If there were a God, He wouldn’t stay hidden. Discuss.

Please start by outlining the argument of hiddenness (in the first paragraph) before assessing. Read The Hiddenness of God – A Puzzle or a Real Problem? JACOB JOSHUA ROSS In philosophical circles such as ours, we have become accustomed to expressing our religious ideas, and offering our analyses and arguments regarding these ideas, in terms that are associated with what we call “theism.” I take this usage to be a convenient abbreviation.1 Perhaps we should better characterize the terms that we like to use and the concepts with which we operate as belonging to “monotheistic” discourse, rather than as simply being “theistic.” Moreover it should be noted that our discussions almost invariably relate to monotheism of a very specific type, such as the type that has become foundational in all the current religious traditions which are the successors of the Hebrew scriptures, namely, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Because this is so, there are two things that we shall do well to take into consideration. First of all, we must note that the theological discussions within these three great historical traditions have sometimes been more inclusive and of wider range than what is just contained in these simple monotheistic terms, no matter how foundational these terms may be. Each of the traditions has included philosophical currents and mystical movements that have modified, in different ways, the basic concepts behind the skeletal monotheistic terms with which they have operated. Of this we shall speak more later on. Second, we must recognize that when, in the course of our philosophic discussions, we do formulate our ideas in the simple monotheistic terms, as these are understood by the ordinary believers within those religious traditions, we do so at a cost. That cost is the puzzlement and frustration attendant upon the realization that this shared concept of the monotheistic personal God is irredeemably anthropomorphic, since our model of God is based upon the primacy of human agency and human personality.2 This model is also largely anthropocentric as well, because our interest in God’s activity comes to explain all sorts of things that concern us as human beings. Moreover, the measure of the good and evil that we attribute to the world that we believe to have been created by God is our measure, the measure of human beings. The puzzlement of which I talk reflects the fact that we can easily come to recognize that we want to say so much more about the divine than this model can possibly bear. We may want to move beyond the most simple and direct religious messages that this concept of God, as presented in the holy scriptures, comes to emphasize. We may wish to work out a clear unified doctrine, or a set of consistent beliefs that might be taken to represent the underpinnings of biblical monotheism. But the moment we attempt to do this we are frustrated by the fact that we find lacunae, inconsistencies, paradoxes and theological impasses, which are answered by such would-be answers as “So God wills,” or “So God’s inscrutable wisdom demands.” Ultimately our “whys” – such as “Why did God create the world?” “Why did he create it when he did?” “Why did he create in this way, rather than in any other way?” – are left unanswered.3 They continue, as it were, to hang in the air, and become delegitimized. Reference https://doi.org/10.1017/CCBaOm97b8r0id5g11e6 0B6o09o0k.0s1 O0 nline © Cambridge University Press, 2009 Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Warwick, on 19 Apr 2018 at 22:57:43.