Max Baker-Hytch (Oxford): 'Evil without hiddenness?'
Abstract: Although some philosophers of religion have alleged that the problem of divine hiddenness is simply an instance of the wider problem of evil, it is more common to view the two problems as conceptually distinct and as calling for potentially quite different defensive strategies on the part of the theist. Whilst concurring with this consensus, this paper seeks to explore the extent to which, if God exists and permits the sorts of evils that our world contains, God’s options for reducing the amount of religious ambiguity in the world would be significantly constrained. This in turn may have implications for the extent to which divine hiddenness constitutes additional evidence against theism over and above the evidence against theism from evil.
