Conceptual Argument

Schellenberg’s Conceptual Argument refuses the existence of a God who does not explicitly reveal Himself, by making the following two claims on the basis of divine love:

1. A perfectly loving God would actively seek to make his relationship available to those who are reasonable non-believers, i.e, nonresisters.
2. For such a relationship to be available, there must be sufficient evidence of God's existence which promotes reasonable belief. Otherwise, there is no reason to believe, and nonresisters continue to live unaware of the hidden God.

Thus, Schellenberg concludes that since the perpetual existence of this wider collection of continuous nonbelievers stems from a lack of evidence for God, what is implied is that what is described in Premise 2 is not the case, so Premise 1 is false. Therefore, God is not divinely loving, so the traditional God does not exist.

Here, ‘nonresister’ refers to a person who does not seek a spiritual connection with God because “the very idea of a God is distant from their human thought and imagination”. This could be due to a secular upbringing or an isolated living environment that does not expose them to monotheism. However, if a nonresister met with God’s divine love, they would reform their beliefs.

Premises 1 and 2 can be merged into a single thesis: If a perfectly loving God exists, cogent non-belief among nonresisters does not occur, because God would not be hidden to them.

Soul-Making Response

In response to this formulation, Murray argues that there can be good reasons for why a perfectly loving God chooses to remain hidden, and that divine hiddenness strengthens, not opposes the conclusion that God is loving. His main claim is that if God were to make humans powerfully aware of his existence with grand revelations, then He would be “removing the ability for self-determination” that enables humans to freely choose morally significant actions on the basis of independent incentives. Our desires to commit evil would be overcome by God’s all-pervading presence, essentially ‘coercing’ us by a fear of moral punishment into acting in accordance with divine will. A key element of the Soul-Making Response is the assumption of a realistic situation where the physical advent of God would bring forth prudential desires in humans to do good that are unparalleled by any other moral incentive, including an independent will to do what is right.

Thus, Murray concludes that God chooses to remain hidden to arbitrary extents that make the path towards choosing a relationship with God conducive to our intentions and destiny.

In the context of nonresisters, this would translate to God remaining distant from a nonresister’s imagination in order to prioritize their freedom of will over a divine interaction that overrides their ‘choice’ of belief or non-belief through powerful firsthand experience. Therefore, Murray’s position is that nonresisters not coming into contact with God is actually a product of God’s divine love. Correspondingly, the Soul-Making Response is unopposed to reasonable non-belief occurring in the world, because it grants that God remaining hidden will inevitably result in some degree of non-belief.

The Conflict

Importantly, both Schellenberg and Murray maintain that when debating divine hiddenness, there is nothing logically unintuitive about the existence of nonresisting nonbelievers. The point of disagreement is with respect to the earlier stated motivating question. In order for Murray to successfully dismantle Schellenberg’s claim that a God that is hidden to nonresisters is unloving, he must prove that Premise 1 is false. This entails proving that the preservation of free will is the greatest good in the Universe, far greater than any other manifestation of goodness in the life of a nonresister that God is willing to sacrifice by being hidden, i.e, the preservation of free will is greater than the inclination towards spiritual connection.

We will see why this logical burden gives Schellenberg an argumentative advantage in the next sections.

Adjudicating the Arguments

Before engaging the arguments, I restate that my conclusions about their validity pertain only to nonresisters as defined above. The verdict would vary when discussing seekers and hardline atheists instead, and that is clearly outside this paper’s scope.

I.

The Conceptual Argument appears to be stronger than the Soul-Making Response for a number of reasons:

If God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, He must be able to bring about a situation in which humans do not necessarily have to give up their free will in order to pursue Him.

It makes sense for Schellenberg to compare God’s divine love for His seekers to a parent’s love for their child—a very personal, intentional love—because even theists defend the existence of an all-loving, all-good, personable entity by proposing that a spiritual relationship with God is meant to resemble genuine, authentic human love that precludes a desire to act against it. Granting theists this, it follows that if God is omnipotent, nothing ideally should stop Him from being able to purposely reveal Himself to nonresisters to foster this pure, emotionally driven connection. If the state of affairs that defeats Premise 1 requires that the goodness of spiritual union with God and the motivation of good deeds among humans be sacrificed in exchange for freedom of will, then Premise 1 cannot be defeated by this state of affairs, because:

A) The state of affairs hinges on the goodness of moral freedom outweighing the goodness of good deeds, which is not a clear, unambiguous conclusion by any means, and will always be subject to debate under different philosophical frameworks surrounding morality and determinism, therefore making it inadequate to challenge Premise 1.

B) Sacrificing good for another good assigns a relativistic attribute to the good that God can bring into the world by virtue of His revelation (some goods are more worth keeping than others), which invalidates God as the Absolute Good. If God is not the Absolute Good, then He cannot embody divine love, which is meant to be a transcendent characteristic.

Moreover, Schellenberg’s Premise 1 can stand unchallenged even in light of Murray’s critique that God’s revelation would be coercive and threat-driven. This is because Schellenberg is simply arguing for God to make this relationship available to nonresisters, not to scare them into obeying its terms (Schellenberg, 2015, 296). If Murray pushes back, stating that in such a situation, availability equals obedience because the moral effects of God’s existence are so overwhelmingly strong in steering the human conscience towards good deeds, then God no longer becomes omnipotent because He is incapable of controlling the extent to which He reveals Himself. A corollary of this is that if God is hidden, then he is not triple-O. So, if neither does triple-O God nor does a loving God exist, then the conclusion that God does not exist is ultimately strengthened.

Nonresisters cannot exactly ‘choose’ to soul-make with God.

Let us consider indigenous tribes in North America, pagans, or secular agnostics in post-medieval Europe. These are real examples of Schellenberg’s nonresisters. The commonality between them is that it can be assumed, for the sake of the argument, that their moral will and actions are not in accordance with the prescription of a monotheistic God. Indigenous and pagan traditions, for that matter, worship tangible artifacts of their conscious awareness, namely the material world, and secular agnostics are arguably even more distant from the concept of worship altogether.

Nonresisters therefore may require a phenomenological, sensory experience in order to soul-make. It is not foreign knowledge to us that such people live, die, and pass their worldview to future generations, without ever having their conscience altered by divine intervention, perpetuating an unending cycle of nonbelief. A nonresister that never knows about God can never make a moral choice to pursue Him, more so never out of their own free will.

Is a God that allows this truly loving? Murray could respond ‘yes’ when specifically looking at an atheist who firmly chooses against ascribing their morality to God, and Schellenberg would have to concede. However, for a nonresister, who does not even have the privilege of that choice, a God that does not at least make the prospect of His appearance known can be argued to be permitting a greater evil of ignorance.

A loving God would not establish an incentive structure with communion as a reward and punishment as a consequence.

Murray rightly claims that an individual is coerced into obedience when the threat induces an inclination that suppresses a course of action that competes with it. A means of measuring this threat that Murray discusses at length is the threat’s probabilistic imminence: how likely the proposed outcome of the threat is to manifest should the person not act in accordance with divine will.

Schellenberg argues that if a nonresister is subject to a private religious experience, they are not fully certain about divinity, in which case God’s revelation would not give humans strong enough prudential reasons to do good. Nonresisters may turn to a spiritual connection with God only if the probability of God’s revelation is high, given that they would be experiencing this phenomenon for the first time and would need more experiences to be truly convinced. Without this prudential interest, they are evidently not being coerced into spiritual communion (Murray, 2002, 377).

Murray challenges this by stating that it does not matter whether the threat is guaranteed to occur or not, as long as it instills fear of a non-zero probability of occurrence. He uses the analogy of a mugger in Manhattan demanding money from a victim by pointing a cylindrical object in his back. In such a situation, the victim is unaware of whether the object is a gun or a harmless carrot, or whether the mugger is even confident enough to fire it. He is still compelled to comply with the mugger’s demands under the assumption that the object is likely a working gun, irrespective of what it is or the odds of it firing (Murray, 2002, 378).

However, if the Soul-Making Response is valid, then it follows that God is choosing to hide out of love and not a lack thereof, because He cares utmost about preserving morally significant action. However, if Murray is likening the incentive structure of obeying God’s will to obeying a mugger intending to commit a harmful, malicious act, then Murray’s critique can be interpreted as God purposely hiding Himself to curtail His otherwise ill-intentioned threats to humanity, which, in other words, is the very same threat function that Murray claims to be overridingly powerful in generating a prudential goodwill other than the human’s own. A loving God would not have to force self-hiding to prevent the innate threat of His presence, because His natural character is supposedly loving. If anything, the presumption of such threatening characteristics and their probabilifying manifestation should God reveal Himself is a vilification of God’s nature.

Perhaps the Soul-Making Response should not presuppose coercive outcomes at all since those are not in line with the qualities ascribed to God. Instead, Murray can argue that God chooses to remain temporarily hidden to encourage nonresisters to discover Him in times of distress, abandonment or hardship, forging a connection that is relieving, mentally strengthening and comforting, out of their own aspirations for a more enriched life, thus making the pursuit morally significant by enabling free will. This stance is more defensible.

This leads to some alternate reasons that could render Murray's critique stronger than Schellenberg’s argument.

II.

The Conceptual Argument is not fully robust, as there are a couple of ways to challenge it from a theistic perspective that extends beyond the Soul-Making Response.

God might not be completely hidden to nonresisters.

God arguably manifests in first-order goods that are simply not understood by nonresisters as divine presence. So, they continue their lives unaware of the need for a personally driven relationship with God, even though He exists in plain sight by virtue of nonresisters interacting with said presence. These first-order goods can be considered examples of divine love. For example, your ‘inner voice’ consoling you in times of distress, your moral compass enabling you to live by a self-induced ethical framework, or people you are not acquainted with coming to your rescue. This explanation directly attacks Schellenberg’s Premise 1: God can still show divine love for humankind without explicitly revealing Himself, and in some instances, He does not elude nonresisters in the way Schellenberg portrays Him to. Although non-belief may prevail, God has certainly made Himself available—additional leverage for Murray.

God can choose to reveal Himself at specific instances in the life of a nonresister, which often entails the unforeseen future.

This is evidenced in how many agnostics/atheists worldwide become religious in their later years as they acquire lived experiences and wisdom. Here, God choosing to intervene at a specific moment in the nonresister’s life does not coerce them into belief, because all actions performed by the nonresister leading to said intervention can be argued to be a consequence of morally significant freedom that was never precluded by a prudential desire to obey divine will—the precedent for Murray’s response. God’s relationship with man and man’s free will can co-exist if the temporal attributes of soul-making are considered in the theistic position. Schellenberg, on the contrary, implicitly assumes that God’s hiddenness to nonresisters is eternal and guaranteed, which is a basis for Premise 2.

Sainthood and self-realization are testaments to the powerful awareness of God induced by private religious experience.

Schellenberg argues that the only way to validate the Soul-Making Response is to consider private religious experiences as evidence of God’s non-coercive appearance to humans independently of grand revelations. He further claims that this is not apparent in the world. However, the perceived evidence of monks, divine incarnations and saints of a monotheistic religion could be used to argue the point that private religious experiences indeed do occur, and they engage man’s free will in adopting a virtuous choice of sainthood, rather than overriding it. No one other than the recipient of said experience is affected. The affectation is therefore not existential for everyone, unlike a grand revelation, as argued by Murray. This might be what is leading to Schellenberg’s conviction in God never revealing Himself, which can now be disputed. Furthermore, the adoption of the virtuous choice here can be attributed to strong predispositions to rightly forming beliefs on the basis of religious experiential grounds. Whether these are true beliefs and whether the accounts of such saints are veracious are ambiguities that unequivocally make this point slightly weaker than the rest.