The argument is stated precisely by the philosopher J.L. Schellenberg: a perfectly loving God would want personal relationship with all finite persons capable of it. A perfectly loving God would ensure that no one who is open to relationship with God is left without the means to enter into it. But many people who are open to such a relationship — who are genuinely seeking, genuinely willing, not resistant — remain without belief in God. Therefore, a perfectly loving God does not exist.
This argument is philosophically serious. Unlike some objections to theism, it does not rely on logical contradiction or empirical disconfirmation. It relies on an expectation about what a loving God’s behaviour would look like — and argues that the observed world does not match that expectation.
The concept of divine love at stake
The argument assumes that divine love is analogous to human parental love — maximally solicitous, working to remove all obstacles to relationship, unwilling to remain hidden from someone who is looking. This analogy has genuine intuitive force. But it may not be the only or even the best model of what divine love looks like.
An alternative picture: the relationship God seeks is not the relationship of a needy parent who cannot bear the child’s absence, but the relationship of one who loves enough to preserve the conditions for genuine, freely chosen love. A God who made His existence unmistakably obvious — who removed all possibility of non-belief — would produce not genuine love but compelled acknowledgement. The hiddenness that makes genuine seeking necessary may be precisely what makes genuine finding meaningful.
The question of what “openness” to God actually requires
Schellenberg’s argument requires that some people are genuinely open to relationship with God and remain without it. But openness to relationship is not the same as intellectual willingness to accept God’s existence if sufficiently evidenced. Genuine openness to a personal relationship involves something more — a readiness of the whole person, not just the intellect, to enter into what that relationship would require.
This is not a demand for religious submission before belief. It is an observation that relationship with God, if it exists, is not a purely intellectual conclusion. It involves the whole of a person. And the conditions for that whole-person openness may be more complex and more individually varied than the argument assumes.
The Islamic tradition on hiddenness
The Islamic tradition has a specific answer to hiddenness: God is not hidden. “We are closer to him than his jugular vein.” (50:16). “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God.” (2:115). The tradition’s claim is that God is the most present reality — that the hiddenness experienced by the doubter is not God’s absence but the doubter’s inattention, shaped by the noise of immediate experience, social conditioning, and the human capacity for self-distraction.
This response will not satisfy the person who has genuinely sought and genuinely not found. The tradition acknowledges this experience — the night of the soul, the silence that feels like absence — and describes it not as refutation but as one of the textures of the spiritual life. Whether that description matches the reality is, ultimately, a question each person has to pursue in their own experience.