On sin-based responses to divine hiddenness

Journal article

While sin-based responses to divine hiddenness arguments are a road less travelled, they do nonetheless have a number of defenders in the contemporary divine hiddenness literature. I begin this article by exploring the various strategies that have been employed to attempt to motivate such accounts. What none of these strategies seem to take into account, however, is a cluster of facts about the correlation (or lack thereof) between a person's propositional attitudes about God and the degree to which that person displays the relevant moral and intellectual virtues. This article aims to fill this lacuna by mapping out the options available to defenders of sin-based responses in trying to cope with this cluster of facts. I argue that there may be resources available for preserving some aspects of the sin-based approach, but that taking stock of the aforementioned facts will ultimately require the positing of causal factors besides sin in order to generate a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon of non-belief.

Authors: Baker-Hytch, MRO

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Religious Studies
• Volume: 61
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 650-664
• Publication date: 2023-11-20
• Acceptance date: 2023-09-29
• DOI: 10.1017/S003441252300094X
• EISSN: 1469-901X
• ISSN: 0034-4125
• Language: English
• Keywords: non-belief; divine hiddenness; intellectual virtue; Augustinian tradition; sin