J. L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument is one of the key contemporary justifications for atheism and has prompted numerous responses from those defending the plausibility of belief in God. I will outline a recent counterargument from Michael C. Rea, who claims that relationships with God are far more widely available than Schellenberg assumes. However, I will suggest that it invites a response from proponents of the hiddenness argument because it leaves some nonbelievers unaccounted for. I will rectify this by suggesting that (...) a model of panentheism in which God is embodied in the cosmos allows all, including all nonbelievers, to have a relationship with God. I will then claim that semantic externalism and externalism about beliefs can enable nonbelievers to get to know this God. I will then challenge the hiddenness argument by suggesting that these relationships can accommodate the key motivations behind Schellenberg's insistence on personal relationships without requiring subjects to recognize that they are in a relationship with God. (shrink)

As we explore panentheism, what can we learn from Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita? Although widely acknowledged as a panentheist, in the contemporary debate on how to characterize panentheism, Rāmānuja barely features. But Rāmānuja's position is worth studying not just because it bears on taxonomical questions. Among its interesting features is a conception on which devotional love, bhakti, serves an epistemic function that is also of crucial soteriological relevance. This chapter addresses both these topics. First, Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita is used to cast doubt on (...) a characterization of panentheism recently proposed by Mikael Stenmark. Second, Rāmānuja's conception of bhakti is juxtaposed with two conceptions of love that serve an analogous dual function: Weil's conception of supernatural love and Murdoch's conception of love as just attention. Rāmānuja's position, it is argued, is distinct, partly due to his panentheist commitments, but it also shares a number of features with the other two. In closing, it is suggested that for further comparative work on these three, ample room remains. (shrink)