Aron Ra on Divine hiddenness

Aron Ra frames the hiddenness argument with characteristic bluntness: a God who wants to be known would be known. The fact that billions of people throughout history have lived and died without any awareness of the Christian God — including entire civilisations that existed for millennia before Christianity — is exactly what we would expect if no such God exists, and nothing like what we would expect if one does.

Ra emphasises the practical implications. If belief in God is necessary for salvation, and God is both omnipotent and loving, then God's failure to make himself known to all people is either incompetence or cruelty. The billions of people born into non-Christian cultures had no opportunity to accept the 'correct' religion — through no fault of their own. A just God would not condemn them for the accident of their birth.

He also challenges the common apologetic response that God hides to preserve human free will. Ra points out that in the Bible itself, God appears directly to numerous people — Moses, Abraham, Paul — without apparently compromising their free will. If God could reveal himself to Paul on the road to Damascus without overriding Paul's agency, he could do the same for everyone. His failure to do so requires explanation.