Pascal on Divine Hiddenness

International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3):325-343 (2015)
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Abstract

This essay aims to reconstruct and defend Pascal’s account of divine hiddenness. In the first section I explain Pascal’s view that divine hiddenness is primarily a function of human volitional aversion and only secondarily a result of God’s intentional action. In the following section I evaluate the primary sense of hiddenness by considering Pascal’s response to the objection that divine goodness requires and divine power makes possible God’s provision of evidence sufficient to overcome human volitional indisposition. While Pascal does think it possible for God to provide such evidence, he argues that this would unjustly harm human freedom and endanger human intellectual understanding. I conclude by addressing a weaker form of the objection through consideration of the second sense of divine hiddenness and Pascal’s surprising view that God’s intentional “hiding” is in fact a progressively deeper entry into the particulars of human history.

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Citations of this work

Hiddenness of God.Daniel Howard-Snyder & Adam Green - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Strategic and Religious Ineffability in Plato and Plotinus.Pietro Montanari - 2021 - Diálogos. Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 2 (108):148-175.
Non-belief as self-deception?Lari Launonen - 2024 - Religious Studies.

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