Meredith Sheeks

The Argument from Divine Hiddenness asks how a perfectly loving God could permit nonresistant nonbelievers, individuals who do nothing to try to lack belief in the existence of God but nevertheless lack belief. Ultimately, the argument answers: A loving God could not allow for nonresistant nonbelievers. There are nonresistant nonbelievers, so God does not exist. While many defenses of theism have hitherto been developed in response to the argument, all have serious limitations. They either fail to move the debate forward or to explain why God must allow for nonresistant nonbelievers. This paper offers a robust defense, which overcomes the leading limitations of previous proposals. I defend the hypothesis that God hides Godself, at least in part, in order to prevent at least some of us from loving one another less than we already do. Loving one another, I argue, is a necessary condition for loving, personal relationship with God.

Intellectual interest in epistemic bubbles and echo chambers has grown exponentially over the past two decades. This is largely because many assume, in light of recent events, that these phenomena are morally, socially, politically, and epistemically problematic. But are we justified in simply assuming that epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are inherently epistemically problematic? Perhaps surprisingly, numerous philosophers have recently argued that epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are not intrinsically epistemically problematic. Nevertheless, I argue, this trend is mistaken. Epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are all intrinsically epistemically problematic, such that we should try to escape them, if we find ourselves in them. Crucially, there are two senses in which we might identify epistemic bubbles and echo chambers as being intrinsically epistemically problematic, as opposed to “good.” After distinguishing between these senses, I demonstrate that, even if there is a sense in which epistemic bubbles can in principle be “good,” all epistemic bubbles are epistemically problematic in the sense that is ultimately relevant to the question of whether we ought to stay in epistemic bubbles or to try to get out of them.