Divine love and nonbelief › The argument, step by step

Schellenberg's target is a perfectly loving personal God. He argues that a personal religious ultimate must be perfectly loving. The immediate conclusion concerns that God. Rejecting such a being would not, by itself, show that every possible religious conception is false, or establish that the physical world exhausts reality. Schellenberg explicitly distinguishes his atheism about a personal ultimate from metaphysical naturalism. “Précis,” pp. 5–8.

The developed argument can be reconstructed in six steps:

1. A perfectly loving God would always be open to personal relationship with every created person capable of it.
2. Such openness would leave each capable person able to participate just by trying, unless resistance on the person's side placed them in a contrary position.
3. Being in that position requires belief that God exists.
4. Therefore, if a perfectly loving God existed, capable persons would never lack that belief nonresistantly.
5. Some capable persons have lacked that belief nonresistantly.
6. Therefore, no perfectly loving God exists. Given the further premise that God would be perfectly loving, God does not exist.

This is a deductive reconstruction of Schellenberg's reasoning, not a quotation or a poll of philosophical opinion. If its premises hold, the conclusion follows. Whether the premises hold is the disputed issue. The conceptual link between love and constant availability needs defense, and the existence of nonresistant nonbelief needs support. Logical validity does not remove either task. Schellenberg's later explicit formulations, “Précis,” pp. 2–3 and 10.

Notice the timing. The argument concerns a person's condition at a time when they are capable of relationship. An eventual opportunity is not automatically enough to satisfy a claim about availability whenever the capacity exists. A defender who proposes eventual revelation must therefore explain why temporary nonavailability can accord with perfect love, rather than treating the eventual outcome as a complete answer.

The reasoning also explains why this is not a general inference from invisibility to nonexistence. If a hypothesis gives us no reason to expect awareness of its object, a lack of awareness may tell us little. Schellenberg thinks perfect personal love creates just such an expectation: an available relationship requires a condition that some people lack. The dispute therefore concerns that expectation and the alleged counterexamples. A critic who simply observes that unseen things can exist has not yet addressed the argument; a defender who merely observes widespread doubt has not yet established its conceptual premise.