Christopher Hitchens on Divine hiddenness

Hitchens reframed the hiddenness problem as a question about the character of God rather than his existence. If the Christian God exists — omnipotent, omniscient, and loving — then his failure to make himself unambiguously known to all of humanity is not a mystery but a moral failing. For 98,000 of the 100,000 years of human existence, the Christian God watched humanity suffer without intervening or revealing himself. Then, roughly 2,000 years ago, he chose to reveal himself to illiterate people in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. This is the plan?

Hitchens pressed this point with devastating effect in debates. The billions of people who lived and died before Christianity, the billions who lived in cultures that never encountered it, and the millions of sincere seekers who found no evidence of God — all of these, on the Christian view, were either condemned or required special pleading to save. A God who operates this way is either incompetent or indifferent.

He connected hiddenness to his broader critique of religion as totalitarianism. A God who hides but demands belief on pain of eternal punishment is operating a system of entrapment. The rules are rigged, the evidence is concealed, and the penalty for failure is infinite. This, Hitchens argued, is not the behaviour of a loving parent but of a cosmic dictator.