Divine love and nonbelief › Belief enables relationship without completing it

The kind of personal relationship Schellenberg means is conscious and reciprocal: each party recognizes the other. A person cannot consciously thank God for a gift as God's gift while entirely lacking belief that God exists. The person might still act generously, feel gratitude toward life, or benefit from God without recognizing the source. Those would be different descriptions of the situation. Whether implicit relations would satisfy perfect love is an objection to the love-and-openness premise, rather than a straightforward refutation of what Schellenberg means by conscious relationship. “Précis,” p. 4.

This requirement is modest in one respect and demanding in another. It does not require exhaustive knowledge of God or an uninterrupted feeling of divine presence. It does require a belief that the person cannot necessarily produce by choosing. Deciding to pray conditionally, or deciding to investigate, differs from coming to see the proposition that God exists as true. In his later account Schellenberg emphasizes this involuntary aspect of belief.

Consider someone who hopes that a missing relative is alive. The person can act on that hope, continue searching, and refuse to give up. Those actions do not necessarily produce the belief that the relative is alive. Likewise, a person can keep religious possibilities open without already believing. This is a teaching analogy about attitudes toward a proposition. It does not settle whether hopeful religious practice could itself be a valuable way of relating to God.