If belief needs to be free for a relationship with God to mean anything, God could still give everyone sufficient evidence to make belief reasonable without forcing it, the way good arguments and reliable testimony do in every other domain. He does not even do that much, which suggests either indifference or nonexistence.

Why people find it persuasive

This version sharpens the coercion reply: normal evidence, like a clear historical record or a reproducible experience available to any sincere seeker, does not eliminate freedom in other fields, since people still freely reject well-evidenced claims like climate science or well-attested history. If ordinary evidence does not destroy freedom elsewhere, God supplying it should not destroy freedom either, so the free-will defense of hiddenness looks like a non-solution.

Important distinctions

• • Coercive, overwhelming revelation vs. sufficient but resistible evidence
• • Freedom of will vs. freedom from all possible influence
• • Evidence that settles a matter for careful inquirers vs. evidence that settles it for everyone regardless of disposition
• • General revelation available broadly vs. private, on-demand personal proof

Christian response

• • The objection is right that evidence in general does not eliminate freedom, and this is actually the theistic position: many philosophers and theologians hold that God has given exactly this kind of resistible, sufficient-but-not-coercive evidence, through the created order's fine-tuning and apparent design, through the historical case for the resurrection, through the moral law inscribed in conscience, and through religious experience across cultures. The complaint then reduces to a disagreement about whether this evidence is good enough, which is a substantive debate about apologetic arguments, not a knockdown proof that God is hidden in a way inconsistent with his existence.
• • There is an important difference, however, between evidence sufficient to make belief reasonable for a careful, honest inquirer and evidence that would settle the matter for every person regardless of their moral and existential orientation. Blaise Pascal wrote in the Pensees that God has given 'evidence sufficient to condemn, but not enough to convince' those unwilling to seek him, suggesting a deliberately calibrated middle position: real evidence exists, but so does room for people to explain it away if they are looking for a way out.
• • It is also worth noting that on Christian theology specifically, the primary means of revelation is not abstract argument but the person of Christ and his testified resurrection, which functions like historical testimony we accept in other cases, such as testimony about ancient events like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Demanding a different, more direct epistemic channel, such as private telepathic certainty, sets up a standard that no historical religion could meet and that even secular historical knowledge does not meet.
• • Still, a thoughtful theist should concede that the distribution of this evidence is uneven across history and geography in ways that are hard to fully justify; someone born in a remote culture with no access to the historical case for Christianity, or before it existed, faces a genuinely different evidential situation than a modern seeker with a library and the internet. This asymmetry is a real cost of this response, not something that dissolves cleanly.

Christian counterresponse

The theist can respond that we are in no position to know what a policy of universally sufficient evidence to convince every non-resistant seeker while never overriding any resistant person's freedom would even look like, given how interconnected human psychology, culture and testimony are, so the objection assumes an achievable policy we cannot actually specify.