The Hidden God, Second-Person Knowledge, and the Incarnation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The core argument of this essay is significant: that personal presence, necessary for second-person relationship, does not require prior belief in the existence of said person.  This is presented as a defence against the argument for the nonexistence of God based on divine hiddenness.

The key issues, then, are these:

• What is required for personal presence? A body – or does a short narrative suffice?
• What is required for divine personal presence?

The essay proposes the Incarnation as a satisfactory solution for divine personal presence.  For those who lived before Christ, or who are unacquainted with Christ, the divine presence of the Logos, the gospel narratives, the sacraments, Church, or presence of God in believers might suffice.

Nevertheless, the essay does not really pursue these issues – it is not really interested in them.  Therefore, it does not really assess whether the presence of God in Christ meets the criterion of personal presence of God to all people.

For example, the hypothetical Mary in the essay could know her mother Anna in very different ways: being informed about facts about her mother; being informed of tales about her mother; having a body and personality derived genetically and maternally from her mother; speaking on the phone to her mother; encountering her mother in a public place; dwelling in a home with her mother; observing her mother at the height of her professional career; discovering her mother’s secret diary of her innermost thoughts.  Which of these amounts to unrestricted personal presence?  How is the analogy with a relation to God to be pursued?

It is notable that Stump, in Wandering in Darkness, chooses biblical narratives of the personal presence of God that do not themselves depend on the Incarnation: Abraham, Job, Samson.  Although Stump’s main focus is theodicy rather than the hiddenness of God, the latter is something that has been deeply thought through in her work – yet Stump’s thought is ignored here.  Even so, my own reading of Stump is that she has dealt entirely inadequately with what might be meant by the personal presence of God, and this fault is reproduced in this essay.

The problem of the hiddenness of God is not a new issue, even if it has been recently formalised by Schellenberg.  The whole of modern Christology engages with it, and, beyond a few quotes used as proof-texts, there is no real engagement with modern Christian theological thought here (as is typical for much contemporary philosophy of religion).  Even Stump’s emphasis on second-person knowledge is not new for existential theology, although the psychological discoveries confirming it are fresh.

 

Specific points:

• A cursory summary of what Schellenberg argues should be given at the start of the introduction for those readers unfamiliar with it.
• There’s an excessive use of indefinite articles; otherwise the English is very good.
• Line 127: ‘if one subscribes to a perfect being theism then one is forced to accept HAP1’ – but the evidence presented in this article is that Michael Rea subscribes to the former without being compelled to accept the latter.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review for Religions

The Hidden God, the Second Personal Knowledge, and the Incarnation

Thesis: The author’s case is against the second premise of the atheistic argument from divine hiddenness.  The second premise is that if God were always open to relationships with finite beings, then there would be no nonresistant belief in God’s existence.  The author’s counterexample to the premise is that there are de re instances of second-personal relationships, ones that are not de dicto propositional knowings-that regarding that relationship, and there are instances from developmental psychology and cognitive science that substantiate this thesis.  The incarnation of Christ, further, stands as an instance of God being hidden in human nature.

Evaluation.  I suggest some revisions (more on those shortly).  The essay is well-researched and crisply argued.  The author provides good signposting as to how the argument is developing and is clear as to what the stakes for the examples are.  There are some infelicities in the English, even in the title (there is no need for a ‘the’ for ‘second personal knowledge’), but it is overall a well-written piece.  I have one (two-part) critical concern I would like the author to address before the paper is ready for publication.

I think the move with the de re/de dicto distinction with relationships is useful, but I think that this significantly diminishes what the aim of the relationship is, especially as a need for humans.  The reason why the problem of divine hiddenness is interesting is that it is a cognitive version of the problem of evil – humans suffer, by hypothesis, because they do not have a relationship with god.  And they do not have that relationship because they do not have knowledge of god’s existence.  If the author’s answer is: yes, people do have a relationship with god, just a non-cognitive de re relationship, then there are two related questions.  Q1: Then whence the suffering? (Which is why this is a version of the problem of evil), and Q2: is the non-cognitive relationship, without the content of knowing who one is in a relationship with, really a relationship in the sense necessary?

Let’s start with Q1.  The cognitive version of the problem of evil iis that there is still a bad downstream from a cognitive lacuna for humans – that they are not in a proper relation to their creator because they do not know he exists.  For sure, there is a theological argument here – that god is with us through the dark night of the soul, even when we don’t see him as with us.  But the problem is that we have the dark night of the soul precisely because we don’t see him with us as him.  To insist that he’s still there is not only to miss the point of the atheological argument, but seriously makes matters worse – it makes god’s reticence to be present as god now the contributing factor for that suffering.f

With Q2, I question the analogies the author proposes.  Take Peter Parker and Mary Jane – MJ is in a relationship with PP, and surely THAT relationship is one that is comprised of many knowings-that.  Mary is in a relationship with spider man de re, but only because she is also in a de dicto relationship with PP as PP.  But we have no intermediary PP with god, and the incarnation is pretty weak tea for that.  More people find it easier to believe in god than they do to believe in Jesus.

With the version of Jackson-style ‘what Mary doesn’t know’ argument, but now with relationships, I think the problem is, again, that Mary antecedently knows many things about her mother.  She accepts her into her life when she shows up, she knows that she exists, who she is, and how to identify and distinguish her from figments of her imagination.  In the adults interacting with objects with faces case, the author is right that the intentional stance toward the object with a face precedes the actions attributed with intentionality, but in what sense is that a relationship, but more a stance we take toward things?  If stance-taking is one component, then, I have a relationship with the weather every time I say it wants to rain or that the sun is trying to poke through some clouds.  And, again, the problem is that the problem of divine hiddenness is that humans want to take the intentional stance with the things that challenge them, but god does not give them much to hang that intentionality on.

Again, the problem with all these instances is that they seem deeply disanalogous to what needs to be plausibly shown for the theological case.  The problem is that those suffering from the cognitive version of evil is that they don’t have any of those sub-propositional senses, either.

Now, I don’t think that the author needs to address all these objections, but I will not that most argument by analogy often need better arguments for the analogies to begin with.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is very well written and engenders much insight. It doesn't even depend on a Thomistic doctrine of Divine Simplicity despite being rooted in some ways in its adherents (Stump, Leftow, et al). And it's ingenious to intimate the relevant research in cognitive psychology. But much hinges on a particular understanding of Schellenberg's notion of "personal relationship" that Schellenberg himself does not proffer. He says in his book (2015) that it should be taken as having an "ordinary" meaning (38f). And if we take him at his word there, then the main argument of the author succeeds in providing a successful counterfactual that there are some relationships that do not necessarily involve de dicto propositions of the kind "X exists" but are mutual relationships nevertheless. But, to be charitable with Schellenberg here, the mere presence of a technical relationship (such as Mary Jane's with Spiderman via Peter Parker) would not be the sort God would have the finite person open to in his economy (and shame on Schellenberg for not seeing this). Presumably, the kind of relationship that would be sought would be one that is soteriological--one that involves and enables the redemption of the finite person from her sins. If a kind of God is in view (and here Schellenberg is explicit about God being someone who is all-loving, benevolent, etc.), and one adopts all of the other premises of the Hiddenness Argument, then the relationship will more than likely involve the relevant de dicto beliefs about God (i.e., those that appropriate or result in salvation) after all. The maximal lover presumably wills that the beloved be loved and protected; and if that can only be achieved through a saving faith, and that faith entails certain relevant propositional knowledge, then the beloved's relationship will be less like knowing Spiderman via Peter Parker and more like knowing Rumpelstiltskin who will only give up claim to your child if you know (de dicto) his name.
So, a swift way to circumnavigate the author's fine objection here would be to offer up on behalf of Schellenberg a better notion of "personal relationship" as a kind of personal relationship that saves. But I acknowledge that this would essentially retool the argument, and so as it stands it does not count against this successful strike given against HAP2.

In the final proof, consider making the following minor grammatical adjustements:

Line 34: "I shall begin with reminding two main premises of HA" - Should "reminding" be replaced with "recalling" for clarity's sake?
Line 39: "then the belief the God exists would be universal across ..." - Replace the second "the" with "that"?
Lines 157-8: "She elaborates on the Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment" - Delete "the" in front of "Frank."
Line 206: "hart" should be "heart."
Lines 234-5: "If Anna loves Mary, then not only she would want to establish an interpersonal relationship with her" - Switch "she would" to "would she."
Line 339: For consistency, "HAP 2'" should be "HAP2'."

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I note the care that the author has taken to respond to my objections and I am grateful for the clarifications.  The additional references to further relevant literature are helpful.  While I am not persuaded of the conclusions with regard to both HAP1 or HAP2, this is perhaps a matter for philosophical debate - one which can only occur if the paper is published.