Abstract

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in contemporary philosophy of religion. The basic idea: we have good reason to think that God, if He existed, would make Himself known to us such that His existence could not be rationally doubted . And since He hasn’t done so, we can be confident that He does not actually exist. One line of response that has received relatively little attention is the argument that God justly refrains from granting us all a rationally indubitable belief in Him because we are unworthy of such belief, and in fact deserve exclusion from communion with God. John Schellenberg dubs this the “Just Deserts Argument.” Here I consider several possible versions of the argument and subject one of them to further development and defense