Is the hidden God just evil? A contextual analysis of Schellenberg’s hiddenness problem

Abstract One important challenge to J. L. Schellenberg’s divine hiddenness problem for theism does not concern its argumentative soundness. Instead, it asserts that the highlighted issue surrounding non-belief is merely one of the alleged evils or imperfections in the world, and thus, the argument, whether sound or not, fails to offer evidence against God beyond what is already addressed by the existing problem of evil. Schellenberg, throughout his career, has proposed several lines of thought concerning the relationship between the two problems facing theism. In this paper, I examine these lines of thought and argue that each faces certain shortcomings when considered a potential solution to the overlap challenge. The general lesson is that, while the divine hiddenness problem should not be regarded as merely a problem of evil in disguise, it remains difficult to formulate a hiddenness argument that is sufficiently independent of the problem of evil. The paper ends with some suggestions for how an independent hiddenness argument—and, more generally, related arguments in the philosophy of religion—might be formulated in the face of this challenge.