Julia Sweeney on Divine hiddenness
Sweeney experienced God's hiddenness personally during her deconversion and came to see the silence as evidence of absence rather than mysterious presence.
Julia Sweeney's engagement with divine hiddenness was intensely personal. As her faith began to erode, she prayed for a sign — for some experience or evidence that would restore her belief. The silence she encountered was devastating. She describes the experience in Letting Go of God as a slow, agonising realisation that no one was listening — that the sense of divine presence she had felt throughout her life was, in all likelihood, a product of her own mind rather than a response from a transcendent being.
Sweeney's account is powerful precisely because she is not angry or defiant in her atheism. She did not reject God out of resentment or rebellion; she searched for God honestly and found nothing. The hiddenness of God, in her experience, was not a profound theological mystery but a straightforward absence — the kind of absence that, in any other context, we would take as evidence that the thing we are looking for does not exist.
Her story illustrates the human dimension of the divine hiddenness problem in a way that formal philosophy often misses. Sweeney was not evaluating Schellenberg's argument from a position of detachment; she was living it. And the conclusion she reached — that a loving God who wanted to be known would not remain silent in the face of honest seeking — was the product of experience, not abstract reasoning.
“I kept waiting for God to show up. I prayed, I listened, I looked for signs. And eventually I had to admit that the silence wasn't mysterious. It was just silence.”