Andrew Blanton

According to J.L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument, a perfectly loving God would not permit the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief. One influential response to Schellenberg’s argument is the Responsibility Argument. It holds that God might permit nonresistant nonbelief because it provides theists with an opportunity to help non- theists come to know God. Schellenberg has raised several important objections to the Responsibility Argument. Others have added to these objections, while proponents of the Responsibility Argument have responded with increasingly sophisticated versions and defences. In this paper, I reconsider this debate. I suggest that resuscitating the non-necessitarian formulation of Schellenberg’s argument offers the most promising route to countering the Responsibility Argument. I argue that while some objections to the Responsibility Argument should be given up, others can be developed to show that even the most refined versions of the Responsibility Argument remain unsuccessful. Central to this case is the claim that nonresistant nonbelief is neither necessary for the good of helping others come to know God, nor is there reason to think that God would prefer it over alternative means of achieving this end. Consequently, the claim that God permits nonresistant nonbelief to foster the good of helping others come to know God ought to be rejected, at least on the non-necessitarian reading of Schellenberg’s argument. I conclude with one implication of this result: it undercuts an appeal to the Responsibility Argument aimed at showing that theism should lead us to expect the occurrence of pointless nonresistant nonbelief.

Slater Simek (2025) argues that we should suspend judgement on premise (2) of the Argument from Surpassability, which claims that, if God exists, God could have created a better world than this one. His case rests on a form of consequential scepticism: we cannot reliably predict the overall axiological impact of local features of the world and thus cannot infer from them to its comparative value. In this paper, we challenge Simek’s argument on three fronts. First, we argue that his scepticism does not undermine the most promising arguments in support of premise (2). Second, we contend that his position implies that, for all we know, this may be the worst possible world, a highly counterintuitive consequence. Third, we argue that his analysis presupposes a purely consequentialist standard of axiological evaluation and neglects deontic considerations that plausibly bear on the axiological ranking of worlds. We conclude that Simek has not shown that suspension of premise (2) is warranted.

Perry Hendricks (2025) has recently argued that theism is not only compatible with what he calls ‘pointless atheism’ (instances of nonresistant nonbelief that do not serve a greater good) but also makes it expected. His case combines the Responsibility Objection (RO) — the view that God permits nonresistant nonbelief because it is required for theists to bear responsibility for bringing others into relationship with God — with a William Hasker-inspired argument concerning motivation and rationality. Hendricks’ core argument can be expressed in two distinct yet interrelated ways: a ‘motivation’ formulation and a ‘rationality’ formulation, and I examine each in turn. I argue that, even granting (RO) and the rest of Hendricks’ assumptions, each formulation fails. (RO), together with a few further assumptions to which Hendricks also seems committed, leads to conclusions that undermine rather than support his argument. Thus, we have at least as much reason to reject as to accept his conclusion, and without further clarification and support, his case remains incomplete.

J.L. Schellenberg’s argument from divine hiddenness partly rests on the claim that non-resistant non-belief exists. In this paper, I take up the question of whether such non-belief is pervasive and argue that it is, in fact, relatively common. To support this claim, I present a novel argument grounded in a distinction between acquisition responsibility and maintenance responsibility. I argue that, for a non-believer to count as resistant in Schellenberg’s sense, they must be acquisition-responsible for their non-belief in God. I further contend that many non-believers lack such responsibility and therefore qualify as non-resistant. This argument has the added benefit of showing that many prominent objections to the existence of non-resistant non-belief are irrelevant or incomplete. Finally, I highlight the broader significance of this conclusion, both for Schellenberg’s argument and in light of recent shifts in the literature toward more evidential approaches.

In his article ‘Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism’ Stephen Maitzen (2006) develops a permutation of the argument from divine hiddenness which focuses on the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the globe. Max Baker-Hytch (2016) responds to this argument by providing a theodicy which appeals to the fact that humans are epistemically interdependent. In this article I argue that Baker-Hytch's response is at best incomplete and at worst relies on a faulty modal judgement. After exploring some ways Baker-Hytch might salvage his theodicy and maintaining their failure, I conclude with the success of Maitzen's argument.