Q&A: The Argument from Hiddenness
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
The Argument from Hiddenness
Question
With God’s help,
I wanted to ask what the Rabbi thinks about the atheist argument from hiddenness / lack of intervention and the like.
That insofar as there is a God, it is not reasonable that there should be divine hiddenness.
There is divine hiddenness, and from here it is reasonable that there is no God.
Answer
A weak argument, for several reasons:
- Why is it reasonable that there should be involvement? If He created a world with fixed laws, then apparently He wants the world to operate that way.
- There is strong evidence for His existence, regardless of this (see in the notebooks and in my book The First Existent).
- In conditional probability there are some quite confusing pitfalls. Even if you accept that the probability that if there is a God there will be involvement is high, that does not necessarily mean that the probability that if there is no revelation there is no God is high. Unlike deterministic implication (if there is a God, there is revelation, and therefore if there is no revelation, there is no God—which is of course a valid argument), when you move to probabilistic implication you discover a different phenomenon. You can use Bayes’ formula and see what the relevant factors are. (One of them is the prior probability that there is a God. I referred to that in 2.)
Discussion on Answer
Divine hiddenness?
If the world is God’s creation, then what hiddenness is there here?
For a more detailed explanation, see column 402, which is devoted entirely to this question: