Divine Hiddenness: Is God Really Silent?

Fiddling with the dials

Although the numbers vary by country, it is estimated that the global percentage of atheists and agnostics is around 7%. A recent 2023 Pew Poll noted that 81% of Americans responded positively to the statement, “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” Rather than suggesting that people have a problem with God’s hiddenness, the data reveals that the more significant issue is why He, She, or It is shrouded in mystery. Perhaps, as apologists, we should focus less on debating God’s radio silence and more on helping those fiddling with the spiritual dial to tune into the proper divine frequency. 

Vanilla or 31 flavors?

Baggini raised an interesting point: If God chooses to remain hidden, perhaps He does not share our religious zeal. 

“Well, a God who is just so mysterious, if that God exists, probably cares much less about whether we believe in it or not than a lot of religious leaders would have you believe.” (Baggini) 

While an atheist, Baggini grants that there may be proof that suggests God’s existence, but it is so vague that no one religion is justified in claiming that the God of the universe is their God. Therefore, if the evidence doesn’t get us any closer to picking God out of a divine line-up, then maybe each religion is guilty of the same counterfeiting scheme.

“If you want to get from a general belief that there is something more to the universe than matter to belief in one of the traditional religions, I think that’s the gap. I think that’s why hiddenness is such a problem. Hiddenness means we don’t have any good evidence to establish belief in one of the specific religions that human beings have come up with.” (Baggini)

Is Baggini correct? Is our evidence for God so vague that it can only reveal a vanilla deity? Has our eagerness to taste and see that He is good emboldened us to top Him with various theological sprinkles and philosophical flavorings to suit our cultural tastes? Do our religious attempts to describe God reveal more about our desire to offer 31 flavors of religion than the vanilla divine to which the evidence points? At what point does evidence for God end and human embellishment begin? I think it is a fair question, so let’s dive in a bit deeper. 

Unveiling the divine

I have challenged the assumption of God’s hiddenness because most people believe this entity exists. The question isn’t whether a divine figure is out there, but rather what He, She, or It looks like. Let’s review the evidence and see if it provides more divine clarity than Baggini is willing to acknowledge.

A rigorous intellectual defense of God’s existence often begins with philosophical first principles, such as an unmoved Mover or a being than which none greater can be conceived. I agree with Baggini that these first principles do little to distinguish God from every other divine pretender; however, they provide us with an academically defensible starting point. The Kalam cosmological argument builds on these ideas by demonstrating that the first immaterial cause has the agency to choose to create something from nothing. We can then include the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants, design in nature, and the information-processing systems found within cells to show that this first cause also possesses remarkable mathematical, engineering, and linguistic abilities. As we compile these pieces of evidence, the scales fall from our eyes, and God is transformed from a logical entity conjured up in a philosopher’s mind into a being with a mind of its own 

We can gain even more clarity by contemplating the transcendental palette of the true, the good, and the beautiful, as each contributes additional color to our divine portrait. Truth connects the divine immaterial mind to the physical world through the correspondence of thought and reality. Goodness reveals His desire for the world to function properly by establishing relational parameters between God, humans, and nature. Finally, despite its seemingly impractical nature, beauty introduces an accomplished Artist who considers it essential that we take a break from all our foraging and mating and take in a sunset. The true, good, and beautiful extend the transcendental hand of friendship to mere mortals and compel us to answer the question, “Who do you say I am?” 

The evidence for God’s existence isn’t as generic as Baggini led us to believe. In fact, without opening a holy book, we have narrowed Him down from a Force to a Mind to a Person. 

Image bearing evidence

So far, I have provided a description of God suitable for posting on the Most Wanted Deity wall at our local post office. However, we have one more piece of evidence that is even more powerful than the others but is often overlooked because it is right under our noses: human exceptionalism. St. Augustine explained this situation quite eloquently. 

“Men go to gape at mountain peaks, at the boundless tides of the sea, the broad sweep of rivers, the encircling ocean and the motion of the stars, and yet they leave themselves unnoticed; they do not marvel at themselves.” (My emphasis) 

Humans display characteristics not found in the natural world, such as creativity, compassion, morality, worship, purpose, and love, implying that instead of evolving from the ground up, they originated from beyond this world. The idea that human exceptionalism is powerful evidence for the existence of God is the central thesis of my book, “Cry of the Elephant Man: Listening for Man’s Voice Above the Herd.” 

“As unique beings who bring spiritual traits to a physical planet, we are the most impressive evidence of God’s existence. We often get hot and bothered over the theological and philosophical arguments for God’s existence, yet seem oblivious to the fact that the only creatures debating it are humans. We become so distracted by academic evidence that we fail to recognize the significance of the academicians. The planet is an evidence locker filled with 7 billion walking, talking proofs of God’s existence. Every time you cross paths with another human being, you encounter another witness testifying on God’s behalf.” (Strandness – “Cry of the Elephant Man.”)

Baggini is an articulate and thoughtful man who enjoys debating God’s existence, but at what point in his evolutionary lineage did squabbling over bananas evolve into a metaphysical debate? It’s challenging to explain how an evolutionary process of genetic mistakes, filtered by a survival metric, would produce beings interested in coming together to contemplate their belly buttons. If we can’t find these traits by searching the Earth, perhaps they originated from the heavens. It seems fair to say that humans represent a singularity of personhood that could only have been set in motion by an Unpersoned Person. 

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Personal presence

Baggini acknowledges that, despite all the proofs for God’s existence, the evidence people find most convincing is the experience of His presence. 

“I think for most people who have a religious faith, at least a Christian faith, the most fundamental reason for it is they have felt, sometime in their life and perhaps ongoing in their life, the presence of God in their life. They have felt, in some way, that God has spoken to them, called to them, whatever language they use. So, actually, the kind of evidence that persuades people of a personal God is a very strong personal experience.” (Baggini)

Humans naturally sense a personal spiritual realm. Researchers have discovered that even very young children are  “intuitive theists-disposed to view natural phenomena as resulting from nonhuman design.” An intuition we continue to indulge in adulthood as we kneel at altars, cast spells, or wear our lucky socks. 

If this is correct, the presence of a personal God appears to be an evidential minimum for most people from early childhood, and the academic evidence we later gather as adults is just icing on the cake. However, sensing the presence of a personal God is one thing, but we genuinely want to know whether He is a friend or a frenemy of sinners.

Is it possible that we have enough forensic evidence to identify God in a divine lineup but are simply afraid to confront Him in the court of public opinion?  Acknowledging an unknown God feels much safer because it allows us to check the spirituality box without bending a knee. Instead of doing the hard work of getting to know this God, we can pat ourselves on the back for hedging our deistic bets. It’s a brilliant earthly strategy until one reaches heaven’s gate and encounters a Jesus who says, “I never knew you,” because we never took the time to get to know Him. 

Conversation Partner

The moderator posed an excellent question that directly relates to the nature of the relationship between God and man. 

“I know friends who have a very sincere desire to experience God. They’ve maybe been to church, maybe even had people pray for them, they’ve read the Bible and yet it’s not happened for them. Do you think God might have good reasons for (not speaking to them)?”

Rather than asking why God is silent, we may want to consider what would make us a desirable conversation partner. Dallas Willard addressed this in his popular book, “Hearing God.” 

Are we ready to be in business with God? If you find yourself in a position where you can honestly say, ‘God has never spoken to me,’ then you well might ask, ‘Why should God Speak to me? What am I doing in life that would make speaking to me a reasonable thing for Him to do? Are we in business together in life? Or am I in business for myself, trying to ’use a little God’ to advance my projects?

I don’t want to dismiss the sincere desire of people who desperately want to hear God speak to them, but maybe we need to stop acting like parents telling their children to use their “words” and instead listen carefully as God communicates through the sign language of small miracles, the body language of the cross, and the written language of Scripture. 

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Therapeutic silence

Why does it seem that God is at His quietest when we need to hear from Him the most? King David asked this very question in Psalm 22, which Jesus later quoted at His crucifixion.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

    Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,

    and by night, but I find no rest. (Psalm 22:1-2)

Is God giving us the silent treatment or trying to convey something words cannot express? What if we have confused God’s silence with His quiet sobbing? What if words are inadequate when Jesus weeps? Maybe God is silent during tragedy because we cannot see His sorrow and live. Nicholas Wolterstorff addressed this idea in his book “Lament for a Son.” 

“It is said that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.” 

Suffering often feels like the final scene in our life’s tragedy, but what if God is busy preparing to raise the curtain for our next scene? What if God’s silence is therapeutic? Dominic Done explains this idea in his book “When Faith Fails.” 

“The most meaningful things God does, he does slowly—in secret and stillness, when tomorrow is veiled like a heavy curtain. Yet behind the scenes, God is setting the stage. He’s apprenticing you now for your next adventure.” 

God’s Spokespeople

In her excellent book, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved,” Kate Bowler comments on God’s silence.

“At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus.”

When God seems muted, the church should raise its voice. Perhaps people would be less critical of God’s silence if the Body of Christ allowed its hands and feet to do the talking.  

Bowler goes on to describe the fear of losing that overwhelming sense of God’s presence.

“That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, and nuns I liked, What am I going to do when it’s gone? 

And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves…But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God’s presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back. 

But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.” 

God’s presence always leaves a mark on you, no matter how fleeting. Once God has spoken into your life, even if you feel that He has fallen silent, your mind remains engaged in a never-ending internal spiritual dialogue.

God is an open book

Both guests acknowledged God’s hiddenness, but as a scientist, I hear His voice in every good word spoken into creation. I see His biological writing on the wall when I look at the intensive care monitors. I feel His electricity in the QRS complex of the EKG, and I’m reminded that life is in the blood as I observe a blood pressure tracing. I sense His breath as I check the oxygen levels on the oximeter. In my world, God is an open book that can be read any time of the day (and far too often at night). God has spoken through nature, scripture, and His incarnate Word, so it seems that rather than being silent, we can’t get Him to shut up. 

Sandals on the Ground 

Sadly, Christians often fall into the trap of arguing for the existence of a generic God and forget that He put sandals on the ground. If we don’t talk about Jesus, we are defending Baggini’s generic God - a God who hovers but doesn’t descend, a God so full of Himself that He never empties, and a God who demands service but does not serve. For Christians, God isn’t a philosophical afterthought, but the Word made flesh, and we have heard Him in all His rhetorical glory.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

The last word on faith isn’t an exclamation point at the end of a syllogism; instead, it is the proclamation that “It is finished” on the lips of a Savior. God knew that logical proofs for His existence would be nothing more than noisy academic gongs and philosophical clanging symbols if they didn’t also offer “no greater love.” 

God humbled Himself when He could have put on a fireworks show. He had the bully pulpit but preferred to use His still, small voice. Divine restraint may not impress Baggini, but it might be the most underrated of all God’s great-making attributes. A God of power can make an impressive display, but One who empties Himself is truly a sight to behold.

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who practiced neonatal medicine for more than 20 years and has written three apologetic books. Information about his books can be found at godsscreenplay.com