Dark planet

Schellenberg is a leading atheist philosopher, famous for his overrated argument from divine hiddenness. Here he gives an autobiographical backgrounder: 

I grew up in a deeply religious household on the prairie of Manitoba, Canada's "keystone" province (so we self-importantly told each other in school), with a father who, when I was a child, sang me to sleep with songs about Jesus he himself had written. We lived far from any town and were very poor; my dad, though in some ways a startlingly creative individual, suffered from a variety of complexly interwoven physical and mental troubles that undermined his every worldly endeavor. It was left to my mother, a salt of the earth type and my father's opposite, to help us hold body and soul together–and also to my siblings, much older than I, who one by one left home and through ingenuity and grit made a better way in the world, and then supported Mom and Dad and me with the fruits of their labors.

Alone on the prairie with my parents, feeling a loyalty to them and to their God, stirred by what I took to be God's presence in the whirling wind and sky and my inmost thoughts, atheism was unthinkable (I don't believe I even knew the word). I wrote my own songs about Jesus. In three years of Bible and musical training after high school I also sang them (I come from a family of singers). During one year as associate pastor of a Mennonite Church in Alberta I preached the Word as diligently and fervently as anyone. It was only after all this–after I too left home, both literally and metaphorically, discovering all the books about the deeper things of life from which I had been cuff off, that religious questions began to arise in me.

They arose quite quickly, as I recall, and although there was considerable pain in letting go of childhood beliefs and experiences at odds with the new insights generated by biblical criticism and philosophical argumentation, and although my loyalties did not shift swiftly, there was also a sheer exhilaration at the ideas I found. It was as though they had always been waiting for me, or I for them. And even after the shift occurred, there was still a felt continuity with my previous self, who so earnestly and naively proclaimed to others the "truth" about God. For although I had lost a passel of beliefs, I was still committed to the truth in my newfound vocation as a philosopher. Indeed, an unrelenting and scrupulous pursuit of truth and understanding–a fierce and unwavering desire to know the truth, whatever it might be–was something I now set before myself as worthy of cultivation much more consciously and earnestly than I had ever done before.

One of the ideas that intrigued me in my early days as a nonbeliever (I was not yet a disbeliever), even as it deepened my doubt and thus simultaneously troubled me, was the germ of the hiddenness reasoning I mentioned in the previous chapter in connection with the notion of religious ambiguity. 

Considering the arguments for an against God's existence and evaluating the intellectual worth of my religious experiences, I at first found myself with just the sense conveyed in the writings of Hick and Penelhum: that the world was somehow religiously ambiguous, equally open to theistic and non-theistic interpretations. 

Let me say a bit more about the "naturalness" of nonbelief in many parts of our culture, which is of central importance here. For people who spend all their time in the bosom of a deeply religious community, say, your typical small town with ten churches in the American Midwest or the Manitoba prairie, religious nonbelief may seem to be deeply unnatural. They and almost everyone they talk to–in the hall, on the street, in the post office, in restaurants–takes the existence of God for granted much as people take for granted that the grass is green and that the sun rises in the east. Their life, in this respect, is similar to that of people in Europe 800 years ago, who lived in a time when pretty much every department of living was saturated with the assumption of God's existence. And yet even their lives are profoundly different from the lives of the medievals in ways that have the fingerprints of secularity all over them. J. L. Schellenberg The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God (Oxford 2015), 35-37, 83.

1. Before commenting on the main issue I'll make a few preliminary observations. It's not surprising that an inquisitive, lonely, socially and intellectual isolated young man was so bowled over by his exposure to academia. The contrast between his intellectually neglected childhood and his college education was stark.

2. To my knowledge, Mennonite theology is thin on doctrine, so it's not surprising that between his pietistic upbringing and his Mennonite training, he was defenseless and credulous when exposed in adulthood to objections to Christianity.

3. Like so many apostates, I'm struck by his insular idealism. It sounds admirable to value "an unrelenting and scrupulous pursuit of truth and understanding–a fierce and unwavering desire to know the truth, whatever it might be"–but if that drives a wedge between the good and the true, the resultant worldview implodes. Goodness without truth is rootless while truth without goodness is ruthless.

4. The comparison with medieval Europe is somewhat overdrawn. On the one hand, theological ignorance was massive, padded out by folk theology and folk magic. On the other hand, while atheism is highly accessible and influential, evidence for Christianity is more abundant and available than ever. 

5. Moving onto the main point, I'm struck by how many apostates, even highly intelligent ones like Schellenberg, have such a shallow grasp of what Christianity implies. Is the world religiously ambiguous? And is that unexpected if Christianity is true?

To begin with, we need to distinguish between evidence for God and evidence for Christianity. These are interrelated, but distinct. There are philosophical and scientific arguments for God. And in principle there can be more direct lines of evidence, like a miracle, unmistakable answer to prayer, or uncanny special providence.

However, for most of human history, cultures were either animistic or polytheistic. If you were living in a pre-Christian world, there's a sense in which the world was religiously ambiguous. Even if there was evidence for the supernatural, that would be hard to fit into a unified narrative. Moreover, the benevolence of the numinous realm was highly questionable. A world of witchcraft and the cult of the dead. Evil spirits human and demonic. 

Is that inconsistent with Christianity? If you think about it, doesn't that sound like a world invaded and captured by a malevolent force? If, at most times and places, the world was occupied territory, under the thrall of the dark lord, then the world as we experience it will be religiously ambiguous. Residual goodness obscured by evil. Like people living behind the Iron Curtain. A world in which, to some degree, God withdrew his light and grace, leaving his creation in enemy hands. A fallen world before redemption. 

6. There's the religious ambiguity of a world without the revelation of Christianity, then there's the illuminating impact of Christianity. That, however, isn't something which naturally available. That depends on revelation and historical knowledge. 

Christianity provides a unified narrative. In addition, it clarifies God's intentions for humanity. In a pagan world, or a world bereft of revelation, it's much harder to discern the actions of a benevolent deity. Christianity disambiguates the character of God in a way that natural experience does not. It dissipates the fog of moral, natural, and supernatural evil to the point where a clear contrast comes into view. And there is now an ongoing battle between the dark lord, his vassals, and the sons of light. 

I suppose you might call it ambiguous or confusing due to the alternation, yet they stand in mutual contrast, like flashes of lightning at night. Rather than a dark planet where most of humanity resided in the shadow of evil, the emerging conflict separates opposites.