The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

148 The Hiddenness of God
in general a repentance and an attempt at amendment of life that are
transitory indeed. I shouldn’t be surprised if our general would, before
too long, find some way to convince himself that his vision of his brother
was some sort of illusion, perhaps a transient psychotic episode, and
to push it out of his mind altogether. But whether he does or doesn’t
continue to believe that the miracle he witnessed was real, it’s not going
to produce any change in his behavior that God would be interested in.
It’s not going to cause him to realize that the world is a horrible place
and to seek a way out of this horrible world. It’s not going to make of
him a man who believes that the world is a horrible place because human
beings are separated from God, and that the world can be healed only if
humanity is reunited with God. It’s not going to convince him that he
is a moral horror, and that his only hope of being anything else is to be
united with God in bonds of love. No, he likes things just the way they
are—or just the way they seemed to be before the visitation. He doesn’t
think the world is a horrible place, although he no doubt realizes that it’s
a horrible place for many other people. But other people are of interest to
him only as instruments. His only objection to the world as he perceived
it before the visitation was that he didn’t enjoy enough power in it, a
deficiency he was devoting every minute of his waking life to correcting.
I would generalize this contention. If God were to convince us of his
existence by ubiquitous miracles, this would contribute nothing to his
plan of atonement. And it seems to me likely that it would interfere
with it. If I were an atheist or agnostic who witnessed such things as the
following:
The stars in the skies spell out ‘I am who am’;
A voice heard in the thunder tells us that there is a God and that we had
better mend our ways;
Microscopic examination of grains of sand reveals that each of them
carries the inscription ‘‘Made by God’’ (this amusing example is due to
John Leslie);
I suppose I should conclude that God existed—or at least that some
being I should probably refer to as ‘God’ existed. (It isn’t clear that I’d
conclude that a being who was God, properly speaking, existed; for, as
I had my characters in the story of the secular utopia point out, any
series of miraculous events can always be explained by postulating a
finite being of great power and knowledge.) But I should also probably
infer that this being’s main project for me was this: he wanted me to