Timothy D. Miller

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.

The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule.