Richard Dawkins on Divine hiddenness
Dawkins treats divine hiddenness as straightforward evidence of absence — a God who wants to be known would not be this difficult to detect.
Dawkins does not engage the argument from divine hiddenness as a standalone philosophical argument in the way that Schellenberg or O'Connor do. Instead, he treats the absence of clear evidence for God as part of the cumulative case for atheism. An omnipotent God who wanted to be known could make his existence unmistakable. He could write a message in the stars, regrow amputees' limbs on request, or simply appear. The fact that he does none of these things is, for Dawkins, evidence of absence rather than absence of evidence.
He is dismissive of theological responses that frame God's hiddenness as a test of faith or a precondition for free will. An omniscient God would know that ambiguous evidence will lead millions of honest, intelligent people to nonbelief. If such a God then punishes nonbelief, he is punishing people for using the rational faculties he supposedly gave them. This is not a loving relationship — it is an entrapment scheme.
Dawkins also connects divine hiddenness to the broader pattern of God's alleged interventions becoming rarer as our ability to verify them improves. God parted seas and spoke from burning bushes in the Bronze Age but now communicates only through subjective feelings and ambiguous coincidences. The simplest explanation, Dawkins argues, is that there was never a God communicating at all.
“A God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and yet chooses not to, is, at the very least, not the benevolent deity his followers would have us believe.”