The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Hiddenness of God 149
believe in his existence, and, no doubt, to behave in some way that
would be a natural consequence of this new piece of knowledge. And
this isn’t really what God wants at all. From the point of view of theism,
or at least from the point of view of the theistic religions—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam—it is indeed true that God wants us human
beings to believe in his existence, 13 but, like many truths, this truth can
be very misleading if it is asserted out of context. I want my wife to
believe in my existence; if I say this, I say something true; but it’s not a
thing I would ever say outside a philosophical example. What I want is
for my wife and me to stand in a certain complex set of relations that,
as a matter of fact, have her believing in my existence as an essential
component or logical consequence. If my marriage were destroyed, if
this complex set of relations ceased to obtain, she would no doubt still
believe in my existence, but that, by itself, would be of no value to
me. And God does not place any particular value on anyone’s believing
in his existence, not simpliciter, not by itself. What he values is, as I
noted earlier, a complex of which belief in his existence is a logical
consequence, a complex some of whose features I had Theist spell out
in Lecture 5 in his description of God’s plan for the reconciliation of
humanity with himself. Is it not possible, does it not seem plausible, that
if God were to present the world with a vast array of miracles attesting
to the existence of a personal power beyond nature, this action would
convey to us the message that what he desired of us was simply that
we should believe in his existence?—and nothing more?—or nothing
more than believing in his existence and taking account of it as one
important feature of reality, a feature that has to be factored into all our
practical reasoning? If that is so, then the vast array of miracles would
not only be useless from God’s point of view, but positively harmful, a
barrier to putting his plan of reconciliation into effect.
If it is hard to see what I am getting at here, perhaps a sort of analogy
will help. There are many propositions God wants everyone to accept
that people don’t generally accept, or haven’t generally accepted in the
course of human history. One of them would be ‘‘Women are not
intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually inferior to men.’’ But if God
wants everyone to accept this proposition, everyone at all times and in
all places, why has he not (as Russell might have asked) provided us
with more evidence for it? Why doesn’t a voice from a whirlwind or a
burning bush inform everyone of its truth on their eighteenth birthday?
Why isn’t every woman born with a tastefully small but clearly legible
birthmark that says (perhaps in the native language of her parents) ‘‘Not