Hate Mail

"If God exists, why doesn't he just tell us he does?"

I don't know.  God didn't tell me.  But I can think of one good reason.  If we knew, beyond any doubt, that God existed and what God wanted us to do but then we didn't do that then we would be more absolutely guilty of disobeying God than we can be since we always have the excuse of ignorance or uncertainty.   We would be as absolutely guilty of transgression as the story of Lucifer and the fallen angels in Genesis if we had as absolute a knowledge of God as they're presented as having.  And notice, in that strain of fable, people don't transgress until one of those fallen creatures preys on the ignorance, or innocence, of the two first people - something of a second try at making independent, intelligent, articulate beings.   Whatever else could be said of the man and woman in the fable, they aren't exactly creatures of light, I mean, they get duped by a talking snake, the first Trumpian snake oil salesman.

If they knew, absolutely, their guilt would be absolute instead of mitigated by their ignorance, or innocence.  If people are able to figure out that a state of unknowing excuses the one who is ignorant through their inability to know their guilt, I'd imagine that's a way in which we might be held to be made in the image, or reflection of God.  But, then, I am a universalist by both insight an preference, much to the dismay of both the lovers of retribution and atheists.

Given how annoying the fan boys of the gods of atheism can be, parroting such Brights™ as George Carlin and, Bill Maher and, heaven help us, Penn Jillette, I can imagine lots of us would have a lot of trouble establishing an independent identity if God manifested herself to us, directly.  I suspect that establishing an independent identity is one of the purposes of life and I fully believe that having inalienable rights and a moral obligation to respect those rights in other people is intimately connected to that purpose of life.  It's something that even the simplest of beings whose behavior we are able to observe seem, to me at least, to have,  an awareness of the more primitive aspects of individuality, though a sense of moral obligation would seem to develop quite late and our species certainly hasn't gotten the hang of that.  Some of us seem to have about the same idea of both of those not much developed from what can be seen in some single-celled organisms.  But I don't want to make this about Donald Trump.   Or Penn Jillette.

If your question is a problem for religion, there is a far bigger problem of ignorance in some of the assertions of most modern atheists I know of, the question of how, by random, chance occurrences, we can trust our perceptions and ideas of the universe that have nothing to do with our survival and reproduction, the means through which natural selection is alleged to have produced consciousness and intelligence, giving us real, as opposed to illusory, knowledge of the universe.   It is far easier to explain how those are an endowment of our Creator and to make logical conclusions leading to the idea that human beings perceptions and ideas can actually reflect the universe, that our minds can be made to hold the image of the universe than it is to explain how any materialistic explanation of that could produce reliable, accurate knowledge of the universe unrelated to what we need to survive to reproduce.  Given the choice between the two ideas, I think anyone who goes for your preferred explanation has a lot more explaining to do than I do.