Paul K. Moser

Background

Paul K. Moser (b. 1957) is an American philosopher at Loyola University Chicago and the leading experiential-volitional respondent to the divine-hiddenness argument. Where evidentialists answer Schellenberg by weighing public evidence and Reformed epistemologists by invoking proper function, Moser relocates the question: divine evidence is purposively available — calibrated to moral transformation rather than to spectator curiosity — so that demanding neutral, coercive evidence of God is itself a form of cognitive idolatry.

Two threads of his position are registered in our reference corpus. First, on hiddenness: God may withhold belief from one who "is ill-disposed to the sort of moral transformation God intends for him," or who wants a relationship with God "just for the pleasure and titillation of it" (Moser 2002, 2008b, at SEP 'Hiddenness of God' §3). Second, on religious experience: unlike perceptual models vulnerable to the objection that God is not the right sort of thing to be perceived, "Moser's treatment is not open to that objection. For he draws our attention to the experience of being guided about how we are to live and in our search for meaning" (Moser 2019, at SEP 'Epistemology of Religion' §7).

Positions held in this wiki

• Divine Hiddenness — paired with Plantinga's Aquinas/Calvin model as the wiki's fourth response to Schellenberg. Moser's variant absorbs the honest-seeker data distinctively: since evidence is tied to volitional transformation, not-yet-finding is compatible with God's active, elusive pursuit — a Pascalian calibration restated in analytic idiom.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Moser's monographs are copyright-locked; his position is reconstructed from the two SEP entries cited above ('Hiddenness of God' and 'Epistemology of Religion'), both in corpus.

Principal critics

• J. L. Schellenberg — the master reply: proposed hiddenness goods fail "individually or collectively" because they "can be accommodated within a developing, positively meaningful, reciprocal, and conscious relationship with God" (SEP 'Hiddenness of God' §3).
• Stephen Maitzen — the demographic objection: volitional explanations do not predict the geographic patchiness of nonbelief (pressed against the whole reformed-experiential family in Divine Hiddenness).

See also

• Alvin Plantinga — the warrant-theoretic partner view within the same article section.
• Blaise Pascal — the tradition's ancestor: a God who gives light enough for those who seek and obscurity enough for those who flee.
• William P. Alston — the perceptual model of religious experience against which Moser's guidance model is contrasted.