Does “The Greater Good” Explain Evil For A Theist?

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Joshua Shrode’s last post about the inability of the greater good defense to resolve the problem of evil in philosophical theology initiated a sophisticated discussion between two interlocutors: Mr. Shrode and Micah Redding. Since this is a high-level discussion, I’ll let the two speak for themselves.

Mr. Redding’s response to Mr. Shrode’s critique of the greater goods defense was as follows:

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.

Mr. Shrode responded,

@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.

This reply brought this reply from Mr. Redding,

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.