Sam Harris on Divine hiddenness
Harris argues that a God who remains hidden while billions suffer from ignorance of his existence is either indifferent, incompetent, or nonexistent.
Harris addresses divine hiddenness primarily in the context of religious diversity and the problem of hell. If God exists and belief in him is necessary for salvation — as orthodox Christianity teaches — then the fact that billions of people have lived and died without ever hearing the Gospel is a moral catastrophe of God's own making. An omnipotent God could have ensured that every human being received clear evidence of his existence and his requirements. He chose not to.
Harris finds the standard theological responses inadequate. The claim that God respects human free will by remaining hidden is undermined by the biblical narratives in which God appears directly to individuals — Moses, Paul, Abraham — without apparently violating their freedom. If God could reveal himself to Paul on the road to Damascus without violating Paul's free will, he could do the same for everyone else. His failure to do so is inexplicable on the hypothesis that he loves all humanity equally.
He connects divine hiddenness to his broader argument that religious claims should be held to the same evidential standards as any other empirical claim. The claim that God exists is an empirical claim about the universe. The evidence for it is, at best, ambiguous. In every other domain, ambiguous evidence is treated as insufficient. Religion alone demands that we treat insufficient evidence as a test of character.
“If God exists, his plan for the salvation of humanity has been remarkably inefficient — given that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived died without even hearing the name of the deity they were supposed to worship.”