He really is that good.
[Michael Murray] argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.
But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.
This sort of response bugs me because Murray pretzels himself up to preserve freewill, but given what’s at stake why would God really prefer freewill so much so over assured salvation? A skeptic would rightly be unsatisfied with this rationalization; he would much rather be tackled against his will out of the path of a careening tractor trailer—complete with bowel evacuation in front of a cadre of spectators. I would rather suffer granite scrapes, a minute of rattled nerves, and the embarrassment and stench of my own feces on display than be plowed over into a red stain on concrete.
I might approach a counterargument, or counter this counterargument, in a few different, yet very scatterbrained, ways:
1) Freewill in the metaphysical sense is not like dealing with freewill in the material agency sense. Getting jailed goes against my freewill. Falling onto floor spikes is unpleasant, deadly, and against my will to not end up like. Yet my will does not change the law of gravity or the placement of an unseen errant roller skate in my path; my freewill is irrelevant to the process. The relationship of humans to divine sovereignty is such that it could similar to the latter situation. But…
2) We’re not dealing with impersonal physical laws but an agency (God) that proposes to hold intimate knowledge about us. He could chose to reveal himself to remove doubt from all choice-making agencies (humans), but there could be something about His nature such that it prevents Him from doing that. And no, I don’t think preserving freewill is highest on the list but I have no idea what this other property would be.
3) It could be the case that some of us have freewill and some don’t. Or some of us has some kind of partial freewill, or that we have freewill at some points and none at another point. There might be no reason to think this property is static. On this side of the divide it really ends up as a epistemic crapshoot. Aside from Exodic pharoahs scriptural revelation these aren’t very strong scenarios but I’d rather err on that side than suggest there’s something very possible that God can’t do.
4) God, having perfect foreknowledge of events, knows who would choose Him and who wouldn’t, and therefore “hides” Himself, either actively or passively, from those who He knows would not choose Him and reveals Himself to those who will. There’s a theological term for this that someone with relevant knowledge can clarify for me, but we could call it “divine efficiency” for now. It does come off as a very freewill-quashing Edwardianism to me, on first impression. I don’t like this option, personally, but I don’t completely rule it out.
5) Why does it matter if a person comes to a belief in God out of fear? Does God care that belief is a result of some more “noble” situation?
6) As William Lane Craig correctly pointed out in a response to a reader’s email: God owes you absolutely nothing.
Summary of blather: Murray’s response rests too much on freewill preservation.