The problem of divine hiddenness focuses on the issue of whether it is reasonable to believe in the existence of God in light of the ambiguity of evidence for God’s existence. The problem of divine hiddenness is often considered a subpart of the problem of pain because God’s absence during the midst of human suffering is itself the source of another form of suffering: man’s anguished experience of abandonment.
Some philosophers maintain that it is impossible to reconcile this latter form of suffering with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God because—even if we assume that God has a good reason for allowing evil—there is no intelligible reason why he could not be present in some unambiguous manner to comfort us as we suffer under the weight of terrible experiences of evil. Does God’s elusiveness during such suffering not cause needless additional suffering? Is the very fact that we must suffer in solitude not, in and of itself, evidence of the non-existence of God?
The Advent of Time answers the problem of divine hiddenness by providing the precise reason why God remains hidden. God remains hidden in order to allow us to have faith, which is a prerequisite of love.
More specifically, if “heaven” consists of the actualization of a love-based union between man and God, and if faith is a prerequisite of love, then fallen man must have the opportunity to establish, exercise, and grow faith in God in order to have the capacity to enter into an eternal love-based relationship with God. Since faith, by definition, cannot be developed in the face of certain knowledge, fallen man would be unable to experience love with God were man to acquire certain knowledge of God’s existence and omnibenevolence in this life. In other words, were God to make himself definitively known to mankind in the temporal world, the very act of making himself known would undermine our ability to enter into an eternal loved-based union with him.