Michael Shermer on Divine hiddenness
Shermer argues that God's hiddenness is most simply explained by God's nonexistence, and that the theological explanations for the silence are ad hoc.
Michael Shermer approaches divine hiddenness as a sceptic who has spent decades evaluating extraordinary claims. His position is straightforward: the simplest explanation for God's apparent absence is that God is absent — not hidden, not testing us, not respecting our free will, but simply not there. Every other explanation requires additional, unsupported assumptions.
Shermer is critical of the claim that God hides to preserve free will or to make faith meaningful. He points out that according to the Bible itself, God appeared directly to numerous people — Moses, Abraham, Paul — without apparently violating their free will. If direct revelation was compatible with free will then, it should be compatible with free will now. The fact that God has apparently changed his communication strategy is better explained by the hypothesis that the earlier reports were mistaken than by the hypothesis that God has adopted a new policy.
His broader framework for evaluating the hiddenness question draws on Bayesian reasoning. On the hypothesis that God exists and wants to be known, we would expect clear evidence of his existence. On the hypothesis that God does not exist, we would expect exactly what we observe: silence. The evidence, Shermer argues, strongly favours the second hypothesis.
“If God is hiding, he's hiding exactly the way a nonexistent being would hide. At some point, Occam's Razor should apply.”