It’s God’s Fault That I Don’t Believe He Exists

The problem lies in divine hiddenness

If you think the title of this article sounds like I am deflecting responsibility, you would be right! I deflect responsibility to God and blame God for my unbelief, for good reasons.

Christian view on God and humanity

For my claim to work, several assumptions about God and humanity need to be true. I believe most Christians would agree with these assumptions (I can’t include minority theological viewpoints in my short article).

• God is all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-merciful (omnibenevolent).
• It is good for humans to bond and interact with God. Conversely, it is bad for human beings to be separated from God.
• God loves humans and wants the best for them (inference from the attribute of omnibenevolence).
• For humans to have a relationship with God, they need to know that God exists in the first place.
• God is able to make Himself known to humans (inference from the attribute of omnipotence).

If you agree with the assumptions I listed above, the following questions and arguments should be valid.

Why doesn’t God show Himself?

If God wants to have a relationship with every person, and He is capable of showing Himself to every person, then why are there a lot of people who don’t know or are not convinced that this God exists?

For the longest time in human civilization, animism, pantheism, and polytheism were the norms. Monotheism was a relatively recent “invention”. If Christian God is real, why didn’t He make Himself known to ancient people? Did He only start loving people recently?

Romans 1:20 says:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Apparently, that’s not true. God’s invisible qualities have NOT been clearly seen. Otherwise, we would consistently see some form of monotheistic belief across ancient tribal religions.

Divine hiddenness presents a serious challenge to the coherence of Christian theism.

You would not want to say that those ancient people were all willfully ignorant, blindly arrogant, and intentionally closed their minds to God, so even though they have some sorts of worship rituals for some deities, none of them were sincerely seeking God. Would you?

Even today, there are lots of religious people sincerely seeking God, but they fail to recognize the Christian God to be real.

Take me for example, I was a first-generation Christian. I was not brought up in a Christain family but in a polytheistic and ancestor-worshipping household. I went against my parents’ will to get baptized when I was 17 years old. I was totally committed to Christianity to the extent that I became a missionary in a country with limited religious freedom, if you know what I mean. Because of this, no one can say that I was resistant to God. I was the opposite of resistant.

But in the end, after years of serious commitment and quest, I could no longer convince myself that God exists. There are just so many reasons and observations, or lack of them, that make the existence of Christan God nonsensical in my eyes. So I deconstructed my Christian faith a few years ago.

Given my circumstances, Christians need to come up with a better counter-argument than claiming that I just don’t want to obey God, so I pretend He does not exist. It’s silly.

I am not an exception. There are many others like me. We are non-resistant non-believers.

Non-resistant non-belief

People like me cannot find adequate evidence that points to God’s existence. It’s not that we are trying to find excuses, but we are genuinely non-resistant.

Out of selfish desire, I personally would prefer that God exists because I don’t want to feel like I wasted twenty-plus years of my life. But I just could not find evidence to persuade myself.

Christians may argue that plenty of evidence points to God’s existence. Yet, I can boldly say that I have considered all of the evidence that I came across. Name any apologetic argument. I will most likely tell you I have heard of it and found it wanting.

Recently, I made a comment on Medium, saying that God is not real. One reader responded:

Dang you’ve not conversed with God before?

My face was like this.

This is my response:

I thought I did, for twenty years. I am now ex-Christian. I realized I was only talking to the air. If you have a recording of your conversation with God, I’d like to hear what He sounds like, so I can go back being a Christian.

If you think I set the bar too high, just do a thought experiment and ask yourself: If those apologetic arguments are advanced to show other religions to be true, would you accept them, or would you find them inadequate?

For example, lots of Christians told me that if I have an encounter with God, I would know He is real. But appeal to religious experience is not good enough. I have talked about the worship of the goddess Mazu in other articles. You can find hundreds of testimonies testifying to the power of Mazu’s blessing.

Now, do you believe Mazu is real because of those well-documented religious experiences? Probably not. You are more likely to be skeptical and you would say those religious experiences are not sufficient proof that Mazu is a real deity who has real power to make real impacts in people’s lives.

Why, then, do you expect me to accept the veracity of Christian religious experiences?

In short, if Christian God cannot give me evidence that surpasses other religions, I have no reason to believe in Him and not in other religions. If it turns out that He does exist, it’s His fault for failing to make himself known.

What’s more absurd is that God not only fails to show Himself so people can have a relationship with Him, but He also decrees that those who don’t believe in Him will suffer a terrible consequence (whether by annihilation or eternal torment is beside the point).

There are people who honestly seek God, but could not find Him, so using their best judgment, they decide they have to presume He does not exist.

And then God punishes them for that.

It would be an understatement to say such God is mean.

Conclusion

The logical conclusion is that the loving and powerful God that Christians proclaim does not exist. Some other kind of God may exist out there, but He/She is either not loving or incapable of revealing Himself/Herself to humanity.

An alternative possibility is that God is loving, but this God created human beings in a way that it’s best for them to live independently, so He/She finds no need to interfere with them.

Or deism is true. God simply does not care one way or the other. He just created the world and retreated.

There are a number of possibilities, but the Christian version of God is one of the least likely options.

(Some of the ideas presented in this article are inspired by J. L. Schellenberg, whose viewpoint is summarised in this YouTube video.)

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