It has rightly been said that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I can offer no evidence that a man is standing at the South Pole at this moment, but that is not evidence that the South Pole is unoccupied.
Incidentally, this is why arguments from silence across every academic discipline tend to be very weak. For example, the fact that St Paul references Our Lady only once – and even then it is in passing – is not in itself evidence that St Paul considered Our Lady to be unimportant.
With that being said, there certainly are situations in which the absence of evidence can amount to evidence of absence. The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig points to two conditions which must be fulfilled in order for such a situation to occur:
- If the thing existed, we would expect more evidence than what we actually find.
- We have conducted an adequate search to determine whether such evidence exists.
In the case of the man at the South Pole, these conditions clearly do not apply so long as I remain sitting at my desk writing this article. It is true that I see no evidence of there being a man at the South Pole, but then again I should not expect there to be any evidence of this in my office (condition one). Nor have I made any serious attempt to explore whether any such evidence exists outside my office (condition two). As such, my lack of evidence for there being a man at the South Pole is no evidence at all for the South Pole being empty.
No doubt the Catholic would say something similar about St Paul’s writings. Is the mere fact that Paul never talks about Mary a sign that he does not care about her? Here our second condition might seem simple enough to fulfil: we can read through all of Paul’s letters and, upon doing so, conclude that there is no positive evidence that Paul cared about Mary. Yet even this conclusion is suspect, for the reality is that Paul surely said and wrote all sorts of things of which we have no record. This throws into question whether it is even possible for us to fulfil the second condition properly.
What about the first condition? If the proposition “St Paul considered Our Lady to be important” were true, would we expect there to be more evidence of this than what we actually find? Here we must answer in the negative, because we simply are not in a good position to know what we should expect on the basis of Paul’s 13 surviving letters. The Apostle to the Gentiles also never discusses the Virgin Birth, the Transfiguration, the Great Commission, Pentecost, the parables of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus or the Lord’s Prayer, yet we should not take his silence on these topics as evidence that he considered them unimportant.
Instead, we should admit that a writer who lived 2,000 years ago must surely have cared deeply about all sorts of things that we never get to hear about. In other words, we should not expect there to be any more evidence than the evidence that is available, and therefore the absence of evidence for St Paul esteeming Our Lady is not evidence that such esteem was absent.
Now let us change the calculus somewhat. Let us suppose I stop writing this article, catch a plane to Chile and from there make my way to the South Pole. Upon my arrival, I find that the place is uninhabited. This time my absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. If someone were at the South Pole, I would expect them to be standing in front of me. Since they are not standing in front of me, I can conclude with a high degree of certainty that the South Pole is empty.
All of this is a long – and perhaps tedious – prelude to considering the classic problem of divine hiddenness. It is not uncommon to hear garden-variety atheists compare the existence of God to the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden, Santa Claus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If theists are justified in not believing in mythical creatures such as these, then why is the atheist not similarly justified in not believing in God?
Here our two conditions offer a helpful way of framing the issue. If fairies and Santa Claus existed, we would expect to find evidence of their existence – voices at the bottom of the garden, mysterious new additions under the Christmas tree and the like – in precisely the places where no such evidence exists.
As for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, our satellites have never detected such an object, and at any rate we know that spaghetti is incapable of flight. We therefore possess strong background evidence against the existence of such an object. But if the atheist’s only point is that the universe may be home to all manner of weird and wonderful creatures, then here the theist would wholeheartedly agree. Indeed, it would be bizarre to rule out the existence of such entities simply on the basis that we have not yet seen them.
Now consider the case of God. Nobody can deny that God is hidden from us in some non-trivial sense. For instance, I cannot see or hear Him in the way I can see or hear my next-door neighbour. In this sense, there clearly is at least some absence of evidence for God’s existence. But does this absence qualify as evidence of God’s absence? Let us invoke our two conditions once more.
Beginning with the second, we must not ignore the fact that many people have never conducted an adequate search of the evidence for God. Far from being honest seekers of truth, most secular people – at least the ones whom I have met – could hardly care less about pursuing ultimate truth or uncovering the deeper meaning of their lives. In the 21st-century Anglosphere, intellectual apathy and spiritual indifference abound.
But suppose we are talking about a sincere atheist, one who has engaged seriously with the question of God’s existence and conducted a thorough search of the available evidence. In this case, the non-believer will have successfully fulfilled the second condition – conducting an adequate search to determine whether the evidence exists – which leaves us with the first condition: “If the thing existed, we would expect more evidence than what we actually find.”
Here our atheist runs into several problems. For one thing, although God is hidden in some sense, the evidence for His existence remains considerable. The contingent nature of reality, the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe for life, the mathematical structure of the universe, the origins of life, the mystery of consciousness, our moral sense, the reality of religious experience and the occurrence of miracles all provide compelling evidence that God exists.
This is borne out in the way humans live their lives. A quick inquiry on ChatGPT suggests that, of all the human beings who have ever lived, 90–99 per cent believed in some kind of supernatural being. Even of those living today, that number remains around 80–90 per cent. This is awkward for the atheist, since it suggests that the vast majority of human beings consider the evidence for God to be sufficient to warrant belief. But if this is so, then it becomes harder to conclude with any real certainty that we ought to expect more evidence than what we presently find.
Still, perhaps our atheist friend will insist that even though there is a huge amount of evidence for God, we should still expect more. If God does exist, the atheist argues, then we should expect His existence to be as obvious as the existence of the neighbour next door. But since His existence is not as obvious as that, He probably does not exist.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that we simply are not in a good epistemic position to adjudicate whether God’s existence ought to be more obvious. Perhaps God, in His wisdom, considered it worthwhile to construct a world in which our actions have real consequences, and perhaps a real consequence of humanity’s sin is that our vision of God has been clouded. Or perhaps there is something about our walking in faith – together with its attendant childlike qualities of humility, trust and hope – which God finds valuable. Or again, perhaps Pascal had it right when he observed: “There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
None of this is to suggest that God’s hiddenness is not a mystery. It most certainly is, and it is one I wrestle with almost daily. When we consider that God’s overarching purpose is to bring His creatures into a loving relationship with Him, it can be perplexing to try to understand why He would create a world in which, seemingly, the number of souls who attain a high level of holiness is exceedingly small.
Nevertheless, a mystery is not a contradiction. It is good for us to wrestle with the mystery of why God does not reveal Himself more clearly. But the fact that we must wrestle with God does not itself prove that He is not there.
