Friday, September 4, 2009

God's Hiddenness and Psychology?

I've been thinking about why people think that religious truths should be more obvious. If something as important as my personal damnation hinges on whether I know certain facts, why wouldn't God make more certain that I know these facts, or that everyone knows them? Now, I can't honestly ask this question with a straight face, because I think I have good reasons why the question doesn't make sense. Of course, I could be wrong, but I only have my mind to work with.

Surely God knows everything. That's what omniscience means. We also know that everyone's psychology is unspeakably complex. Who knows what lurks beneath our own conscious lives, let alone everyone who has ever lived. For me, it seems entirely possible that for some people, people with a certain kind of psychology, a direct and obvious relevation from God would be met by revulsion, fear, rationalization, or perhaps even indifference, or even puzzlement. But then perhaps an omnipotent God can remedy this. But I don't see how He can do this without direct manipulation of thier psychological constitution, which would tamper with their free will, which is linked up with their psychology. It is intuitive to me that we have to perserve freedom.

So, it is possible that a direct revelation yeilds less saved than an indirect one. And it doesn't seem like we can overturn this possibility from the standpoint of our finite perspectives. I mean, what reason could we possibly appeal to so as to prove that God ought to have made Himself more obvious, or Christian Truth more obvious? It seems we extrapolate from our own expectations or our own idiosyncratic predicament to foist that upon everyone else. But there doesn't seem to be a good reason to engage in such an extrapolation. It doesn't even seem like we have a good reason to apply it to the case we know about the most: our own. For the psychologists are the quickest to let us know that our knowledge of our selves is extremely limited, the vast portion of what may be called 'our naked personalities' submerged - like an iceberg - beneath a vortex of competing wishes, desires, and fears: what Freud might call the Id.

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