James Randi on Divine hiddenness
Randi argued that God's failure to provide testable evidence of his existence is exactly what you would expect if God does not exist.
James Randi's entire professional life was organised around a simple principle: claims that cannot be tested should not be believed. The hiddenness of God fits this framework perfectly. Randi argued that a God who refuses to provide clear, testable evidence of his existence is indistinguishable from a God who does not exist — and that the simplest explanation for this indistinguishability is that there is, in fact, nothing there.
The Million Dollar Challenge was, in a sense, Randi's standing response to the problem of divine hiddenness. For decades, anyone who claimed to demonstrate a supernatural phenomenon under controlled conditions could win one million dollars. The challenge was never met. Randi drew the obvious parallel: if God exists and wants to be known, producing clear evidence should be trivial for an omnipotent being. The fact that no such evidence has ever been produced under controlled conditions is, in Randi's view, telling.
Randi was unmoved by the theological response that God hides in order to preserve human freedom. He regarded this as an ad hoc excuse — the kind of unfalsifiable rationalisation that believers construct after the fact to explain away the absence of evidence they expected to find.
“If God exists, he's hiding. And he's doing a very good job of it — exactly as good a job as if he weren't there at all.”