John Schellenberg argues that God would never withhold the possibility of conscious personal relationship with Him from anyone for the sake of greater goods, since there simply would not be greater goods than a conscious personal relationship with God. Given that nonresistant nonbelief withholds the possibility of such relationship, this entails that God would not allow nonresistant nonbelief for the sake of greater goods. Thus, if Schellenberg is right, all greater goods responses to the hiddenness argument must fail in principle. (...) I argue that there are good reasons for thinking that greater goods responses do not, for the above reason, fail in principle. (shrink)

The article discusses a response to Schellenberg’s atheistic ‘hiddenness argument’ that neither objects to its premises nor formulates a new inductive argument in favour of the existence of God. According to the proposed response, it is sufficient for the task of defending theism to reverse Schellenberg’s reasoning and present a theistic meta-argument that takes as its assumption the fact that there are resistant believers in the world. The paper defends the claim that both arguments have similar persuasive power. However, because (...) of their contradictory conclusions both cannot be sound. It is argued that the way to decide the dilemma is to compare the demographics of theism and atheism and to compare accommodation strategies of both arguments. The first comparison favours theism, but it does not exclude the possibility that quantitative proportions between theists and atheists can change in the future. The second comparison refers to accommodation strategies of proponents of A-argument who have to give an account of how it is possible that in an atheistic world there exist resistant believers and of proponents of T-argument who have to give an account of how it is possible that in the world governed by an all-powerful and all-loving God there exist nonresistant nonbelievers. The conclusion of the considerations is the claim that the theistic accommodation strategy compares favourably to the atheistic one. (shrink)