Christians tell me that God wants me to know him. This isn’t simply because it’d be nice to have a supernatural pal but because of the huge stakes involved. God cares about me more than I care about myself, and he knows that if I don’t believe, I go to hell. But since God knows what it would take for me to believe, why not give me that evidence? Why is he hidden?

C.S. Lewis tried to explain it this way: '[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.' But this relationship analogy fails. In an ordinary human relationship, the very existence of the other person is never the question. No party to a relationship 'ravishes' by simply making their existence known.

Augustine had similar advice: 'Do not understand so you may believe; instead believe so you may understand.' But why? You don’t pick a belief system first and then select facts to support it; it’s the other way around. You follow the facts to their logical conclusion. Christians are forced to imagine a trickster God who plants vague clues to the most important truth.

Another response is that if God were plainly known, faith wouldn’t be required. Well, yeah—isn’t that a good thing? Defending an invisible God and celebrating faith is exactly what you’d do if the religion were manmade. Faith—that is, belief without sufficient evidence—is always the last resort. Faith is permission to believe without good reason. Believing something because it’s reasonable and rational requires no faith at all, and if there were convincing evidence, you can be sure that Christians would be celebrating that rather than faith.

You don’t use faith to cross a busy street or build a house or cure smallpox. It gives no way to distinguish between true and false claims. Faith simply encourages an end to questioning. It’s even worse than guessing, because with a guess, you’re at least open to revisiting a decision in the face of new evidence.

Yet another excuse is that God must have good reasons for staying hidden, but this presupposes God. No honest seeker of the truth starts with a conclusion and then rearranges the facts to fit; rather, we start with the facts and follow them where they lead. That brings to mind a cartoon where a man says to a pastor, 'Yes, I know God works in mysterious ways, but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.'

Why then is God hidden? Because he doesn’t exist. That’s not to say that we can be certain that the Christian God doesn’t exist. Instead, we follow the evidence where it leads, and it points to no God. —Bob Seidensticker