Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Divine hiddenness

The argument from divine hiddenness has particular biographical resonance for Hirsi Ali. During her transition from Islam to atheism, she experienced precisely the kind of honest seeking followed by divine silence that Schellenberg's argument describes. She looked for God, found nothing, and concluded that no God was there to find.

Her conversion narrative reframes this experience. Hirsi Ali now appears to regard her atheist period not as evidence of God's absence but as a stage in a longer spiritual journey — one that ultimately led her back to faith, albeit in a very different form from the Islam of her childhood. Whether she would now say that God was present but hidden, or that her earlier atheism was a necessary passage, she has not explicitly stated.

The tension in her position is instructive. For twenty years, she was a living example of the sincere nonbeliever whose existence the hiddenness argument invokes. Her conversion does not resolve the argument — billions of sincere seekers remain unconvinced — but it does complicate the narrative by showing that sincere nonbelief can be a phase rather than a permanent state.