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Response to Tucker on hiddenness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2008

J. L. SCHELLENBERG
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Abstract

Chris Tucker's paper on the hiddenness argument seeks to turn aside a way of defending the latter which he calls the value argument. But the value argument can withstand Tucker's criticisms. In any case, an alternative argument capable of doing the same job is suggested by his own emphasis on free will.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 289 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1 I have here summarized, and will focus on, the version of Tucker's argument that – given worries about God's knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom – I believe to be the strongest. I say ‘keep in the relating position’ instead of using Tucker's expression ‘put into the relating position’ because the latter threatens to beg the question against the hiddenness argument, which pictures the opportunity for relationship as always there, from the dawn of the relevant capacities, not as an intrusion in the midst of life. (If Tucker were to think of his duration t to t 1 in PV1 and MV1 as the very first stage of relationship capacity, this problem might not arise, but he gives us no reason to suspect that he is construing it thus.)

2 Notice that the latter are kept to one side until his penultimate section, and even there they are taken up only because they might be thought to undermine Tucker's response to the value argument.

3 Many things in his paper invite comment (sometimes criticism), but I have focused here on the more central matters.

4 I made very much the same point in response to Daniel Howard-Snyder's similar (though more wide-ranging) criticisms back in 1996. (See my ‘Response to Howard-Snyder’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 26 (1996), 460.) Tucker is aware of this piece – see his n.11 – but he misses some of its relevant points.

5 See my Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 151–152.

6 On this, see my The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 223–225.

7 Ibid., ch. 9, section 4.

8 Thank you to Chris Tucker for his comments on a draft of this response.