationalize the lack of obviousness of God, but a priori I would not have expected that.

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Your opening paragraph is a version of the argument from nonresistant nonbelief, in section two of the SEP article on the Hiddenness of God. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-hiddenness/#ArguNonrNonb

As with the Problem of Evil, there are very few theist responses which are not clearly just rationalizations.

IF a Divine being cares lovingly for us, AND we benefit from a direct personal relationship with such a being if it exists AND our welfare is improved by a correct understanding of the world AND we have good reason to think the above two points are true THEN divine hiddenness is only explicable if the divine being does not have the power to act on its moral principles.

I think we do have reason to think the two key points above are true, which leads to the same conclusion that the POE leads to.

I have thought through the possible theistic responses to the POE (and divine hiddenness) and can offer three possible alternatives to retain belief in a loving Deity.

  1. The Deity of Love is one among a multitude of deities, and has limited strength, such that the communications from the Deity of Love are mostly lost in the noise of other communications (Son of Sam, channeled messages, Yahweh, Allah, Kali, etc.)
  2. The Deity of Love is the only God of this world, but has to devote most of its attentional and power to a conflict with rival Deities from another. If this world was an ad hoc structure thrown together with little thinking about how to optimize it, for the purpose of developing living souls to add to the loving Deity's strength, then harms (evils) and other non-optimization (silence) could be short term compromises, accepted due to the very limited power and attention available to our circumstances here due to a much greater long term need (survival of the Deity of Love itself).
  3. This world is better described as a battleground, where a Deity of Love is in near balanced conflict with a Deity of Harm -- in the fashion of the di-Theist religion model, where two nearly equal forces check each other's power.

None of these answers are monotheistic, and the SEP article limited itself to monotheistic religious replies. But relax the assumption of monotheism, and there are possible answers to these two problems for theism.

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  • While there is similarity between divine hidden in philosophy and the question of the OP, the OP does not necessarily question the existence of God based on the presence of qualified non-resistant non-believers. The OPs question is much less mature or complex. As SEP says: 'However, “divine hiddenness” refers to something else in recent philosophical literature.' The OP did not refer to recent philosophical literature (or any literature really).
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 4 at 23:34
  • +1 For Gnosticism in 3 variations??? If yes the label may help to situate the answer for those who may find it really far out from anything they can relate to. For myself: I find 90% of God questions, answers, rebuttals, rejections here to be 99% Christian. And the more belligerent the rebuttal the more inexorably Christian. AFAIC unresolved Oedipus projected onto an imagined Father-deity.
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 6 at 2:23
  • But while your view is too fringe to even be understood (leave aside engaged) in western-Judeo-Christian milieus like here it is normal eg. in Hinduism: Brahma the creator is never worshipped. Vishnu the preserver is worshipped but almost always in his active warrior/political form of Ram/Krishna; Shiva the "destroyer" is universally worshiped. This corresponds quite closely to the gnostic situation: the demiurge is the creator and not beneficient, the Pleroma is the source of all beneficience but occluded from us by the demiurge
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 6 at 2:25
  • @Rushi -- reading writers whose theology crosses boundaries between Gnosticism, shamanism, new age, and parapsychology, provides useful insight into the variation of options one can find in metaphysics. I find classical Gnosticism to be as morally flawed as orthodox Christianity. But variants on it allow for "Christian" solutions to the moral and logical critiques of theism. Of the subcontinent perspectives, the one I find most compelling is Sikhism. But its mega absolute deity is monotheism to the ultimate degree, and cannot deal with these two problems..
    – Dcleve
    Commented Sep 6 at 4:49
  • Yes I guess we can agree on this much: Everyone needs to be the creator of his own religion, not in a cocksure, arrogant way of course but from the realization that nothing else is an option. Ppl who think the theism/atheism arguments are cross cultural don't understand that in what you call the "subcontinent religions" without exception the guru transcends God. This is because we all must fashion our own religion based on our background, proclivities, culture etc bit we can't do it without help
    – Rushi
    Commented Sep 6 at 4:58
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No, a loving God does not logically imply having the same traits as a loving human. There can be any number of reasons for any loving gods to not appear in anyone's life in a discernible way.

Else, the absence of observations of a god would imply such a god either does not exist, or is not loving in that way. But the definitions involved are too weak to make that inference. Hence many people believe in a loving God without being able to name a significantly discernible way any gods interacted with them, (though there are of course also people who claim to have had such observations).

Some example reasons:

  • A god shows himself all the time, but needs effort to be discernible, maybe the OP did no look enough (did you check under the bed?)
  • A god shows himself in everything, thus cannot be discerned from anything
  • A god is busy with very important stuff, or on vacation, but will be back soon
  • A god does not love that way, but in mysterious ways, a bit like priests love choir boys in mysterious ways, and maybe it's better to not give in to that love
  • A god loves, but not all (did you eat your soup?)
  • A god loves but only shows once your reach paradise
  • This life is actually hell already, so no god for you
  • ... And so on, there is no shortage

The SEP equally does not bother listing all rationalizations (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-hiddenness), to inly describe "In religious literature, there is a long history of expressions of annoyance, anxiety, and despair over divine hiddenness, so understood".

It's just tedious to try an categorize all the different ways gods hiddeness has been explained away.

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  • According to the Christian worldview all humans are children of God, their heavenly father. Hence the comparison from the OP’s post with human parents, who love their children, is carefully constructed. - Your second sentence objects against the validity of the OP’s comparison. Which argument supports your objection?
    – Jo Wehler
    Commented Sep 4 at 21:18
  • So long as one accepts both agency and rationalism by a Deity, then the Divine Hiddenness argument is quite strong. Abandon agency, and then a Deity is intrinsically non-active in the world -- which a very few theists do assert, but this is a pretty minority view. Abandon rationalism, and a Deity's actions decouple from its motivations -- which is a view I have never seen any theists hold.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Sep 4 at 21:43
  • At the time of my answer, the question had no details on the deity.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 4 at 22:57
  • Also @JoWehler, there is no such thing as a single "Christian Worldview" there is the Bible, which is not a philosophical work, and various philosophical writings based in the Bible, all representing different worldviews, and finally various religious groups referencing some version of a Bible in various waya, all with different worldviews. The OPs post is not carefully constructed to disambiguate, but on the contrary tries to be generic, meaning a person mishmash cherry picked from wherever the OP wanted.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 4 at 23:02
  • @tkruse Christian worldviews agree that all humans are children of god and that god loves his children. Hence your remark that the bible in general is full of different opinions - I agree with you - is not relevant for the OP's comparison. Hence it cannot serve as an argument against the comparison.
    – Jo Wehler
    Commented Sep 5 at 0:24
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I would say, No, not necessarily. A loving God would simply have to communicate within a reasonable threshold: Loudly enough so that those who really desire to know Him have every incentive to draw near; but not so loudly as to leave no choice for those who would rather keep their distance or not believe. It would be like knocking gently on a door; firmly enough so those inside are aware of your presence, but not kicking the door in. Our response then becomes a revelation of our will. God loves us, desiring that we make the right choice for our own good; but He has ordained to leave the choice to us in any event. Furthermore, in this way, faith and evidence meet: we have sufficient evidence to believe, but not so much as to overwhelm our will and make belief inevitable, short-circuiting a deliberate decision.

I believe this is the same conceptual resolution we find in the Bible. For instance, Jesus said that if we seek persistently, we shall find (Luke 11:5-13); and Proverbs says that we will be rewarded if we seek after wisdom with the same energy and excitement as for hid treasure (Proverbs 2:1-5). That is, God wishes to be found by those who want to find Him, but not to force a friendship, or faith (Hebrews 11:6). God has communicated His existence in the heavens, nature, and in our consciences; but in the end, God can tell when someone would prefer, deep down, to keep his distance; and God has decided to leave us this choice.

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  • This is not a place for sermon. Claiming the OP has decided deep down to keep their distance from God is mean, you know nothing of the OP, it's their faith, not yours.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 5 at 6:05
  • "That is, God wishes to be found by those who want to find Him" - This part of your answer is both very intriguing and painfully vague. The vagueness comes from the fact that it's not at all clear what "finding" means in this context. My analogy of "parents hiding in an underground bunker" offers a very clear, non-ambiguous interpretation of "finding": the parents just have to leave the bunker and show up in person in front of you, and that's how you encounter/find them. However, I presume that's not exactly what you mean here, assuming a Christian theological perspective, but I'm not sure.
    – user77058
    Commented Sep 5 at 7:37
  • @tkruse Well, I'm not trying to say anything about the OP specifically, and for all I know, the OP may be seeking in a way by asking good questions on the topic, but I'd have no way of knowing for sure. I mean, there are even plenty of stories of people who appeared not to care in the least, but later, they say they were deeply interested for years. So that's above my ability to know, but all I'm trying to do is provide a consistent general synthesis of the two concepts in the question. Commented Sep 5 at 10:08
  • @user77058 Yeah, since God is a spirit, "finding" as meant here is a spiritual event. Part of the issue may be that all language is symbolic by nature, and at some level, the symbols must represent pieces of shared experience by sender and receiver to be meaningfully communicative. Hence, I think, the Bible's heavy use of analogies to illustrate the spiritual. I'd say one aspect upon finding God is an unusually strong sense of peace, though there's more to it, and even "peace" may be a little hard to quantify outside the spiritual. Commented Sep 5 at 10:46
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I'll work with the definition of God as the Creatrix (and in Itself the Increatus), since else what would I start from? I will also bring up the question of divine omnipresence.

So firstly, what do we "know," if anything, about what it would take to create a world, in terms of love? Do we "know" that the act of creation must itself be an act of universal love? And then what if creation is intrinsically accompanied by continuation/preservation, so that all things which the Creatrix has made, persist on Its account as such?

Consider that if the Increatus is impassible, then Its love is not a response to the value of the beloved-of-deity, but is an action thereunto, i.e. what the Christian terminology names agape. Presumably, we can disentangle the strictness of the Christian reference, from the conceptual case, at least owing to the word agape itself being embedded in a religiously neutral (or ambivalent) ancient Greek language (Koine? I don't know what that means, though). But so if we identify the Creatrix as purely active (as well as "pure act," which is not quite the same thing, I have recently found out...), then our identification of the form of Its love must be one that is proactive, projective, and again this might be found even in the general will to create and conserve the universe in existence.

How direct is this? If we credit ontological intermediaries with existence too, we might well think that the Uncreated transmits Its power through those, but we would not want to say that it transposed Its agape upon them alone, so that it would be left to the mediatrices to transpose this love again upon the world. We should hope that the divine nature directly loves the world that It is supposed to have created.

Now, "in principle," or "other things being equal," there might be two ways to recognize the existence of a Creatrix: discursively first, or intuitively first. (I say "in principle" in scare quotes to indicate that, per the usual ascription of absolute and especial unity to the divine nature, it might be more fitting if mortal intellects could pass into a state that was neither quite discursive nor quite intuitive, but some retro-Hegelian transcendence of either.) So, if the Uncreated can be "known" by a priori insight, then since this insight can accompany us wheresoever we go, this might count as a kind of divine omnipresence. Then, however, if we hold to the intuition thesis instead, we should think less, unless we are in a state of delusional psychosis, that we are having clear perception-like engagement with the all-encompassing and potentially all-incinerating light of the Creatrix. (Sorry, Hesychasts...) And one would be very hard pressed to sincerely assert that one had been intuitively bearing witness to this light for all of one's self-aware life.

Synoptic gospel of the preceding: assume that God's love is active, and that knowledge of God is at least based on pure reason or pure intuition, if not neither or both. Now, is God discursively or intuitively omnipresent? Since there is perhaps rather obviously no omnipresent intuition of God (on our parts), we are left with the possibility, or requirement, that we prove God's being a priori if at all. Since that too seems beyond us, then God can't be directly evident to the world It created. So even if God's love is directly for the world as an active substrate of the act of creation/preservation itself, yet God is still not directly knowledge-theoretically relating to the world as such. This is a possibly justifiable mismatch between God's loving us eternally and God's not appearing to do much of anything about anything sempiternally. But I want to just suggest "possibly justifiable" as an apt description, here; maybe the idea could be turned around to show that there must not be a God who has creative love for us, after all, instead.

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  • While I'm at it/remember: I get this funny feeling in my mind, like I'm acting like Dun Scotus here on this SE, and Conifold is like Aquinas. I wonder how accurate that is... I mean there's a way to how Conifold posts that's like Latin, on some obscure, but emphatic, level. But I don't know that I write at all like Scotus, so to say. Commented Sep 6 at 20:57
  • The Abrahamic god as referred to by the OP made lots of direct appearance to individuals in the main scriptures though, not even only to prophets. Those witnessings are a main reason for even asserting the existence of such a god. So it's unclear how this answer deals with that very typical frustration.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 7 at 6:48
  • @tkruse wouldn't those be thought of as temporary intuitions of divine beings? So still not a constant epistemic interaction, and not quite a direct one either (hence this deity is said to "dwell in an unapproachable light" and be seen "through a glass darkly", etc.). Commented Sep 7 at 10:26
  • They can be explained any which way, I just thought it might be good to mention them in your response.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 7 at 11:01
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Now, a "loving God" does not need to love all individuals. The reason is as simple as acknowledging the difference between good and evil.

Some could argue that the existence of evil is what allows for God to "love" evil, as he must be the cause for the evil. The issue becomes Free Will.

If we are to suggest that free will exists, then we cannot blame God for our doings of evil. Furthermore, we cannot suggest that God would be just if he were to tolerate evil in a grand understanding. Thusly, God would be responsible for the eradication of evil, even if it "is a process". Justice itself allows for those who are evil to be punished, for the entirety of their lives. If we see evil that is perpetuating outside of the "justice system", it would not be God at fault, rather, the "agents" within the system that are rejecting God and his love, even Godess and her love.

Now, to address the "seeming" issue of God and interactions with such being "indistinguishable from schizophrenia", the "disorder" was coined as of April 24, 1908. The understanding of God has been here much, much longer. Thusly, it would seem that the argument, or better yet attempt at rationality, that "God interacts only in a schizophrenic manner" is nothing but a limited view that rejects History. In fact, it would be "schizophrenic" to only view the founding of schizophrenia and forward as the reason to argue that all "divine interventions" with God or Godess, are nothing but hallucinatory. Surely, it is ignorant, as the literature that counters this horrid claim is abundant, whereas the literature on schizophrenia is inconsistent, scarce and heavily induced. On the contrare, the argument for God and even Godess, is nothing short of deduced information that may be known as knowledge.

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    The question is about the assumption of God loving the OP. The OP is specifically asking "what if this assumption were true". So any answer based on "this assumption is wrong" is not viable, but pushing some personal beliefs. Also pretty nasty to tell the OP that they are so evil that their God does not love them. It's their faith, not yours.
    – tkruse
    Commented Sep 4 at 23:19
  • Loving humans only punish to achieve better behavior in the future. We are limited in our ability to communicate the reasons and point behind better behavior. God is not so limited, and can achieve far more improvement via wise communication and healing, than any punishment could ever provide. So no -- no Loving God would EVER punish!
    – Dcleve
    Commented Sep 5 at 4:24
  • And humans having free choice is no get out of jail card for God's moral responsibility as creator. A creator would be responsible for our characters, could have made us better, and is therefore responsible for all evil we do. AND most of the evil in this world has nothing to do with us anyway. Our world has scarce resources, and life multiplies far past them -- leading to continual bloody killing and mass starvation, as the lot of all living things. The evil was built in from the start.
    – Dcleve
    Commented Sep 5 at 4:28

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