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This is a fragment of J. L. Schellenberg’s paper “Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy” originally published in Adam Green and Eleonore Stump (eds.), Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief (Cambridge: CUP 2015), 23–25, 28. Reprinted by permission of the author Jest to fragment artykułu J.L. Schellenberga „Divine Hiddenness and Human Philosophy” pierwotnie opublikowanego w: Adam Green i Eleonore Stump (eds.), Hidden Divinity and Religious Belief (Cambridge: CUP 2015), 23–25, 28. Przedruk za zgodą autora.

Here I show how thinking of inquiry as immature can illuminate problems about metaphysical and scientific realism. I begin with the question whether human beings at the very beginning of systematic inquiry who (counterfactually) held themselves to be thus situated, temporally speaking, and came to recognize their inability to prove or probabilify the truth of metaphysical realism would have been justified in believing or accepting metaphysical realism even so. Drawing on broadly Wittgensteinian ideas I defend an affirmative answer. Then I extrapolate from this result, arguing by analogy that acceptance of both metaphysical realism and scientific realism is justified for us today.

Here I explain the concept of evolutionary religion and consider its relations to what in previous work I have called sceptical religion. I also interact with five articles recently published in Religious Studies that respond to my work and address related themes – articles by William A. Rottschaefer, James Elliott, Travis Dumsday, and Carl-Johan Palmqvist.

This article describes a new type of religious commitment that is activated only if the associated religious propositions are true. The notion of a conditional intention provides the mechanism for understanding how it works, and the justification for forming such an intention in the religious case comes from an awareness of human immaturity combined with a more fundamental and unconditional commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty. The article's argument promises to contribute widely and to supersede certain older arguments, including Pascal's Wager.

Religious epistemology is widely regarded as being in a flourishing condition. It is true that some very sharp analytical work on religion has been produced by philosophers in the past few decades. But this work, for various cultural and historical reasons, has been kept within excessively narrow bounds, and the result is that the appearance of flourishing is to a considerable extent illusory. Here I discuss three important ways in which improvements to this situation might be made.

In this paper I develop a new recipe for solving the problem of religious disagreement suggested by the injunction to cultivate intellectual humility conjoined with awareness of human immaturity in deep time. The ingredients brought to the table include such things as noticing the full breadth and texture of the religious propositional field, observing the previously hidden areas of agreement this exposes, making a differential judgment of importance in relation to religious propositions, applying the concept of a position, and finding a better home for an emphasis on detailed beliefs than contexts of inquiry can provide. Special attention is given to the modesty of the proposal, which asks relatively little of religious practitioners while reconceiving this area of discussion.

Distinguishing between the old atheism, the new atheism, and modest atheism, and also between belief and acceptance, and belief and acceptance tokens and types, I defend the disjunctive view that either modest atheistic belief or modest atheistic acceptance, construed as type, is today epistemically justified in the context of philosophical inquiry. Central to my defence is a deductive version of the hiddenness argument and an emphasis on the early stage of philosophical inquiry that we presently occupy.

Mark McCreary has argued that I cannot consistently advance both the hiddenness argument and certain arguments for religious scepticism found in my book The Wisdom to Doubt (WD). This reaction was expected, and in WD I explained its shortsightedness in that context. First, I noted how in Part III of WD, where theism is addressed, my principal aim is not to prove atheism but to show theists that they are not immune from the scepticism defended in Parts I and II. To the success of this aim, McCreary's arguments are not so much as relevant, for a thoroughgoing scepticism embracing even the hiddenness argument is quite compatible with its success. But I also explained how someone convinced that the hiddenness argument does prove atheism escapes the grip of religious scepticism because of that argument's reliance on apparent conceptual truths. McCreary's critique obscures this point but does not defuse it.

The problem of Divine hiddenness, or the hiddenness problem, is more and more commonly being treated as independent of the problem of evil, and as rivalling the latter in significance. Are we in error if we acquiesce in these tendencies? Only a careful investigation into relations between the hiddenness problem and the problem of evil can help us see. Such an investigation is undertaken here. What we will find is that when certain knots threatening to hamper intellectual movement are unravelled, the hiddenness problem emerges as a contender in its own right – one that may generate serious difficulties for theism regardless of conclusions drawn concerning the force of the problem of evil.

Abstract: This is the inaugural Jay Newman Memorial Lecture in Philosophy of Religion, as delivered to the Canadian Theological Society in May 2009. Its themes are four: (1) the influence of conservative Christian theology in the shaping of contemporary (broadly analytical) philosophy of religion; (2) the resulting difficulty of demarcating philosophy of religion from theology or theological apologetics; (3) the possibility of a new, more progressive evolutionary approach to philosophy of religion, and how not just theological assumptions but certain philosophical assumptions too are standing in its way; and (4) the interesting parallel between where an imaginative, evolutionary philosophy of religion might take us and certain features of non-conservative Christian theology.

Chris Tucker's paper on the hiddenness argument seeks to turn aside a way of defending the latter which he calls the value argument. But the value argument can withstand Tucker's criticisms. In any case, an alternative argument capable of doing the same job is suggested by his own emphasis on free will. The many ways in which creatures might choose and the little we know about their likely choices are central themes in Chris Tucker's paper. His argu ment can be summarized as follows. For all we know, there is in some world including God a spiritually capable and non-resistant creature S who likely would at some time t fail to relate herself to God despite having the opportunity to do so, and God knows this before t. Now God is provided with little reason to act by value that will likely not be realized. Thus if God knows before t that the value of relationship with S will likely not be realized at t, and knows also that keeping S in the 'relating position' anyway would not improve anyone else's spiritual state, God is provided with little reason to keep S in the relating position at t by relationship-related value. Furthermore, in such circumstances even relatively weak competing con siderations would override what little reason God has to keep S in the relating position. Now, as Tucker notes, I have sought to deal with various purported competing considerations by means of an accommodationist strategy. Do we know that this countermove works? We do not, says Tucker, for the free choices of various individuals affected by any attempted accommodation need to be made in certain particular ways in order for it to work. And we do not know or, at least, we do not know without appeal to arguments other than those concerned with the value of divine-creature relationship that they would likely be made thus. Hence, he concludes, for all we know, the value of divine-creature relationship provides no reason at all to keep S in the relating position at ty and the argument that we are justified in supposing it necessarily provides sufficient reason to do so always and for all creatures like S is shown to be without force.1 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:18:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 290 J. L. SCHELLENBERG Tucker's aim in all of this is to assess the prospects of the latter argument, which he calls the value argument. As is evident, he construes this argument as an independent defence of the hiddenness argument's universal claim. I do not myself have a horse in this race, having emphasized in my work on the hidden ness argument not only the benevolence here at issue but also certain important features of divine love distinct from benevolence.2 But let us begin by considering how the independent force of the value argument can be defended against Tucker's criticisms.3 I agree, of course, with the idea that if God knows that some relationship that would be valuable cannot be realized, God will not pursue the relationship for the sake of its value. But in trying to press this idea into philosophical service in connection with the hiddenness problem, Tucker overlooks some pretty import ant contextual facts. For example, even before we decide how much reason the value of possible divine-creature relationship gives God to perform the specific action of keeping someone in the relating position, we need to think about certain other actions it gives God reason to perform. Tucker himself allows that God needs to be in a situation where an especially good thing cannot be got' no matter what He does' before the good thing provides no reason for its pursuit (274). Well then, what might God do to make it more likely that when S is kept in the relating position at ty S's response is the desired one which realizes the value of divine-creature relationship at f? Surely there is a lot that can be done. After all, we are talking about God here. (Tucker's God, I'm afraid, sometimes sounds like one finite, limited actor among others.) Just for example, God might ahead of time make experientially accessible for S more of the achingly beautiful divine nature (this can always be done, no matter how susceptible to distraction the subject may be, because there must always be more beauty to be revealed in a divine reality). Thinking about such facilitating actions which God might do, it becomes less and less plausible that, for all we know, there are spiritually capable and also non-resistant creatures who likely would yet at some time be so indifferent to divine overtures as to fail to respond positively to God.4 Assuming, as Tucker does, that judgments of likelihood are possible here, we must surely say that the varying degrees and possible contents of religious experience are such that a free positive response on the part of such individuals is not at all unlikely, if God does everything God can do to assure this result. How can we suppose otherwise without either seriously and in appropriately downgrading our conception of divine greatness and beauty or neglecting the import of that phrase ' spiritually capable and non-resistant' ? On these grounds, I suggest, Tucker's criticisms of the value argument must be held to fail. Whatever plausibility they may seem to have comes from giving such points insufficient attention. But let us suppose, for the sake of further argument, that I am mistaken about this. What I want to do next is to show how even if the value argument is unsuccessful, by looking more closely at the very free will This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:18:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

In this brief reply I argue that criticisms of the hiddenness argument recently published in this journal by Imran Aijaz and Markus Weidler are without force. As will be shown, their critique of my conceptual version of the argument misses the mark by missing crucial distinctions. Their critique of my analogical version of the argument misunderstands that argument and also misapplies the work of W. H. Vanstone. And their critique of my view that belief is necessary for a certain kind of relationship with God overlooks both some central features of that kind of relationship and some good reasons for not accepting acceptance or anything similarly nonbelieving as a substitute for belief in this context.

I argue that Poston and Dougherty are mistaken in supposing that the hiddenness argument contains ambiguities about the nature of belief. And the attempt to extract from their mistaken account some reasons for favouring a broad, disjunctive view of divine – creature relationship that will be convincing for individuals not in the grip of theological assumptions comes up dry.

This paper criticizes the assumption,omnipresent in contemporary philosophy ofreligion, that a perfectly good and loving Godwould wish to confer on (at least some) finitepersons free will. An alternative mode ofDivine-human relationship is introduced andshown to be as conducive to the realization ofvalue as one involving free will.Certain implications of this result are thenrevealed, to wit, that the theist’s free willdefence against the problem of evil isunsuccessful, and what is more, that free will,if it exists, provides positive support foratheism.

Offered here is Part 2 of a two-part critical survey of recent work in philosophy on divine hiddenness. Part 1 surveyed recent development of the discussion initiated by my 1993 book on the subject. Here, I examine some related work that expands the scope of the hiddenness discussion. Some of the enlargements take further the discussion of Stephen Maitzen's work on the demographics of theism. Others introduce new hiddenness problems and ways of dealing with them. A third category of new work urges theological constraints, of one sort or another, on hiddenness reasoning, thus raising new methodological issues.

Only 6 years have passed since I last published a critical survey article on the divine hiddenness discussion (Schellenberg, 2010a). But more than 60 papers and books dealing with hiddenness themes have been published in that time. Not all can be addressed here. Moreover, to enable a reasonable treatment of those that will make an appearance, I shall break the present survey into two parts. I begin in this piece with recent work—including my own—on the argument descended from Schellenberg (1993), which started the discussion. Part 2, yet to come, will consider ways in which this area of inquiry has recently been enlarged beyond its original parameters.

In this paper I discuss a neglected form of argument against religious belief-generically, 'the probabilistic argument from pluralism'. If the denial of a belief is equivalent to the disjunction of its alternatives, and if we may gain some idea as to the probabilities of such disjunctions by adding the separate probabilities of their mutually exclusive disjuncts, and if, moreover, the denials of many religious beliefs are disjunctions known to have two or more mutually exclusive members each possessing a significant degree or probability, then at any rate in many such cases, the denial of a religious belief can be shown to be more probable than it is - which is to say that the belief can be shown to be improbable. I consider a large number of responses to arguments of this form, concluding that none suffices to overthrow it altogether. Indeed, the argument remains as a significant threat to any religious belief confronted by a plurality of alternatives.

I cannot resist remarking at the outset upon Howard-Snyder's label for the argument. If the latter were from Divine hiddenness, it could hardly be for atheism. The claim that God is hidden entails that God exists! But let that pass. I am more interested in commenting on (i) the way HowardSnyder sets up the discussion, his characterization of the argument and of the conditions necessary for its success; and on (ii) his (relevant) proposed defeaters. Let's begin with (i). While he relies on my work2 in clarifying the argument and in showing how certain of its premises might be defended, Howard-Snyder (presumably acting on the Principle of Charity) adds a clause to one of the premises I employ, and also inserts into the argument a premise I do not employ. Now this sort of move is in itself

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic (xi), this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ (MP) – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof (pp. 103, 258). Alston argues, in particular, for the (epistemic) rationality of engaging in the Christian form of MP (CMP). On his view, those who participate in CMP are (in the absence of specific overriding considerations from within CMP) justified in forming beliefs as they do because their practice is ‘socially established’, has a ‘functioning overrider system’ and a ‘significant degree of self-support’; and because of the ‘lack of sufficient reasons to take the practice as unreliable’ (p. 224).