“3... 2…1… Ready or not, here I come!”

When I was a kid, I loved playing Hide-and-Seek. I especially liked being the seeker. The thought of calling someone out of their clever hiding spot was thrilling. Sometimes it only took me a few seconds to spot a shirt or a shoe tucked behind a bench, but other times I would spend what felt like hours trying to find my friends, positioned behind bushes and up in trees. Sometimes, I never found them. I hated losing. Little did I know then, the childhood game of Hide-and-Seek is one I would continue to play my whole life. But now it takes a different form, and the stakes are much higher.

I play Hide-and-Seek when I try to figure out whether to lie to protect someone’s feelings or tell the truth … when I deliberate over what side of social issues I am supposed to stand on … and when I debate my fellow Christians about whether God said [insert controversial act here] is a sin or not. Where are God’s moral commands for these things, and why are they so hard to find? I dig deep within my heart, and they are not clear. I read through the Scriptures, and I find no solace. Let the game continue.

Evolutionary debunking challenges pose a significant threat to knowledge of mind-independent moral truths. I argue for this elsewhere.[1] In response to such challenges, I often contend that theism provides the best available framework for moral knowledge. To overcome debunking concerns, I propose that God could have shaped our moral psychology to track moral truths either by guiding the evolutionary process to lead us towards aligning moral convictions (divine guidance) or by granting us rational insight through intuitive moral convictions (divine revelation).

When I give such an argument for theism, I often get a similar reply: “If God exists, then why isn’t morality clearer?” We might call this the problem of divine moral hiddenness (DMH). This can be formulated as follows:

1.      If God exists and cares that we do the right thing, He will make the right thing to do clear to us.

2.      The right thing to do is not clear to us.

3.      Therefore, God either does not exist or does not care if we do the right thing.

At first blush, this argument appears quite merited. But upon careful examination, there seem to be two underlying false assumptions that dissolve this charge against a theistic explanation of moral knowledge.

Before getting to these assumptions, which are rooted in (1), let’s first look at (2). Is it true that the right thing to do is not clear to us? In many cases, it seems the right thing is, indeed, clear to us. It seems clear, for instance, that we ought not to torture an innocent child or that we should help those in need. It seems clear that values like love, generosity, and equality are good, while vices like hate, envy, and greed are bad. Although the application of many of these principles might be more vague, the general principles themselves remain relatively clear. Atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse agrees, stating, “The man who says it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says 2+2=5.”[2] Hugh Rice adds, “It is not just that it seems to us that it is awful to torture babies: it seems to us that it could not have been otherwise.”[3] There are many things that seem to be “written on our hearts”[4] and can be counted as genuine moral knowledge. That said, there is also a lot that is unclear, even within the Church. Debates about just war, the death penalty, meat-eating, and more come to mind. As I alluded to earlier, personal issues often fall into this category of moral complexity as well. Instances where one must decide whether to tell or withhold a lie, for example, don’t always seem to have a clear moral resolution. In this way, despite many things that are written on our hearts, there does seems to be a lot that remains unwritten and clouded. As a result, the force of (2) holds, with the caveat that it remains true only for more difficult, complex moral cases.

Let’s return to (1). In this premise, the proponent of the DMH argument gets something right about the nature of God. The communicability of God’s moral commands seems to necessarily align with His omnibenevolent desire to bestow upon humans the ability to know right and wrong (at least to some extent), thus allowing for free moral choices. However, this does not mean (1) holds. As I said earlier, (1) seems to be built on two faulty assumptions:

A)   God could clearly communicate to us the right thing to do.

B)   God would clearly communicate to us the right thing to do, if He could.

To understand assumption (A), it is important to reflect on the nature of evolutionary human psychology. The complexity of the evolutionary process in shaping our moral psychology might make it unfeasible for God to guide us reliably towards complex moral truths (i.e., answers to difficult moral questions). Let’s look at this through both a divine guidance approach and a divine revelation approach to moral knowledge.

On a divine guidance approach, it is possible that the actual world could be the world where we have the clearest moral truth tracking abilities in the set of possible worlds where evolution occurs and human freedom is also granted. Such a combination inevitably gives rise to complex, sociobiologically layered moral scenarios induced by human freedom. To this point, if divine guidance is true, the limited moral knowledge we have (about more obvious or general moral truth propositions) is exactly what we should expect. This places the theistic explanation in no worse of a position than any other theory of moral knowledge regarding complex moral scenarios.

If divine revelation is true, free agents still have the ability (and possibly tendency) to suppress moral truth, even if they do have it instilled within them by way of intuitive moral convictions. In such a case, it seems entirely possible for some people to have more acute moral sensibilities than others. This would make good sense of our moral experience.

So, on both divine guidance and divine revelation, assumption (A) fails.

To address assumption (B), we might draw parallels regarding the relationship between God and humans and the pedagogical relationship between a teacher and a student, whereby the development of moral character is amplified by the process of seeking and discovering moral truths. A good teacher, though they are capable of giving their student all the answers on the homework, does not do so, but instead lets them grapple with the problems and struggle through the process of discovery. The good teacher acts as a guide, not as an answer key. In this way, the character and intellectual development of the student is given priority over their knowledge of the correct answer. This process might parallel our search for complex moral truths. Even if God could reveal all moral truths to us (which I have shown is not necessarily feasible), He might have overriding reasons for not making clear every moral truth proposition, especially in complex cases.

Consider again the game of Hide-and-Seek, which I discussed at the beginning. For the seeker, what is the purpose of the game? One might say the purpose is to find those who are hiding. But maybe there is more to it. When I was a kid, I hated when I finished counting, turned around, and could easily spot my friend. I wanted my friends to be in spots that required me to do some searching, some investigating. Why? Because the purpose of the game is not only to find those who are hiding, but to partake in the process of seeking. The meaningfulness is in playing the game, not solely in the outcome.

So what can be said for the DMH argument? Though it might initially seem merited, reflection on many general moral truths we do know narrows the argument to complex moral cases. Concerning such cases, the failed assumptions that God could clearly communicate to us the right thing to do, and that God would clearly communicate to us the right thing to do, if He could, undercut the DMH argument. This leaves the theistic framework, characterized by divine guidance or divine revelation, as a viable and robust alternative to naturalistic theories in the wake of evolutionary debunking challenges.

[1] Kallay, Hunter.  “Saving Moral Knowledge: A Debunking Argument and Theistic Alternative,” [cited 13 June 2024]. Online: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/savingmk

[2] Michael Ruse. Darwinism Defended. (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), 275.

[3] Hugh Rice, God and Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 69.

[4] Romans 2:15; Hebrews 8:10

Hunter Kallay is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee and holds a MA in Apologetics from Houston Christian University. His primary interests include moral epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In his spare time, he enjoys fitness, sports, and exploring new restaurants.