Divine Presence in a Material World

Professor Rea will argue that God’s presence, as well as certain kinds of divine communication, are, and always have been, widely available - to a much greater degree than is typically credited in the literature on divine hiddenness - to those who have the concept of God, and especially so to those who have access to scripture and the liturgies of the church. Showing this does not by itself solve the hiddenness problem (the argument of this paper is a partial supplement to a solution that rests primarily on appeal to divine transcendence); but, it does raise significant obstacles to establishing the conclusion that negatively valenced analogies - God as distant lover, or neglectful parent, for example - are more apt than traditional positive analogies for characterizing the attribute that we call ‘divine love’.

Michael Rea is a Professorial Fellow at the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St. Andrews, as well as Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2001. He is has written or edited more than ten books and thirty articles in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and has given numerous lectures in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, China, and Iran. He is also scheduled to give the 2017 Gifford Lectures.