By Joshua Shrode
I. Introduction
The traditional Problem of Evil asks: Why does a perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allow suffering? A common reply—especially in Christian philosophy—is that evil is permitted for the sake of some greater good: free will, soul-making, or a complex moral order in which God’s purposes unfold.
But there is a class of harm that resists this line of defensea category that brings into question not only divine providence, but divine justice and love: , epistemically preventable suffering and moral failure.
I argue that when a person suffers, fails, or is eternally damned because of epistemic deprivation they did not choose and could not overcome, this constitutes not only a problem of evil, but a moral contradiction at the heart of theism—what I call the Structural Problem of Epistemic Deprivation.
II. What Is Epistemic Deprivation?
Epistemic deprivation refers to the condition in which a person lacks access to morally or existentially significant truths—through no fault of their own. It is the absence or distortion of truth in contexts where that truth is necessary for responsible action, moral development, or spiritual salvation.
This deprivation is not incidental. It is often structural: shaped by misinformation, cultural formation, psychological trauma, and institutional failure. And it becomes theologically significant when:
- The person affected is sincere and non-resistant,
- The consequences of the ignorance are grave—moral, spiritual, or physical,
- And the deprivation could have been trivially prevented by a loving, omniscient, omnipotent being.
The following examples illustrate just how morally urgent this problem is.
❖ The Death of an Infant
A young couple, exhausted first-time parents, finally get their newborn to sleep after hours of soothing. They swaddle her tightly, lay her face-down on a soft blanket—just as they remember their own parents doing—and collapse into bed.
They are unaware that prone sleep on soft bedding is a major risk factor for SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).
In the morning, their child is no more.
No negligence. No rebellion. Just a gap in knowledge—one that cost a life.
A whisper from God—“turn your child on it’s back”—could have spared them lifelong grief.
But God said nothing.
❖ The Dosage Misunderstanding
A man picks up a new prescription for his elderly mother, who has heart failure. The printed instructions say:
“Take Drug A & Drug B, depending on blood pressure.”
But the cardiologist had told him—quickly, during a chaotic discharge process:
“Take Drug A OR Drug B, depending on blood pressure.”
He doesn’t realize the error.
Three days later, his mother collapses from a drug interaction.
By day four, she is gone.
The difference between “and” and “or”—a single word—cost her life.
A nudge from God—“Call the doctor again,” or “Check the label twice”—would have been enough.
But there is only silence.
❖ The Misinformed Seeker
A young man in rural Pakistan sincerely seeks God. He prays daily, fasts, gives generously, and asks to know whatever is true.
But the only version of Christianity he ever encounters comes from state-controlled television and secondhand caricatures: imperialist, immoral, idolatrous. He believes he is rejecting corruption.
He dies having never encountered anything like the Christian God in a way he could recognize as morally or intellectually credible.
He never chose to reject God. He rejected a distortion—a distortion he never had the tools to correct.
A God who desires that all people be saved (1 Tim 2:4) could have reached him in a dream, a vision, a traveler, a single page of a New Testament to show him something true.
But that moment never came.
❖ Why These Cases Matter
These stories are tragic not just because people suffered, but because:
- The suffering or spiritual loss arose from ignorance that was non-culpable,
- The corrective knowledge was minimal and available,
- And the people involved were not resistant to truth—they simply never had the right pieces.
Each of these cases reveals the fragility of human agency in a world where truth is not evenly distributed.
If God is omniscient, then He knows what each person lacks.
If God is omnipotent, then He can correct even a small epistemic gap.
If God is loving, then He has no reason to withhold the knowledge required to prevent irreversible harm—whether physical death, moral collapse, or eternal separation.
And if God fails to provide that, then we are not merely dealing with divine hiddenness.
We are dealing with divine silence in the face of epistemic harm—a harm that is avoidable, foreseeable, and unjustly consequential.
III. Moral Responsibility and the Conditions of Agency
Moral responsibility—on any plausible theory—requires that the agent’s decision reflects their informed will. Whether one adopts:
- a libertarian view (freedom requires real alternatives and informed, uncoerced choice), or
- a compatibilist view (freedom requires that actions flow from the agent’s beliefs, values, and reasons),
both agree that severely distorted epistemic conditions compromise moral agency.
If a person’s beliefs about right and wrong, or about God, are formed through misinformation, fear, or structural deception, then even their “authentic” choices may lack moral significance. Their actions may flow from them, but not from a morally responsible self—because the self is malformed by forces beyond its control.
IV. When Epistemic Deprivation Is Structural
What makes these conditions particularly insidious is that they are not rare or fleeting. They are structural:
- Cultural misinformation and propaganda,
- Religious indoctrination or isolation,
- Psychological trauma that inhibits trust or inquiry,
- Systemic educational gaps.
These are not mere accidents—they are predictable features of human development, and they affect billions of people. And crucially, God knows every one of them. He sees the lie as it forms, the decision it warps, the harm it causes.
V. The Theological Dilemma
Christian theism claims that God is:
- Omniscient (knows every truth and every heart),
- Omnipotent (can do all that is logically possible),
- Omnibenevolent (loves all persons and wills their good).
It also teaches that God desires that “none should perish” (2 Peter 3:9) and that “all should come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).
So here is the dilemma:
If God sees that a person is being epistemically malformed in a way that will lead to spiritual ruin, psychological despair, or avoidable death—and He could prevent that by supplying a single piece of knowledge at the right time—
Why does He not intervene?
This does not require overriding free will. It does not require violating laws of nature. It requires only a timely whisper, nudge, dream, or intuition—something Scripture itself says God is capable of doing.
If God permits structural epistemic deprivation knowing it will lead to spiritual loss or suffering, then either:
- He wills the harm (contradicting perfect love),
- He is indifferent to it (contradicting benevolence),
- He cannot prevent it (contradicting omnipotence),
- Or He does not exist.
VI. The Inviolability of Persons: Means vs. Ends
At the heart of this issue lies a deeper ethical principle: persons must never be treated merely as means to an end.
This principle, rooted in Kantian ethics, also runs throughout Christian moral theology—and is grounded in the doctrine of the Imago Dei: the belief that every human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). This implies that each person:
- Has intrinsic dignity,
- Possesses rational and moral worth,
- Must be treated as an end in themselves.
Throughout Scripture, this idea reappears:
- “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31),
- “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” (Matt 25:40),
- “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34),
- “It is not God’s will that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9).
So when people suffer, fail morally, or are eternally lost not through their own sin, but because of preventable ignorance—God is not only permitting harm, He is instrumentalizing their personhood for some broader “purpose” that disregards their dignity.
Any theodicy that treats epistemically deprived persons as necessary casualties in a cosmic plan treats them as means to an end—which a perfectly good being cannot do.
VII. The Failure of “Greater Good” Theodicies
Most responses to the problem of evil rely on some version of greater-good justification: God allows evil to bring about a more valuable outcome.
But this move fails in the case of epistemic deprivation:
- The “greater good” is often for others (e.g., soul-making in the observer, not the sufferer who may die or never grow spiritually).
- The person who suffers does not consent to being used or even sacrificed for this purpose.
- The good could often be achieved without the specific harm (e.g., you can learn empathy without someone being damned or dying in ignorance).
From a non-consequentialist perspective—which Christian ethics typically affirms—a good outcome cannot justify treating a person as a tool, especially when that person’s suffering or damnation is entirely preventable.
God may allow suffering—but if He allows suffering rooted in non-culpable ignorance, and does nothing when He could easily act, then He treats the individual not as a beloved child, but as a pawn.
That is not perfect love. It is, by the standards of Christian ethics, evil.
VIII. Formal Summary of the Argument
Let me summarize the structure of the argument:
P1. A person is morally responsible only if their choice reflects epistemically grounded agency (on either libertarian or compatibilist terms).
P2. Structural epistemic constraints exist that significantly distort moral and spiritual choices, through no fault of the agent.
P3. These constraints regularly result in grave harm: spiritual ruin, moral failure, existential suffering.
P4. A perfectly loving, omnipotent, omniscient God would not permit such harm unless it were logically necessary and consistent with treating persons as ends in themselves.
P5. Such harm is not logically necessary, and its prevention would not violate freedom or divine character.
C. Therefore, the existence of structural epistemic deprivation is incompatible with the Christian conception of God.
IX. Final Reflections
We often imagine God’s hiddenness as a lack of spectacle. But perhaps the greater scandal is God’s silence in the face of epistemic harm. When someone dies believing a lie they never chose, or spends their life suffering for something they could have avoided with one insight, the question is not merely, “Why did God allow this?”
It’s, “Why didn’t He say something?”
If the world is full of people suffering because of what they never had the chance to know—
And if God knows, sees, and could change that—
Then we must ask:
What kind of God is that?
X. Invitation to Engagement
This argument is not offered triumphantly. It is meant to provoke serious thought and dialogue.
- If you are a theist, how do you reconcile epistemically grounded harm with divine love?
- If you are a non-theist, do you find this argument distinct from traditional formulations of the problem of evil?
I welcome thoughtful responses—especially from those who take the moral and intellectual character of God seriously.
As a theist, I take it that (a) some goods are only achievable at a collective level, (b) these goods can nevertheless be essential to an individual person’s own future well-being, (c) the cultivation of a knowledge-creating culture is one of those goods, and (d) the cultivation of such a culture requires pervasive epistemic deprivation.
(d) is the only one of these I am conflicted about. It seems true on the face of it. However, there is a seeming contradiction between this stance and that of Christian scripture, which seems to posit a more epistemically available God. However, when I consider the way the prophets struggle, and the ultimate way the presence of God is resolved in Christian theology, that picture appears strikingly consistent with this view.
thanks for the comments. I’ll pass them along to Mr. Shrode
“greater goodness” was professed within utilitarianism, wasn’t it? did not mean much then, in that context. does not mean much now, in the current one.
@Micah – thanks for the thoughtful response. If I’m understanding you correctly you’re saying something like “Perhaps God permits pervasive epistemic deprivation not because individuals deserve it or benefit from it directly, but because cultivating a collective knowledge-producing culture (science, inquiry, literacy, moral progress) is a good that requires it…and that good, in turn, becomes essential to the flourishing of individuals within it.” So instead of a soul-building theodicy it’s a civilizational soul-building theodicy?
If so, I think your (a)–(c) are spot on. Where I think the tension lies is (as you flag) in (d): It seems that some level of ignorance is necessary to motivate discovery and inquiry—but the kind of epistemic deprivation I focus on involves people suffering, dying, or being morally condemned before they ever had a fair shot at participation in the epistemic project.
So the worry is less that God permits ignorance in general, and more that He permits irreversible losses due to uncorrected ignorance in individuals whose suffering doesn’t clearly contribute to the communal good. To take an analogy: it might be good that a society learns sanitation through trial and error, but it seems deeply problematic if, in the process, some people are doomed to suffer and die unnecessarily, with no chance to benefit from or contribute to the learning. Their suffering becomes, in effect, a kind of collateral damage. And if God could have easily intervened to prevent those losses without disrupting the arc of civilizational development, it’s unclear why He wouldn’t. I will say that your point about the prophets (and especially about the Christian theology of divine presence being mediated, obscured, or delayed) is really interesting. There’s definitely a theological strand where God’s presence is always hard-won, never epistemically coercive. But even then, I wonder whether that model accounts for the distribution of epistemic burden: why do some struggle with divine absence in a generative way (Moses, Job), while others seem to be destroyed by it? If hiddenness is pedagogical, shouldn’t all students survive the lesson?
The crux of my argument is that certain harms are not just epistemic, but morally catastrophic, and they occur without the individual having a fair chance to avoid or overcome them, even though God could trivially prevent them. Unless you can explain why allowing such individuals to suffer irreparably is necessary, the theodicy doesn’t succeed. It’s not enough to say “someone has to suffer for culture to emerge” because that veers dangerously close to treating persons as means to ends, which violates the Imago Dei principle that grounds our moral value. If we allow moral worth the be subordinated to some divine goal then there are other, more catastrophic implications including but not limited to general epistemic collapse (but that’s a dialogue tree we haven’t gone down yet!)
All that said, I love that you’re trying to square the epistemic structure of cultural emergence with the arc of Christian theology. I’d be really interested to see a version of theodicy that embraces (d) more fully but develops constraints on which deprivations are permissible. Also how grace might “retroactively” redeem epistemic losses for individuals. That might get us closer to a theistic model that acknowledges the structural critique while preserving the communitarian frame you’re sketching.
Would love to keep this dialogue going as you seem to have thought more deeply than many about this.
Thanks Josh for your extraordinarily thoughtful reply. As you may know from reading my blog, I don’t think any theodicy comes close to succeeding.
I had to research, theodicy. Inasmuch as I am not philosopher by training, nor, theosopher by experience or inclination. I had to look it up. The term remains enigma to me, although, I think I gained insight (some) into the dispute over who originated(?) calculus.
That said, it seems to me theodicy, more or less=theodessy, hmmmm? Greater good? On whose terms ; by whose standards? Perhaps, it is only idiocy? Language is funny.
Sure.
perhaps this might help
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2015/04/19/finally-the-problem-of-evil-in-two-pages/
Thanks, Dr. When I clicked on the link and saw the spectre of Hitler, I realized I had read the post. I usually have comment to offer but could not think of anything to say because, having read many or most of those premises elsewhere, I recognized I would have little to offer. As is frequent, the term epistemic deprivation left me scratching my head for a moment. So, I read this post again—more reflectively (see: Nick Byrd), and then thought more about the meaning. I agree that epistemic deprivation is a serious problem. It is aggravated by many of the other aggravations faced daily by us proletarians: misinformation; disinformation; obfuscation and damned lies. All, in the interest of selling us something we don’t want, those efforts, in turn, underpinning the intention of *epistemic deprivers*. (I may have just coined that, but it is only a way of talking)
So, as Fields once proclaimed: never give a sucker an even break. The deprivers take all possible advantage from following that advice. Thanks for your advice and patience.
For those of us raised with generic church going training, at some point these questions arise. (accompanied by guilt for daring to question God)
I suspect we usually accept the somewhat bland reasons stated…..evil vs free will, no front without a back, (but isn’t He omnipotent?) Leibnitz’s best world possible. etc, etc.
Or….
We arrive at the most likely probability…..God does not exist. It is only an indifferent, mindless, natural universe. A universe of processes, both driven by, and constrained by, a handful of natural laws.
There is one personal phase I remember going through. (I hadn’t yet arrived at the point where I was willing to relinquish belief in the supernatural).
It is mentioned in Mr. Shrode’s section 5.
“He wills the harm.”
In other words, all we had been taught about God’s love was false. God was actually evil. At best, he was indifferent.
Any evidence of Love was contradicted by much more evidence of his Cruelty. Not to mention Hell being the eternal reward for ingratitude for this state of affairs.
His Great Flood was the same as the bored child drowning his ant farm.
For myself, the idea of no God at all is far preferrable to one of an omnipotent being, with power over my life and soul, actually existing.
Some random thoughts related to what I just wrote.
I have been told that people cried when they heard Stalin had died. They had plenty of life evidence to tell them that he was a cruel monster. They feared him (and his demons/NKVD). But yet, to make it all bearable, they loved him. Worshipped him even.
Excused his crimes as he was working for a Greater good, a Utopia.
Perhaps this is something deep in our human needs?
The other thought is my (fallible) memory of Elie Wiesel’s short personal memoir of WW2 “Night”. As time went on I realized it wasn’t just an account of the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It was the journey of a very devout Jewish adolescent losing his faith in the God he thought he knew.
2 episodes:
One, the inmates are watching the hanging of a young boy. The men began to stir and grumble. Not about the SS. Nor the Germans in general. Nor the Kapos.
They were asking, out loud, “where is God?”
The other episode was the Jewish New Year (I think that was the holiday). He watched the men of the barracks begin to sing and pray traditional songs. Traditional praises.
Watching this young Elie thought “these men are stronger than God”. “God has abandoned them, but they have not abandoned God.” “They are greater than God.”
As I look back at this book, I think what a universe changing insight that must have been for a young, devout boy.
Some years later I came across a play he had written. “The Trial of God”. It made me reread “Night”. I concluded that if, somehow, he hadn’t concluded that God did not exist, he had definitely decided God himself was either evil or powerless against evil.
If that were indeed the case, and God exists, what possible Hope could any of us have?
Thanks for the great insight provided here. I agree with everything you say here.
It seems like the easiest theodicy is just to limit God’s power (I think limiting his omniscience is just an instance of limiting his power) as the theists seems most committed to God being all good. However, you have to get down to a pretty unimpressive level of power – maybe he can only create universes but other than that he’s impotent or just really far away and is bound up in space-time in some galaxy in the middle of nowhere. The slip into deism is pretty fast on this view though. I have seen theists jettison agency in their attempt to reconcile the LPoE and some will jettison moral goodness – pointing to a passage in Isaiah that has a hotly contested translation (I create ‘evil’ vs. I create ‘calamity’) or say that what is good for God is not the same as good for us. Well then in what sense is God good? Equivocation on good doesn’t solve the issue either.
To Lyle I can only extend a hand in brotherly commiseration. I’d agree that if God exists, what chance have we. Fortunately, he doesn’t and our ember of hope can struggle on, one day perhaps, to ironically fulfill the promise of the empty religions. With hope, we can possibly create a meaning that is forever indebted to and acknowledging of the struggles of mankind as we learned to live not for a God but for each other.
thanks for the reply Josh. Your emphasis on hope echoes mine.
Thanks very much, Joshua.
Yes, I’m looking towards a civilizational soul-building theodicy.
I think some of your questions get to the heart of the proposal: Can a collective good, such as a knowledge-creating civilization, actually be essential to an individual’s well-being, and thus justify individual suffering and epistemic deprivation?
My working assumption is: yes, if we consider that the ultimate individual good includes participation in an afterlife shaped by the development of that civilization.
That is, meaningful participation in the “enriched” afterlife is made possible only because humanity underwent the difficult process of becoming the kind of species that could inhabit it. Humans can only experience it because humanity attained it.
(I would connect this to Paul’s incarnational theology in 1 Corinthians 15, where the resurrection can only be accomplished by human beings, and thus, Christ must be human.)
I take it that, if such an afterlife is worth it for an individual, then they are not being treated as a means to an end.
However, you bring up the possibility of damnation through ignorance, which does seem to threaten the whole proposal, because no individual will (likely) judge a collective good to be worth their own damnation. But this is precisely where theology is free to claim that such a harm does not actually occur. While we can easily observe harms that happen in this life, we do not directly observe any harms that may happen in the next.
So different theologies will have different positions here, and this is only a problem from particular theological standpoints.
My own inclination is to assume that while damnation (an “unenriched afterlife”) is an accurate description of the stakes, that if the collective task is accomplished, then individuals will be welcomed into it according to reasonable epistemic criteria. That is, while ignorance may indeed be damning at the civilizational level, and so entail a moral responsibility for individuals, a specific individual failing to discover the correct knowledge is not itself individually damning.
An analogy might be to a town seeking to protect against a flood. The water is rising, and all hands are needed to move sandbags into place. Either this succeeds, or the whole town is washed away. Having succeeded, the town then rewards those who helped, and punishes those who didn’t. But they make allowances for people who weren’t aware of what was happening, or were unable to help. When soliciting people to help, the stakes expressed are legitimately dire (“if you do not help, all of your stuff will be washed away!”), yet when doling out rewards and punishments, the town does not punish those who were unable to help through no fault of their own.
Obviously, that brings up a lot of doctrinal questions. But I am not suggesting anything that would fall outside the parameters of what CS Lewis would be willing to entertain.
You mention God whispering various minor details to people, under the common-sense assumption that such communication would not endanger the epistemic deprivation necessary to the formation of a knowledge-creating civilization. But I am not sure this is the case. Anything which decreased the perception of the stakes involved could potentially stunt the development of this civilization.
By analogy: A young child suffers scrapes and bruises, because their loving parent does not wrap them in bubble wrap, or remove them entirely from an environment with hard surfaces. Were the parent to do so, it seems plausible that the young child may fail to acquire important navigational skills. Of course, the harms we are discussing are greater, yet the stakes are presumably higher as well.
Again, the question comes back around to whether such pervasive epistemic deprivation matches Christian theology. A couple of thoughts occur here:
1. The “common grace” we currently experience may match the best current overall tradeoff between divine presence and necessitated epistemic deprivation.
2. Specific interventions, when they do occur, may need to be seen as unusual and disruptive, precisely so that they don’t change the overall epistemic situation.
3. Christ’s own theology and practice seems to deeply embody the ethic of epistemic non-coercion. This is even echoed in unusual early Christians practices, such as the forbidding of oaths. But in general, a crucified messiah is about the least forceful divine revelation conceivable.
It would take much longer to develop my thoughts fully, but I do find a further Christian theological reason for epistemic deprivation. In ancient scripture, it is held that if you see God, you die. I understand this in terms of raw exposure to (and participation in) unlimited intelligence and power. In Christ, this is changed. We are allowed to see God fully, but only under the following conditions: We must see him on the cross, before we can see him in power. I thus take it that seeing Christ on the cross, crucified and naked and humble, and recognizing the true nature of God in *that condition*, is a prerequisite to any kind of greater exposure (and thus access) to God’s power. Failing that, I assume, the power would destroy us, like the melting faces in Raiders of the Lost Ark—except that the destruction would come from within. And I presume that humanity has not yet purified our hearts enough to tackle that collective challenge.
I was hoping to clean and organize these thoughts a little better, but time is getting away from me. Hopefully this will be a meaningful response. I’m enjoying your thoughts, and would be open to pursuing this conversation in other media as well.
Micah
Micah – thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful reply. JGM