Why is this a NO article? This piece is categorized under the the NO track because it profiles two thinkers who are directly advancing the current apologetics landscape, one from the atheist side, one from the Christian side. The NO track presents the strongest objections to theism at full strength, without straw-manning. Featuring Alex O'Connor here is not an endorsement of his conclusions; it is an acknowledgment that his arguments represent the sharpest contemporary challenge to classical theism. You cannot understand the current debate without understanding who is making the case against God, and making it well. O'Connor qualifies. Wes Huff is here because he is the most competent respondent of his generation, and the contrast between the two reveals something important: the quality of the argument on both sides has risen. The old days of bishops debating Hitchens are over.
Champion access: this article is available to Champion members. The debate profiles, appearance history, and simulated exchange require sustained attention; they are best read by someone already familiar with the NO series.
When the Four Horsemen rode, they were largely unopposed on stage. Hitchens debated bishops. Dawkins debated bishops. The opponents were often not equipped for the encounter. The new generation is different. O'Connor and Huff both know the arguments. Both have done the reading. Both understand what the other side actually says. That changes the quality of the argument, and the stakes.
I. The Principals
I find listening to O'Connor nearly intolerable. Pomposity drips from nearly every exchange, a quality common to very intelligent twenty-somethings who have not yet been seriously wrong about anything important. His influence is greater than mine and growing. I am determined to engage his arguments directly, and if not him personally, to dismantle the case he presents systematically. Divine hiddenness, his signature move, is not a knockdown. It is a misread of what Christians have always claimed about the nature of revelation.
Wes Huff I genuinely like. He is rigorous, humble when pressed, and goes where the evidence takes him. That is rare in apologetics. D.K.H.
II. Media & Scholastic Appearances
Have O'Connor and Huff debated? Not yet: as of 2025 no formal moderated debate between them has been published. Both have debated across the apologetics/skeptic spectrum, but they have not yet met in a structured format. Their respective catalogues, however, are extensive.
| Who | Year | Event / Format | Opponent / Context | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| O'Connor | 2019 | Oxford Union | John Lennox | Does God exist? Lennox vs CosmicSkeptic |
| O'Connor | 2021 | YouTube / Unbelievable? | Blake Giunta | Is atheism incoherent? fine-tuning debate |
| O'Connor | 2022 | YouTube / CosmicSkeptic | Trent Horn | Abortion, ethics, natural law: moral philosophy |
| O'Connor | 2023 | Premier Christian Radio | Andrew Wilson | The problem of evil and divine hiddenness |
| O'Connor | 2024 | YouTube / CosmicSkeptic | Various | Silence of God: extended essay format |
| Huff | 2021 | University of Alberta | Open Q&A | Is the resurrection historically credible? |
| Huff | 2022 | Capturing Christianity | Multiple | Minimal facts; NT reliability under scrutiny |
| Huff | 2023 | Cross Examined / University Tour | Open Q&A | Manuscript evidence; dating the Gospels |
| Huff | 2024 | YouTube / TikTok short-form | Various atheist content creators | Resurrection historicity; divine hiddenness responses |
| Huff | 2025 | International university circuit | Panel debates | Evidence for Christianity in the modern academy |
In 2024 O'Connor published a video titled "An atheist explains the most convincing argument for God." He presents it calmly, methodically, and with the full weight of his Oxford philosophical training. He is not mocking. He believes this is the argument theists should be making, and that most of them are too unsophisticated to make it.
Editorial Note: D.K. Hedrick
Watch him. He is more honest about the strength of the theistic case than most Christian content creators. Note the condescension; it is real, and it is revealing. A man does not spend twenty minutes explaining why an argument he does not believe is the strongest one unless it genuinely troubles him. That trouble is the argument.
Alex O'Connor · CosmicSkeptic · 2024 · "An atheist explains the most convincing argument for God"
III. The Debate That Should Happen
Below is a structured hypothetical exchange on O'Connor's signature argument: Divine Hiddenness: the claim that God's silence is evidence God does not exist. Both voices draw from their real, documented positions and from sources in our research library. This is not fiction; it is a disciplined reconstruction of what each actually argues.
The argument I find most compelling against theism is not the problem of evil, though that is formidable. It is the argument from divine hiddenness, most rigorously developed by J.L. Schellenberg. The claim is simple: if a perfectly loving God existed, non-resistant non-belief would not exist. Yet it clearly does. There are people (I have spoken with many of them) who genuinely want to believe, who are not hardened, who are not willfully resistant, who simply find no compelling evidence that God is there. A loving parent would not hide from a child who is sincerely looking. The silence is the data. The silence is the argument.
Schellenberg's argument hinges on a premise that Christians have never accepted: that God's love would be expressed primarily through felt presence or immediate cognitive accessibility. But the biblical tradition consistently frames faith as a volitional, relational posture, not a sensory experience God is obligated to trigger on demand. The hiddenness you're describing may itself be the conditions under which something genuinely important can happen. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor understood this. If God appeared in the sky tonight in a way that compelled belief, what would be left of free response? You'd have coercion, not relationship. The fact that a person "wants to believe" doesn't create an obligation on God to produce a private miracle on their terms.
The freedom objection doesn't work, and here's why. You say God hides to protect the freedom of belief. But we already believe countless things under compulsion (gravity, mathematics, the existence of other minds) without anyone claiming our freedom is thereby violated. More to the point: Schellenberg's argument is not about people who choose not to believe. It is specifically about non-resistant non-belief. People who genuinely seek and find nothing. The free-will defence requires that such people be somehow resistant. That is a claim that needs evidence, not assertion. The silence is still unexplained.
Two points. First, the analogy to gravity fails because gravity doesn't require personal relationship or trust. Knowing God, in the biblical framework, is not analogous to registering a fact about physics. It requires something more like what we'd call a relational disposition. That's not a trick to protect God from falsification; it's what the entire biblical narrative says belief is. Second, and this is critical, you are assuming that "non-resistant non-belief" is a stable, well-defined category that you can identify from the outside. The history of conversion narratives, including people like C.S. Lewis who spent years convinced they were sincerely seeking, suggests the category is far more contested than Schellenberg's premise requires. Lewis called himself "the most reluctant convert in all of England." He thought he wasn't resisting. He was.
The resurrection is not a faith claim I'm asking you to accept on authority. It is a historical claim that stands or falls on evidence. Three facts are accepted by the overwhelming consensus of critical scholarship, including skeptical scholars, applying standard historical methodology: (1) Jesus died by crucifixion under Pilate. (2) His tomb was found empty. (3) His disciples had experiences they sincerely believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus, experiences that transformed them from hiding in fear to dying for this claim. The question is not whether these facts are true. They are agreed. The question is: what is the best explanation? "Hallucination" fails group experiences. "Stolen body" fails the disciples' willingness to die. The resurrection is not the only explanation. It is the best one.
The "minimal facts" approach is rhetorically clever but methodologically sleight-of-hand. You say critical scholars agree on your three facts. But what those scholars actually agree on is far more qualified than your presentation suggests. The empty tomb is contested; Crossan, Ludemann, and others dispute it directly. The appearances are agreed to exist as belief reports, not as verified events. And "dying for a belief" is no evidence of its truth; suicide bombers die for beliefs too. The resurrection hypothesis requires us to prefer a miracle explanation to a naturalistic one. In what domain of inquiry is that ever the right move when naturalistic explanations remain available?
Your suicide-bomber analogy is the most common objection and the weakest. Suicide bombers die for things they believe to be true but cannot personally verify. The disciples died for something they claimed to have directly witnessed. That is not analogous; it is categorically different. People die for things they believe. People do not, as a general anthropological fact, willingly die for things they know to be fabricated. On Crossan and Lüdemann: yes, they dispute the empty tomb. They are a minority within New Testament scholarship, including skeptical scholarship. Bart Ehrman, hardly a Christian apologist, accepts the empty tomb as historically credible. You cannot selectively cite minority dissenting views as though they represent consensus. The historical case stands.
Here is where I will grant you something. The historical arguments for the resurrection are more serious than popular atheism has acknowledged. Ehrman's position, that the empty tomb is likely real but that the resurrection is still not the best explanation, is intellectually honest. That is the debate I want to have. Not "did miracles happen at all" as a prior commitment, but "given these agreed facts, which explanation is epistemically superior?" I don't concede the resurrection. But I concede that this is a real argument that requires a real answer. What I do not concede is the hiddenness problem. You have not explained why a genuinely loving, all-powerful God permits sincere seekers to go to their graves without ever finding him. That question still stands.
IV. What Both Get Right: And Where Each Falls Short
- Divine hiddenness is a genuine philosophical problem, not a cheap rhetorical move
- Forces precision on definitions of "God" that apologists often evade
- Genuinely engages academic philosophy; not just YouTube pop-atheism
- Willing to concede ground (as above on resurrection historicity)
- Schellenberg's "non-resistant non-belief" is not as clean a category as presented
- Assumes God's love must manifest as felt cognitive presence, a contested premise
- Suicide-bomber analogy is a stock response; does not engage the distinction
- Affect reads as condescension; closes off interlocutors who might otherwise engage
- Minimal facts approach is academically grounded, not credulous
- Fights on evidential turf; does not retreat into presuppositionalism
- C.S. Lewis citation on "non-resistant" non-belief is genuinely effective
- NT textual credentials are real; not borrowed authority
- Freedom-of-belief response to hiddenness doesn't fully address non-resistant cases
- Appeals to Lewis are useful but not universal; one data point in a large question
- Has not yet been tested in a truly adversarial long-form format against O'Connor
"But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear."
1 Peter 3:15 · King James Version
The oldest apologetic instruction in the Christian canon. Note what it demands:
an answer, not retreat, not platitude, and meekness.
Neither dismissive arrogance nor epistemic cowardice is a Christian option.
V. Where to Go from Here
Divine hiddenness connects to several arguments across this site. O'Connor's silence argument is the inverse of the fine-tuning and consciousness arguments explored in NOW. Huff's resurrection case connects directly to GATE.