It Would Seem That There’s No God: The Third Objection to God’s Existence

When St. Thomas Aquinas set out to prove God’s existence in his Summa Theologiae, he articulated two objections. The first was the problem of evil: How can there be an infinitely good God if there is evil in the world? He answers it by positing the principle of o felix culpa, O Happy Fault, demonstrated by salvation history; though God is all powerful, he permits evil in order to draw out of it a still greater good.

The second objection Thomas considers is the apparent completeness of nature: What need is there to posit God when the impersonal causes of science and the personal causes of human nature are able to explain everything there is to explain about the world? He answers this objection with the five proofs themselves, which demonstrate that the world and its secondary causes is not self-sufficient and self-explanatory but stands in need of God’s primary causality.

Were Thomas to pen his five ways today, he would no doubt add a third objection to God’s existence, that of the scandal of God’s hiddenness. If God is not evil but loving and God is not a limited natural cause but an all-powerful one, why does he not make himself readily known to all those who sincerely seek him? Yet there are today and in history at least some instances of sincere seekers who fail to find God, despite their best efforts. Is God not all loving? Is God not all powerful? Does he not wish to be known? Or is the reasonable conclusion that there is no such God?

In what follows, I will sketch the details of a reply to this new objection and in doing so introduce the principal themes of my new book, Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

The Modern Genesis of the Problem

In the Pensées, Blaise Pascal calls attention to God’s scriptural name, Deus Absconditus, the hidden God, and blames us, the seekers, and our occluded hearts, for our lack of finding. On this analysis, there is always some hidden resistance on the part of every seeker who fails to find God. (However true Pascal’s thesis of hidden resistance to the hidden God may be, it is not particularly satisfying to explain one hiddenness in terms of another.)

Friedrich Nietzsche, picking up the thread from Pascal, underscores the enigmatic character of the available divine signs. Even before proclaiming the death of God, he points to God’s enigmatic hiddenness, likening God’s efforts to make himself known to “a deaf-and-dumb man making all kinds of ambiguous signs when the most fearful danger is about to fall on his child or his dog.”[1] It is hard to imagine a more pointed version of the phenomenon of divine hiddenness that this single sentence from Nietzsche.

The person who has done more than Pascal or Nietzsche to make this third objection to God’s existence known is the contemporary philosopher, J.L. Schellenberg. He reasonably grants that it is no objection to God’s existence if some people do not find God, provided those who fail to find God are halfheartedly seeking or are otherwise puffed up with pride (or in his terminology, “resistant”). It seems compatible with God’s being loving that he does not accept every advance. Rather, Schellenberg zeroes in on those who sincerely seek and yet do not find God, those he calls “non-resistant.”

Schellenberg reasons that if God were all loving, God would ensure that he was found by those who with a sincere heart and sincere intention seek him, but we know that at least some people with sincere hearts and sincere intentions have not found him. Schellenberg concludes that God does not exist. No loving parent would withhold himself from his children when they called out; if God does so, he must not be God. Schellenberg’s is a powerful argument, perfectly in tune with the sympathies of the modern mind, and it has yet to be adequately answered.

A Contemporary Opportunity

While some wish to deny that God is truly hidden and instead focus on the moral failings of would be seekers, I am inclined to think, with Nietzsche and Schellenberg, that God really is hidden. But I argue that this is no defect of either the seeker or the one sought; it is rather due to the very nature of the God in question. God is naturally hidden, and we moderns, unlike our medieval predecessors, don’t know how to handle such hiddenness, making it the vexing topic that it is today.

Wittgenstein pointed out that hiddenness is correlated with manners of discovery: “The word ‘hidden’ has as many different meanings as there are methods of finding. When no method of finding has been laid down, there is no point in using the word ‘hidden.’” The hiddenness objection, unknown as such to the medieval mind, has become today a dominant concern. Why? The turn from the cosmos and its causes to consciousness, its ideas, and its models, renders God the creator of all opaque to human inquiry. We can then say that medieval thought had many methods of finding the divine and therefore many senses of divine hiddenness.

Phenomenology’s rediscovery of intentionality once again renders divine hiddenness navigable rather than intractable. In rehabilitating our experience of truth and the appreciation for the interplay of presence and absence, phenomenology gives us the means to manifest divine hiddenness as such. We are not imprisoned in our own consciousness, making guesses about what’s out there in the machinery of the world; we are together with others in the midst of things and therefore able to ask questions about the ultimate cause of the cosmos.

Supposing “God” Were the Creator

We search for God against the backdrop of the world, as though God were just like any other thing. But if God is the creator, he is the cause of the world and not part of it. Hence, to direct ourselves to this sort of God we have to suspend the natural horizon of all searching. The medieval philosophical tradition realized that such a suspension involves not only deploying the right arguments but also inducing the appropriate change of attitude, to shift from regarding the world as ultimate to regarding it as penultimate.

In Isaiah, the original proclamation of divine hiddenness is put in the mouth of a pagan who has just discovered the vanity of every idol for capturing the reality of God. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15). In the Gospel of Mark, the centurion who witnesses the death of the Savior discovers that he was no idol. “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” (Mark 15:39). Unlike the idol that is ever present before us, a familiar sight to pagan eyes, the God of faith is hidden, and reveals himself as such precisely in his eluding that very gaze.

Whenever we seek something we naturally do so against the backdrop of the whole world. We can see this implicit assumption very clearly in the presocratic philosophers and the first scientists who went out and sought the first and ultimate principles of things; it also continues to our own day in the impressive scientific progress and research of our top biologists, psychologists, and cosmologists, who look for what is ultimate within the horizon of the whole, the cosmic whole. Thales said it was water that was ultimate and so divine; Stephen Hawking points instead to gravity governing empty fields of force. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, the cosmos just is: explanation starts from there.

But however natural this horizon or limit or presupposed term or context might be, it’s nonetheless the case that it is not self-evident, and that it can be challenged, and that reason can appreciate the challenge and even justify it with good reasons once it has already been proposed.

What I, following Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, call the “natural theological attitude” is the approach to the divine according to which we regard God as whatever is highest and best in the whole, and this is simply the default mode of human cognition. Against this, Christianity proposes that God is not one being among other beings but rather the cause of being, the source of all being. In Christianity, the natural theological attitude is upended in a way that reason can appreciate, once it is proposed.

By default, we think of God as whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. But to think of God the creator is to think of something that would be better than whatever is highest and best in the cosmos. Therefore, a kind of Copernican shift is necessary in which the cosmos moves from its implicit status as that which is first to an explicit status as that which is second to God the creator.

The medieval tradition experimented with novel literary and linguistic forms to pull of this transformation. Augustine’s Confessions involves a curious eavesdropping structure, which Anselm and Aquinas adapt and transfigure in the Proslogion and the Summa Contra Gentiles. These books are innovative, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of their form. To think of God the creator is not to think of there being new content to the world but instead to think of the form of the world in a new way.

Ostending Such a God

Suppose I visited the University of Notre Dame for the first time. You showed me the library, the stadium, the grotto, and classroom buildings (it was a thorough tour!). At the end, I said, “You’ve shown me the library, the stadium, the grotto, the classroom buildings and so on, but where is Notre Dame itself?”

A university and a universe, as their etymology suggests, are uni-versus, turned toward one. Both are constituted out of a variety of things so as to comprise a unity. Yet both only achieve that unity by being referred beyond their individual parts. In the first case, a university is a university only to the extent to which it is constituted by an alliance of those defined by the activity of uncovering truth. The joint pursuit of truth makes a university a one rather than many. In the second case, a universe is a universe only to the extent to which it is turned toward some unifying principle. Just as the library and the grotto point to the search for ultimate truth, so each and everything that is points to an ultimate cause. We need to avail ourselves of the right category to unlock the reference.

Of course, Notre Dame’s iconic Golden Dome might be seen to be a privileged part of the university that unifies the whole internally, just as Aristotle thought of the divine as the privileged part of the cosmos, that around which all things turn, but if God is the creator, to think such would be to fall prey to what Gilbert Ryle calls a category mistake. Aquinas expresses this primacy as follows: “God is not a part of, but above, the whole universe, possessing within himself the whole perfection of the universe in a more eminent way.”[2]

Respondeo

Divine Hiddenness argues that God is hidden in virtue of being the creator, and it outlines a three-stage strategy for pointing him out.

First, because he is hidden to our experience in virtue of being the creator, God cannot be defined or described. All definition and description presuppose direct access to the terms of the definition or description. All is not lost, however, since God can be pointed out, not, to be sure, via a direct ostension that refers to something present but by what Quine calls a “deferred ostension” that points to something present in order to refer to something absent. We might refer to the person who wrote this screenplay, or the person that wrote this book. Similarly, we can point to the present things about us and refer to their ultimate cause.

So, on this analysis, the phrase, “God the creator” is a deferred ostension that refers to God as that which is the ultimate cause of these present things. A virtue of this approach is that it can use present things to refer to the hidden God in his hiddenness. Another virtue is that, unlike other appeals to a causal chain, to refer to God as creator is to fix a reference that anyone at anytime can renew for themselves. There is no worry of a semantic drift as in the standard account of reference fixing via causal chain, where one has to ensure that the reference is faithfully transmitted. Does Santa Claus still refer to Saint Nicholas? Kripke has his doubts, as do I. God the creator, however, is up for grabs right now rather than being buried in history.

Second, how can we make sense of such a deferred ostension, one that points us beyond the created whole? Divine Hiddenness takes a page from Plantinga’s classic God and Other Minds but shifts from the epistemological problem of other minds (how can I know whether my neighbor isn’t a metaphysical zombie?) to the phenomenological elucidation of other minds (how does my neighbor there appear as other and as yet similar to me here?). To make sense of the deferred ostension of God the creator is to make sense of an absent cause that is present in its effects, which parallels the attempt to make sense of an author in terms of the author’s works. A great writer writes carefully; a great writer writes on various levels to meet different kinds of readers. Creation, too, calls for the highest hermeneutic art to fathom. It’s less like a textbook and more like the work of Nietzsche, requiring careful skill in the art of reading to mine all that is there to be mined.

Third, a classic objection to ostension of any sort is that it is inherently ambiguous. If I point to a cat, do I point to its being-on-the-mat, its being a cat, felineness as such, the color black, something soft and cuddly, or what? Introducing “God the creator” as a deferred ostension, rooted in the things that are, and referring to that which is ultimate, leaves unaddressed this problem of ambiguity, even if the mundane parallel with absent authors and artists provide some light. Here the Augustinian idea of an inner criterion, a sort of second factor of authentication, helps ensure that the deferred ostension functions properly. Augustine, who in De Magistro showed himself to be an expert at minding the ambiguity of ostension, solves the problem in this case with his famous insight at the start of the Confessions: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If I praise “God the creator” and find my heart unexpectedly leap in doing so, that is an indication that I have adequately directed my care toward God the creator, who is not only the origin of the universe but also the origin of me and my inclinations.

Alethic Theism or Aletheism

Divine Hiddenness: God the Creator and Phenomenology is an invitation to take the third objection to God’s existence seriously, and, in doing so, to work out a much more compelling and nuanced understanding of what it means, experientially, for God to be the creator. The method for finding such a God is going to have to be adjusted accordingly.

Replies to the hiddenness argument have up to the present come up short, because they have not availed themselves of the resources of the contemporary method of phenomenology, which is a method built from the ground up for coping with the interplay of hiddenness and manifestation. Moreover, attentiveness to phenomenology allows us to see that not only Aquinas but also Augustine and Anselm thematize divine hiddenness in central ways in their thinking.

Because God is the creator, divine hiddenness is real, a feature of the perennial phenomenology of the divine. But divine hiddenness is not an obstacle to affirming that God exists, as the contemporary mind imagines. Phenomenology and medieval authors surface strategies for referring to and seeking God in a productive manner, beyond the presumed ultimacy of both consciousness and the world of scientific objectivities.

The peculiar alliance of contemporary phenomenology and medieval philosophy I term “alethic theism” or “aletheism” for short, drawing from the Greek word for truth, a-letheia, which, as Heidegger ever reminded us, means un-hiddenness. God cannot be approached without countenancing how he must look just in order to be God the creator.

God is no conspicuous feature of the world to be affirmed or denied. Aletheism names the approach to God that keeps this constraint in mind and thereby undercuts the impasse between theism and atheism on this topic. If my book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it gives readers confidence that the contemporary conversation between theists and atheists is sorely in need of the mediating role of phenomenology and medieval thinking.

God is hidden. But the hiddenness can be navigated. First in virtue of a unique deferred ostension, which refers to the ultimate cause by means of pointing to the things caused, the creator through the creature. Second, by employing analogous strategies when we try to divine an author’s mind through the story he has written; to seek God is not akin to seeking another character but instead seeking the author beyond the horizon of the story. Third, by suspending the natural horizon of the world in terms of gratitude to God the creator for the existence of all, ourselves included.

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