The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology

Three questions motivate this book’s account of evidence for the existence of God. First, if God’s existence is hidden, why suppose He exists at all? Second, if God exists, why is He hidden, particularly if God seeks to communicate with people? Third, what are the implications of divine hiddenness for philosophy, theology, and religion’s supposed knowledge of God? This book answers these questions using a new account of evidence and knowledge of divine reality that challenges skepticism about God’s existence. The central thesis is that we should expect evidence of divine reality to be purposively available to humans, that is, available only in a manner suitable to divine purposes in self-revelation. This lesson generates a seismic shift in our understanding of evidence and knowledge of divine reality. The result is a much-needed reorienting of religious epistemology to accommodate the character and purposes of an authoritative, perfectly loving God.

• Novel approach to an old question: if God exists, why isn’t His existence more transparent? • New account of evidence and knowledge of God’s reality that challenges doubts of God’s existence • Offers a distinctive argument

Introduction; 1. Doubting skeptics; 2. Knowing as attunement; 3. Dying to know; 4. Philosophy revamped; 5. Aftermath; 6. Appendix: skepticism undone.

‘I found The Elusive God to be the most profound and interesting work I have read in the past twenty years at the intersection of philosophy and theology. Instead of beginning with a demand for evidence of the existence of a divine being, the author argues that we should expect any intrusion into our lives of the sort that would convince us that God exists to be authoritative evidence that calls us not only to a cognitive viewpoint but also to a surrendering of our wills. The result of such an investigation is a re-conceptualization of the epistemological landscape relevant to the possibility of the knowledge of God.’

– Jonathan Kvanvig, Baylor University