"You Lack God's Perspective" Is a Catch-All, and Catch-Alls Are Worthless

The problem of evil has a standard apologetic reply. You do not have God's vantage point, so you cannot see why particular evils are necessary. He is balancing goods against evils in a ledger you are not equipped to read, and what looks gratuitous from inside is not gratuitous from outside.

There are three things wrong with this, and they are worth separating because they fail at different levels.

It Is Indistinguishable From Indifference

The situation described — apparent suffering, hidden justification — looks exactly like a universe that simply grinds people down. Which is what natural selection predicts anyway: organisms compete, most die, and nothing is arranged for anyone's benefit.

There is no observation that separates the two hypotheses. Every instance of suffering is compatible with both. So how would I tell "God has reasons I cannot access" apart from "there are no reasons"? By what evidence would I ever distinguish the caring-but-inscrutable God from the absent one?

If no possible observation separates them, the claim is not doing work. It is a story added on top of the facts, and it is precisely the story I would invent if I wanted to soothe my nerves and protect the wish that the suffering means something.

Humans Already Did What God Allegedly Could Not

This is the objection I find genuinely decisive, and it does not require any philosophy.

In roughly five hundred years, humans discovered the causes of infectious disease, developed antibiotics, worked out sanitation, and reduced child mortality by an order of magnitude. We did this with no special knowledge, starting from near-total ignorance, using ordinary intelligence applied consistently.

So the position requires that a being of unlimited power and knowledge could not manage what we managed — or could, and chose not to for reasons that must remain hidden.

Consider what that commits you to. Everyone who died of infection before penicillin — the children especially, and there were an enormous number of children — was necessary. Their deaths served a purpose that could not have been served otherwise, by a being who could have simply revealed the germ theory of disease at any point in the preceding several thousand years and did not.

If ordinary humans could improve the situation that much that quickly, a god could have prevented an immense amount of suffering at no cost whatever. The explanation is not an explanation. It is an excuse, and it is asking me to accept that the cure was withheld deliberately.

The Form Is the Disqualifying Part

The third objection is the most general, and it applies to a whole family of arguments.

"You lack the perspective" excuses anything. The Bible reads as though composed by men of a particular era with the concerns of that era? You are not equipped to perceive its divinity. The prayer went unanswered? You cannot see the larger pattern. The doctrine contradicts the observation? Your vantage point is limited.

An argument that applies everywhere discriminates nowhere. It cannot distinguish a good case from a bad one, because it was never sensitive to the case in the first place — it is a general-purpose solvent that dissolves any objection with equal ease.

And an argument that can never fail is not an argument. It is a refusal to have the conversation, phrased so as to sound like humility.

Why This Is Worse Than Unfalsifiability

I have written before that unfalsifiability is a weakness rather than a strength — that a claim compatible with every possible observation says nothing.

The perspective defence is a specific and more troubling case, because it is deployed selectively. Nobody invokes it when the evidence is favourable. No believer, on hearing of a recovery, says that we lack the perspective to know whether it was really good. The limitation on human judgement is discovered at exactly the moment human judgement returns an unwelcome verdict, and it is forgotten immediately afterwards.

That selectivity is the tell. A genuine epistemic humility would apply in both directions. This one only ever runs one way.