Within philosophy of religion, there is substantial discussion of (various versions of) the problem of divine hiddenness for theism. Atheists tend to argue that the existence of God would have been more obvious (i.e. more evidence, less reasonable non-theism, etc.) if theism were true, for instance, because a loving God would want all people to know that God exists. These discussions are certainly important. It seems to me, however, that there are also reverse problems of divine hiddenness, that is, problems of divine hiddenness for atheism. And these problems have not yet received sufficient attention.

We can express the reverse divine hiddeness problem with the following question: Why if atheism is true, is God’s non-existence not more obvious? We can, after all, imagine versions of reality in which there is much less evidence for theism and much more reasonable non-theism. Consider for instance the world in which human beings are uniformly, or at least generally, doxastic and experiential naturalists, i.e. they don’t believe in God, gods, angels, spirits or any other supernatural beings, nor do they have experiences of such beings. Then evidence for God’s existence from the consensus gentium and from religious experience would have been entirely absent, or at least much less forceful, than it is in our world.

Similar points can be made about human moral and aesthetic belief, experience and/or knowlegde. Conceivably, all people could have been doxastic and experiential nihilists. In such a world, moral and axiological arguments for God would probably not have arisen or had much force. And consider also versions of reality where the evidence for God from cosmology is weaker. We can imagine eternal universes, for example. So why, on atheism, don’t we live in a version of reality that is less conducive to theism? This is something that requires an explanation from atheists. Yes, we can imagine more stars in the night sky guiding us to God, but why is the night not darker?

1. If there are brute facts, then there is at least one fact x that is brute (i.e. unexplained and inexplicable).
2. Fact x is brute only if there is no sufficient condition for it obtaining.
3. There being no sufficient condition for the obtaining of x is a sufficient condition for the obtaining of x.
4. Therefore, x is both brute and not brute. [from 2 and 3]
5. Contradictory facts do not exist.
6. Therefore, there are no brute facts. [conclusion, from 1-5]

God’s necessary existence is something that needs to be explained. Otherwise we are stuck with a brute necessity within our theistic ultimate explanation of reality. A promising explanation of God’s necessary existence is as follows: God exists necessarily, because perfection logically entails existence. If we consider the concept of God, we realise that God must exist in reality. God is thus, in a sense, the opposite of a married bachelor (who necessarily does not exist in reality).

However, Richard Swinburne has argued that God’s existence is not logically necessary. Herman Philipse outlines Swinburne’s case in his boek God in the Age of Science? Philipse does not consider all of Swinburne’s arguments persuasive, but he does think that some of them are convincing, including the following argument:

“Fortunately, however, Swinburne also provides convincing arguments for his claim that the proposition ‘God exists’ is not logically necessary. He says, for example, that if this proposition were logically necessary, all propositions entailed by it would also be logically necessary. But a proposition such as ‘it is not the case that no one knows everything about the past’, though entailed by ‘God exists’, clearly is not logically necessary. For we may safely assume that its negation, ‘nobody knows everything about the past’, does not contain any concealed contradiction.” Philipse, God in the Age of Science?, p. 123.

Let us consider this argument carefully. Let p be the proposition that God exists and q the proposition that no one knows everything about the past. If p is necessarily true, then q is necessarily false. But q by itself is not necessarily false, that is, its necessary falsity is a consequence of p and not due to a contradiction internal to q. At least, that appears to be the case. But the phrase ‘no one’ in q is problematic. For there is a clear contradiction in the following sentence: Set 1 includes an all-knowing person and no one in set 1 is all-knowing. In other words, we need clarity about who is included in ‘no one’, before we can see clearly whether or not there is a contradiction in q.

Thus, a better version of q is as follows: There isn’t a person who knows everything about the past. If p is necessarily true, then q is necessarily false. But q is not necessarily false by itself (i.e. because of an internal contradiction). Does this then prove that p is not true by logical necessity? I struggle to see why. After all, q is necessarily false by necessary logical consequence. Why is that not enough? Perhaps I fail to understand the argument, but, in my view, it is also not a persuasive argument against the thesis that God’s necessarily existence is due to logical necessity.

In this blogpost, I will briefly sketch an abductive argument for theory that there exists an independent, necessarily existing, concrete being. What is in view here is a being that is not ontologically dependent on something else for its existence, which exists in all possible worlds (versions of reality), and that is not an abstract entity (e.g. a number). This theory will be refered to as T1.

The argument starts with the fact that something concrete exists. For reference, I will call this fact ‘F‘. According to the argument, T1 best explains why F is the case. After all, T1 predicts F more strongly than T2, the theory that something exists in some but not all possible worlds. According to T2, there is at least one possible world that is empty in the sense of containing no concrete beings. After all, the probability of F on T1 is 1, while the probability of F on T2 is <1.

Furthermore, T1 predicts F equally well as T3, the theory that all possible worlds contain at least one contingent entity (i.e. an entity that exists in at least one but not all possible worlds), but no necessary entities. But T3 is less simple than T1 and faces explanatory challenges. After all, T3 must postulate at least two possibly existing contingent beings. Further, the contingent beings that T3 postulates are either ontologically dependent or ontologically independent. If ontologically independent, then it is not clear why they do not exist in all possible worlds. If ontologically dependent, then the dependence relation is either infinite or circular. If circular, then, ultimately, they depend on themselves. However, it is not clear that this is even possible, since it means that the contingent entity precedes itself ontologically. And if the dependence relation is infinite, then T3 postulates infinitely more beings than T1, making it much less simple.

Perhaps the Neoplatonic ‘One’, rather than the God of (perfect being) theism, is ultimate foundation of reality. The One is, for the purposes of this blogpost, understood to be an absolutely transcedent, impersonal simple. Here I will offer an dilemma-style argument against the existence of the One.

1. The One is an absolutely transcendent, impersonal simple.
2. Either the One is absolutely perfect or the One is not absolutely perfect.
3. If the One is not absolutely perfect, then the One does not transcend the realm of imperfect things.
4. If the One does not transcend the realm of imperfect things, then the One is not absolutely transcendent.
5. Therefore, the One is absolutely perfect. [from 1-4]
6. For any x, for x to be absolutely perfect, x needs to have all perfections.
7. Omniscience is a perfection.
8. Only minds can be omniscient.
9. Impersonal simples cannot be minds.
10. Therefore, the One is not absolutely perfect. [from 1-2, 6-9]
11. Thus the One is both absolutely perfect and not absolutely perfect. [from 5 and 10, contradiction]
12. Nothing that exists is contradictory.
13. Therefore, the One does not exist. [conclusion, from 11 and 12]

Is the causal sequence that gave rise to the present state of affairs finite or infinite? One reason to prefer a finite causal sequence is its relative simplicity (an infinite series has infinitely more members than any finite causal chain). But another is that there cannot be maximal fundamentality within a infinite causal history. After all, for any cause c of the present state there is a prior cause c – 1 that is ontologically prior to c. Even the infinite series, taken as a whole, does not qualify, since the causes that form the series are ontological prior to the whole (similar to how the bricks of an infinite wall are ontologically prior to the wall that is formed by them).

But there is nothing ontologically prior to something that is maximally fundamental. A being that is maximally fundamental is ontological prior to all (other) things. It has thus reached the logical limit of fundamentality; it is logically impossible to be more fundamental than that. Maximal fundamentality can be reached in a finite causal past, that is, the first cause of the series could in principle be maximal fundamental.

But an infinite causal past does not (and cannot) have a first cause. Fundamentality will always be limited (non-maximal) in a world with an infinite causal past. But whence this limit in fundamentality? If it isn’t an arbitrary or brute limit, then what it is its explanation? This theoretical problem is avoided by a metaphysical theory that postulates a maximally fundamental first cause. We thus have a reason in addition to relative parsimony to prefer the theory that the present has a finite causal past.

It seems that ontological hierarchies can be divided into fundamental and non-fundamental hierarchies. A plausible non-fundamental hierarchy is, for example, the hierarchy of buildings ordered by height, which has the tallest building as its summit. A plausibly fundamental hierarchy is that of (causal) power, which has the most powerful being in reality as its summit.

However, it is difficult to get clear on what makes a fundamental hierarchy distinct from a non-fundamental one. Perhaps the difference is that the summit of a non-fundamental hierarchy can be explained and determined by something external to the hierarchy, while the summit of a fundamental hierarchy cannot. For example, human beings can determine what is the top of the hierarchy of buildings ordered by height. However, something without causal power cannot determine what is the top of the hierarchy of power. The actual summit of the hierarchy of power needs to be explained in terms of something that belongs to the hierachy itself.

All this points perhaps to other features of fundamental hierarchies, namely generality and (relative) irreducibility. Fundamental hierarchies seem to include a lot of things and seem to resist being made subhierarchies of other hierarchies. We can, for instance, reduce the hierarchy of fastest runners in Europe to the hierarchy of fastest runners in the world. But it its difficult to see what more fundamental hierarchy the hierarchy of goodness can be made part of.

Suppose that there is something that is maximally foundational, i.e. all other things depend on it, but it does not depend on something else. In short, there is something which is the foundation of reality. Now, why couldn’t this foundational being be, for instance, a tea cup? Let’s call this bizar view teacupism (TC). The state of affairs envisioned by TC may seem absurd, but many things about reality are weird and surprising. So what is our objection against TC going to be? Well, one might reply, tea cups don’t exist necessarily, and therefore a tea cup cannot be the foundation of reality. But here the response of proponents of TC could be as follows: Ah, but we are talking about a very special tea cup and this tea cup does exist necessarily. Hence, it could be the foundation of reality.

At this point, we could point out that a tea cup lacks certain other features necessary for it to function as the foundation of reality. But I want to put forward a slightly different objection to TC, namely that its foundational being is (or seems to be) arbitrarily fundamental. The problem with TC is that tea cups do not essentially have the features of maximal fundamentality and there does not seem to be a reason for any particular tea cup to have such features. It is only by adding on such features that the tea cup of TC can be the foundation of reality. But why does that tea cup have these additional features, as opposed to, for example, the tea cup in your kitchen cupboard? It seems we cannot locate the reason for this in the essential features of tea cups. Saying that the foundational tea cup has some special property in virtue of which it has the features of fundamentality offers no escape, because that feature is also not inherent to tea cups. The essential features of tea cups do not entail the essential features of fundamentality, and vice versa. Thus, it seems a proponent of TC is going to struggle to explain why the foundation of reality is a tea cup and why it is the particular tea cup that it is, as opposed to some other.

Now, this type of objection to TC generalizes to any view that makes a typically non-fundamental entity the foundation of reality. If it succeeds, we can rule out a whole host of conceivable metaphysical theories. Arguably, only beings that are (plausibly) essentially fundamental would be left as plausible candidates for the foundation of reality, if we are to have non-arbitrary fundamentality.

There is a popular idea that is roughly as follows: The God of the philosophers is not, or cannot be shown to be, the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, i.e. the Abrahamic God worshipped by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which together make up a majority of theists if not humanity in general.

However, consider the following argument:

1. A perfect God exists. [perfect being theism]
2. To be the most worshipped God is a perfection.
3. A perfect God has all perfections.
4. The Abrahamic God is the most worshipped God.
5. Therefore, the Abrahamic God is the God of perfect being theism.

Ultimatism is, roughly, the view that an ultimate being exists. Complete ultimatism seems to be the least arbitrary version of ultimatism. According to complete ultimatism, a completely ultimate being exists. A completely ultimate being is a being that has all ultimate properties. But given complete ultimatism, there plausibly is a single perfect ultimate being:

1. A completely ultimate being exists. [complete ultimatism]
2. To be perfect is an ultimate property.
3. To be ontologically prior to all other beings is an ultimate property.
4. Therefore, a single perfect completely ultimate being exists. [conclusion, from 1-3]