for loneliness or perceived social isolation. Because they believe themselves to be creatures of God, Christians feel related to God whatever happens. Whatever their social circumstances--no matter, at the extreme, how isolated or strong their feelings of abandonment by human others--individuals are to remember that they remain in a relationship with God, who is concerned about them. Even when they feel themselves utterly forsaken by others, Christians have reason to believe God cannot be forsaking them. They can believe they are never alone even when they appear to be absolutely so. In such circumstances, Christians can always avail themselves of a completely counterfactual sense of social connection with the best-connected “superfriend” of all—the God who remains, they believe, in a relationship of ultimately beneficial causal efficacy with not just themselves but everyone and everything.
It is the very unapparent, counterfactual character of God’s influence on human lives—the invisibility of God’s influence, in short-- that permits Christians to perceive their relationship with God as an unbreakable constant. Because God’s influence is unapparent or invisible Christians can continue to believe God is operative for creation’s benefit in the absence of any of the obvious confirming evidence required in ordinary cases of beneficent human influence. Christians who believe that God is a universal influence for good as the world’s creator do not expect God to be present in the way one expects a human person to be; and therefore God’s apparent absence, in human terms, need not break down their sense of being in relation to God.
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Having God as one’s creator (in the best case scenario) is like having a perfectly loving human benefactor; but it is the unusual invisibility of this benefactor that allows Christians to think God present even when not apparently so. Being in a relationship with God for Christians who believe God is a good creator is something like being in a relationship with a human person who never lets one out of her sight and who intends one’s good comprehensively. It is, for example, very like being ina relationship with a loving parent who is fully responsible, not just for the fact of one’s existence, but in a comprehensive way for one’s nurturance throughout an extended minority. Unlike a relationship with an ordinary human person of that sort, however, God is believed to be invisible and this is what allows individuals to assume God’s constant presence, all appearances to the contrary.
The invisibility that underlies the Christian affirmation of God’s constancy here is a function of the very diffuseness of God’s influence, a diffuseness of influence no human person, invisible or otherwise, could possibly match. Belief in God as the creator of the world does not encourage one to single out God as the cause of any specific happening in a way that suggests God is one cause among many, the cause of this particular happening rather than some other with a different cause. Belief in God as the creator of the world does not allow one to identify God’s influence in overly close fashion with any particular causal influence of a beneficent sort. Instead, as I have suggested, whatever is of benefit to the individual, over the long or short term, taken as a whole, is to be attributed to God’s influence.
The Christian cannot, then, locate or pick out God as one could a loving
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