Presentism and the Cross

1. It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2. Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3. So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4. So, presentism is false.

Divine hiddenness and absence

1. (Premise) God is hidden.
2. (Premise) If x is hidden, then x exists.
3. Therefore, God exists.

This argument is logically valid, of course. Moreover, it's hard to dispute premise 2. So the question is whether premise 1 is true. Here is an argument for premise 1.

4. (Premise) Many people experience that God is hidden.
5. (Premise) If many people experience that s, then probably s, barring further evidence to the contrary.
6. So, probably, God is hidden, barring further evidence.

The important thing in connection with 4 is to distinguish the experience that God is hidden from the lack of experience that God is manifest. Obviously, the lack of experience of God as manifest will not do as the start of a theistic argument. But to experience God as hidden is different from just failing to experience God as manifest. It is a genuine kind of spiritual experience of God.

Here is another valid argument:

7. (Premise) God is absent.
8. (Premise) If x is absent, then x existed, exists or will exist.
9. (Premise) God is an essentially eternal being.
10. (Premise) If an essentially eternal being existed or will exist, then that being exists.
11. So, God existed, exists or will exist. (7 and 8)
12. So, God exists. (9, 10 and 11)

I don't know if this argument is sound, because I don't know if God is absent. But there may well be some sense of "absent" in which it is correct to say that God was absent in Mother Teresa's time of darkness (presence and absence after all are things that can hold in various respects), and that sense of "absent" is sufficient, I think, to yield premise 8. (We wouldn't say of a being that never exists, such as the Tooth Fairy, that it is absent.) Again, to support 7, one would need an argument based on experience akin to 4-6, and one would need to distinguish experience of absence from the absence of experience of presence.

I think this shows that the so-called atheological "argument from divine hiddenness" should really be called the "argument from divine non-manifestness." That God is hidden entails that God exists, after all.

A consideration against Christian materialism

Christian materialism holds that the human being is a fully material entity, with no immaterial soul. Here is a problem for this view: What happened, on this view, when Christ died? After all, death is the destruction of the body.

Option 1: He ceased to exist. This option is distinctly unsatisfactory theologically—Christians have never believed that. On the contrary, Christians believed he descended into sheol to draw out the souls of those awaiting him there. And if God is omnitemporally eternal, it has the consequence that one of the persons of the Trinity ceased to exist, which is contrary to divine eternity.

Option 2: He ceased to exist qua human. But this simply means that the Incarnation ceased for the second person of the Trinity, and he was back to the state he was before the Incarnation. Since the Incarnation was not a gain for him, neither was this any loss. But then the sacrificial meaning of his death is undercut.

Option 3: He continued to exist, because a chunk, or the whole, of his brain was miraculously preserved, and then that brain piece or that brain descended into sheol to draw out the souls awaiting him. This seems implausible. Moreover, unless something like this happens for all of us (Peter van Inwagen played with this option), then his death was radically different from our deaths, which is theologically problematic. And if this is what happens to all of us, then death is not as evil as it seems—it's really just like an amputation of a lot of one's body, but not of all of it.

Option 4: He continued to exist, and so the Logos was the dead body of Christ. This view is similar to the orthodox view that the dead body of Christ was still united to the divinity. But do we really want to take the further step of saying that the Logos was a dead body?