J.L. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument contains an often overlooked assumption. Jerome Gellman's grades of religious experience sheds light on why this assumption is problematic. The result is an undercutting defeater against the hiddenness argument. In this video, you'll learn how grades of religious experience undercut believing that God does not exist. The hiddenness argument restricts God's openness to a personal relationship to openness to "a conscious, interactive, and positively meaningful relationship" with persons that have the "capacity to feel the presence of God, recognizing it as such" (Schellenberg 2015: 38, 40). Such a *personal relationship* is, "just the the general and familiar idea of positively meaningful interaction between persons that they are aware of experiencing" (Schellenberg 2015: 40).

This is an overly-narrow understanding of how God works and the range of experiences that God is open to with persons capable of experiencing God. Schellenberg restricts a *personal relationship* with God to what Jerome Gellman (1997) calls Grade 1 experiences of God, whereby, "The person is fully aware of God as God. She *takes* what she is experiencing to be God" (p. 17). Such an experience can cause the belief that God exists. So, for Schellenberg, when there's a lack of belief that God exists, and the person isn't resistantly in a state of non-belief, this is evidence such a God doesn't exist. But this is false. A perfectly loving God can remain open to a personal relationship with a finite person even if the person's experience of God never does or cannot rise to the level of a Grade 1 (G1) experience of God.

Grade 2 (G2) experience of God is possible. Gellman explains a G2 experience as, "There is as much of an act-object structure to the experience as in Grade 1, in which God appears with a bruteness of presence or objectivity, but the person is not aware of God as God because she does not *take* what she perceives to be God" (Ibid., 18). This can happen when a person misidentifies the object of experience, thinking it's something other than God, or she attributes the experience to an aesthetic experience of awe and wonder when she's actually experiencing God, or she may lack the requisite concept of God (as in ancient hunter-gatherer societies) and cannot become aware of God as God even though she's experiencing God. Such people may only G2 experience God without having a conscious relationship with God that they take to be God. That they are not resisting God in their nonbelief doesn't impugn God as not existing. There are also Grade 3 and 4 experiences of God in Gellman's typography of religious experiences. G3 experiences are registered only subconsciously yet have the capacity to influence a person's subsequent behavior, and G4 experiences also have God present to a subject in a nonsensory way, yet G4 experiences don't have the capacity to influence a person's behavior. Thus examples of nonresistant nonbelief only cast doubt on the existence of God assuming that having an experience of God, and a personal relationship with God, is restricted to G1 experiences. But God's openness to a relationship isn't so restricted. A person can remain a non resistant nonbeliever yet have G2-G4 experiences without coming to believe that God exists. Such believers don't show that such a God doesn't exist.