Daniel Dennett on Divine hiddenness

Dennett addressed divine hiddenness primarily through his programme of explaining religion as a natural phenomenon. In Breaking the Spell, he argued that the concept of God is a cultural construct — an 'intentional object' that exists in the minds of believers but has no independent existence. On this account, God's hiddenness is not a theological problem to be solved but a prediction of the naturalistic hypothesis: imaginary beings do not reveal themselves because there is nothing to reveal.

He was particularly interested in why believers are not more troubled by divine hiddenness. His explanation, drawing on cognitive science, was that religious belief is maintained by social reinforcement, emotional investment, and cognitive biases — not by evidence. Believers do not need God to reveal himself because their belief is sustained by community, ritual, and the psychological comfort of certainty. The absence of evidence is reinterpreted as a 'test of faith' rather than evidence of absence.

Dennett argued that this pattern — the reinterpretation of disconfirming evidence as confirming — is a hallmark of unfalsifiable belief systems. When any possible observation is compatible with the belief, the belief is not being tested by reality. It is being insulated from it.