J. L. Schellenberg, "What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 5, 2026

J. L. Schellenberg, philosophy professor and author of What God Would Have Known, links human intellectual and moral development to claims about Christian doctrine. He explores changes in scholarship on Jesus and scripture, psychology and gender, and how missing facts affect salvation and revelation. The conversation examines divine hiddenness, the Holy Spirit’s track record, and alternatives to traditional salvation.

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ANECDOTE

Books That Changed His Faith

Schellenberg recounts growing up in an evangelical Mennonite household and later discovering critical books that changed his beliefs.
He credits reading and university study for his shift to irreligion and philosophy.

INSIGHT

What Counts As Classical Christianity

Schellenberg defines "classical" Christian doctrines as long-standing, central claims rooted in the New Testament and early councils.
He links these doctrines to what an omniscient God would have known about human development at Jesus' time.

INSIGHT

Human Development Means New Moral Knowledge

Human development means intellectual and moral improvement over deep time, especially recent centuries.
Schellenberg emphasizes God would have always known facts we only recently discovered.

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In this book, What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2024), Professor J. L. Schellenberg links facts about human intellectual and moral development to what any God who existed at the time of Jesus would have known, and on the basis of that connection, it crafts twenty new arguments for the conclusion that classical Christian doctrine is false. These arguments represent what Schellenberg calls “the problem of contrary development.” Human origins in deep time, human religion, the formation of the New Testament, human psychology, violence, sex, and gender—advances in our understanding on all these fronts are brought into interaction with the doctrines of sin, spiritual helplessness, salvation, the divinity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and revelation, with the result that the latter are shown to be vulnerable to refutation in new ways. The book concludes by developing, in connection with its results, two Christian versions of the problem of divine hiddenness and an argument against the existence of God from the historical success (but salvific failure) of Christianity. By taking account of all these things, philosophers can bring a better balance to work on Christianity in philosophy, negotiating a shift from Christian philosophy to the philosophy of Christianity.

JL Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He did his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, resulting in the book, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), which introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the hiddenness argument.

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Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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