Participatory Theodicy: Co-Creation, Suffering, and Moral Agency

A Christian Transhumanist Response to the Problem of Evil

We Christians have always struggled with the problem of evil. From the earliest centuries, the question of why a good God permits suffering (“theodicy”) has been a stumbling block for belief and a provocation for theology. The pat answers have remained remarkably stable across time, even as their philosophical articulation has become more sophisticated.

The coming Transhumanist Age calls for clarity around suffering. Not only as we seek the optimising of the distribution of the great blessings of the future, but because humans need an underlying certainty in the goodness of what secular technologists are now intuiting as “the Creator”, as many move from atheism to a form of deism or simulationism.

Taxonomy of suffering for theodicy

Traditionally there are three types of suffering that God permits to exist in the world. To this, I will add a fourth.

· Moral suffering: the result of human cruelty, injustice, neglect, and systemic harm

· Natural suffering: the result of physical processes, from earthquakes to disease, predators and accidents

· Tragic residue: That even when suffering is overcome, the wounds to our personhood remain

· Noetic or Existential suffering: the anguish of constrained agency: lost potential, cognitive limitation, finitude, incomplete understanding, and the grief of knowing how much good we might do but can’t, or won’t

The question “Why would a good God allow suffering?” needs to engage all four aspects.

In brief, the traditional responses to the problem of evil, from both ancient and modern thinkers are:

· Moral evil arises from the misuse of genuine creaturely freedom, which God permits because coerced goodness would destroy responsibility, love, and moral agency. (Augustine, Alvin Plantinga)

· Natural evil arises from a stable, law-governed universe. This is a precondition for rational action and science, even though such regularity inevitably entails harm as a side-effect of consistent physical processes (Aquinas). N.T. Wright argued that the moral meaning of suffering cannot be fully assessed within history alone, but must be understood within the wider arc of resurrection, restoration, and divine judgment.

· The “soul-making” theodicy of Irenaeus and John Hick encompasses both moral and natural suffering. It argues that character cannot form in a frictionless world. Moral and spiritual maturity can only develop in the face of evil.

· Tragic Residue – that suffering we are left with when the apparent cause of suffering is dealt with (be it from moral or natural evil), is traditionally responded to with lament. Lamentation is a process of healing, and avoids bitterness, blame, and despair.

· Noetic or Existential suffering had some recognition from Augustine, but I could not find a stand-alone theodicy, despite Ecclesiastes, Job, and Paul’s “I do not do what I want to do” and “now we see through a glass darkly”.

C. S. Lewis occupies a distinctive bridging position among these approaches. He affirms free will as essential to moral agency, natural law as necessary for a coherent and actionable world, and suffering as a possible—though never guaranteed—occasion for moral awakening, while explicitly rejecting the idea that pain is intrinsically good or evenly distributed. Crucially, Lewis insists that philosophical theodicy has limits: explanation may defend God’s goodness in principle, but it cannot substitute for trust, protest, or lament in practice. In A Grief Observed, he demonstrates that faith under suffering does not require intellectual tidiness, anticipating cross-shaped (cruciform) approaches by locating God’s credibility not in abstract optimisation but in divine solidarity. Power is exercised through self-giving love, suffering is opposed rather than explained, and agency is directed toward redemptive participation rather than control or withdrawal.

Strikingly, these traditional theodicies make only abstractive references to Scripture, focusing on theological and human conceptions of the nature of God and the Universe, rather than deep exegesis.

The biblical account implies that the fall from the garden occurred with God’s foreknowledge and permission. However opaque this remains, it suggests that suffering was neither an accident beyond divine awareness nor a good in itself. It may be that the emergence of consciousness, freedom, and moral knowledge carried with it the near inevitability of misuse. It may be that the difference between good and evil can only be fully understood through participation rather than abstraction. Scripture does not settle these questions philosophically, but it consistently treats human beings as agents within the problem, not merely observers of it.

In Scripture, the book of Job alone addresses the problem of pain directly, but does so in a very different way to theologians. Job rejects moral bookkeeping (bad things only happen to bad people), refuses explanatory closure, and condemns attempts to justify suffering from first principles. Instead, the book situates suffering within a creation that is ordered yet wild, meaningful yet opaque, and afflicted by forces that are neither illusory nor morally tidy. Job is not healed by explanation but by restored participation, by re-entry into life, relationship, and responsibility. In this sense, Job anticipates what this essay is calling a participatory theodicy: suffering is not sanctified, protest is permitted, chaos is confronted, and faithfulness is measured not by answers received but by agency resumed.

Taken as a whole, Scripture does not offer a single theodicy, but it consistently shapes the moral grammar within which suffering is to be understood. From Genesis, suffering is framed as a corruption of goodness rather than a divine instrument; from Exodus, God’s response is deliverance rather than explanation; from the Psalms, protest is legitimised; from Ecclesiastes, moral calculus is destabilised; from the Prophets, injustice is named as preventable; from the Gospels, suffering is reversed rather than justified; from the Cross, God enters suffering without sacralising it.

In the epistles, Paul states creation was subject to frustration in hope. From Romans and Revelation, creation is portrayed as unfinished and destined for repair. Together, these texts rule out both fatalism and rationalisation. Instead, they direct a participatory response in which human agency, compassion, and increasingly technological capacity are called into service against suffering wherever it can be resisted.

The scriptural response to suffering is not speculation but intervention. Healing the sick, uplifting the downtrodden, feeding the hungry, and protecting the vulnerable are not optional acts of charity but expressions of faithfulness. Scripture binds responsibility to capacity: where healing is possible, it is commanded; where action can be taken, inaction is morally charged. Response ability equals responsibility. Compassion is not offered as explanation, but as response.

From Explanation to Participation

As above, classical theologian’s theodicies largely adopt an explanatory posture. They ask why God permits suffering and attempt to render that permission intelligible within a metaphysical or moral framework. While such explanations may be necessary, they are not sufficient, and historically, they have met with limited success, both intellectually and pastorally.

A participatory theodicy begins from a different observation: Scripture consistently shifts the problem of evil away from abstract explanation and toward embodied response. The biblical question is not primarily Why does God allow suffering? but Who will act in the face of it? This reframing does not evade the intellectual problem of evil, but it situates it within a moral ecology in which human agency is neither incidental nor optional.

Suffering is never to be aestheticised, justified, or spiritualised at a distance. The only authorised Christian posture toward suffering is proximity. Any account of evil that does not increase responsibility, compassion, or action is theologically suspect, regardless of its logical elegance.

Now, for Christian transhumanists, if participation in God’s redemptive purpose is real, then increased capacity morally matters.

If responsibility scales with capacity, then advances in medicine, science, and technology are not morally neutral developments. They change what love, care, and faithfulness require. Participation is no longer confined to immediate acts of compassion, but extends to the shaping of systems, tools, and capacities that determine how much suffering can realistically be alleviated. This raises a further question: what of the suffering that arises not from pain or injustice alone, but from the limits of our own finitude?

Noetic Suffering and Transhumanism

Ray Kurzweil speaks of the terrible losses of death. Just as we become experts at life, we leave it. Our relationships end, and the arc of human knowledge and growth is interrupted. In a previous blog, I lamented my human shortcomings, specifically, that I was unable to retain much of the knowledge from thirty years in engineering, four tertiary qualifications, countless books on religion, psychology, physics, cosmology, transhumanism, not to mention the conferences, meetings, and the detail of life experiences that meant so much at the time.

I regret, with Paul in Romans 7, that I don’t always make the right choices I should: the moral weaknesses and fractured self-governance. I regret some days I don’t listen to past me who plans things better than current me, who feels like scrolling and munching.

Why does God allow us to live with these shortcomings? We see so much potential, so much more creativity and relationality we could aspire to. So many more dreams to achieve, yet they are snatched from us. Surely the ‘groaning’ of creation (Rom 8) is also God’s invitation to us as co-groaners and co-healers?

We must therefore confront this noetic suffering as we would any other.

Conclusion: Theodicy that leads to Vocation

A participatory theodicy reframes the problem of evil from a spectator’s puzzle into a participant’s calling. It does not answer every question, nor does it dissolve moral outrage. Instead, it locates meaning in response rather than resolution.

For a Christian transhumanist, theodicy matters because beliefs about suffering quietly shape how seriously responsibility is taken. We need a theodicy that treats suffering not as sacred or untouchable, but as part of our vocation; one that understands medicine, technology, and even enhancement as participatory acts within God’s redemptive economy. Human agency, on this account, is neither decorative nor optional, but genuinely delegated to us by the Creator.

The inclusion of enhancement here is deliberate. The Christian call is not limited to restoring people to what is currently defined as “normal,” but to participating in the ongoing healing and maturation of creation. The noetic suffering of constrained agency – our cognitive limits, the existential angst of knowing how much good might be done, of how much healing might be extended, how much love might be embodied, and falling short of that potential, – must not be sacralised as an acceptable form of suffering we aren’t allowed to complain about. Finitude itself is something we are invited to work against where wisdom and love permit.

To seek greater capacity to heal, to think clearly, to create, to communicate, to solve problems, and to lead well is not a rejection of the imago Dei, but an expression of it. Our longing for this, and our regret at falling short is a kind of suffering. Enhancement, rightly ordered, is not an attempt to escape humanity, but to honour it; to amplify responsibility, not evade it. If ignorance, forgetfulness, and truncated agency harm our reflection of Christ’s love, then clearer knowing and greater capacity can be acts of compassion.

The question, then, is not whether we should participate in technological co-creation, but how can we faithfully do so. What do you, as an image bearer, rightly long to become in order to serve more fully?