Can God Be Hidden and Evident at the Same Time? Some Kierkegaardian Reflections

Abstract

has argued that a loving God would make his reality evident to all who want to have a relation with God, but that God seems hidden to many such people.One response to this claim, suggested by Kierkegaard, is that God's reality is not really hidden to anyone except those who blind themselves to God's reality.This might seem to imply that all atheism is culpable, but it does not, since some of Kierkegaard's claims imply that those who may think of themselves as atheists may actually have an awareness of God's reality.This does not, however, imply that having a propositional understanding of God is unimportant; "thin theism" may have little or no value, but the kind of understanding of God that comes from knowing God as God does have great worth.[W]ould it not have an almost madly comical effect to portray a man deluded into thinking that he could demonstrate that God existsand then have an atheist accept it by virtue of the other's demonstrations.Both situations are equally fantastic, but just as no one has ever demonstrated it, so has there never been an atheist, even though there certainly have been many who have been unwilling to let what they know (that the god exists) get control over their minds.! Many people who only know Kierkegaard from textbooks might have difficulty recognizing that my opening quotation comes from the famous Danish philosopher.To be sure, the claim that no one has ever been able to demonstrate the existence of God certainly sounds like Kierkegaard.Many people know that Kierkegaard is a great opponent of proofs of God's existence, someone who went so far as to say that the person who first came up with the idea of proving God's existence was Judas Iscariot number two.However, the claim that there has never been a real athe-Ist, only people unwilling to allow their knowledge of God to get "control over their minds" does not sound much like the thinker who is best known as the proponent of the "leap of faith."It is true that the passage in question comes from the "B" section of Kierkegaard's Papirer, because it is a passage that Kierkegaard deleted from the final copy of Philosophical Fragments, so one might think that the thought in question is one that Kierkegaard decided not to endorse.However, it is plausible to see the deletion of the passage as a decision Kierkegaard made at the same time that he decided to remove his own name from this book

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