If God is good and all-powerful, why is there suffering?
This question has tortured thinkers for millennia. Every religion offers some answer. The most common in Western tradition: suffering is punishment for sin, or a test of faith, or a mystery beyond human understanding. We’re meant to trust that a loving God has reasons we can’t comprehend.
Many find these answers unsatisfying.
The ancient Gnostics offered a radically different response. They didn’t try to explain how a good God could create a world with so much pain. They said: the highest God didn’t create this world at all.
The Ignorant Creator
According to Gnostic texts like the Apocryphon of John, our world was made by a being called the Demiurge. The name comes from Greek, meaning “craftsman” or “public worker.” This creator god is sometimes called Yaldabaoth, Samael (“blind god”), or Saklas (“fool”).
The Demiurge wasn’t the source of all being. He was himself a product of a cosmic accident. When Sophia, the divine Wisdom, attempted to create without her consort, she produced an imperfect offspring. This creature was the Demiurge.
Born in ignorance, cut off from the realms of light above him, the Demiurge looked around and saw nothing higher than himself. So he made a declaration:
“I am God, and there is no other God beside me.”
This wasn’t malice. It was blindness. He genuinely didn’t know that the Pleroma, the divine Fullness, existed above him. He thought he was alone.
And from this ignorance, he created the world.
Why This Matters
The Gnostic cosmology solves the problem of evil in a surprisingly elegant way.
The highest God remains untouched by the world’s suffering. The true Father, the ineffable One beyond description, never intended for this flawed cosmos to exist. The suffering here doesn’t reflect divine will. It reflects the limitations of an inferior creator.
The world’s imperfection makes sense. Look around. The cosmos contains beauty, but also cancer. It contains love, but also predation. It contains moments of transcendence, but also meaningless accidents. This mixture is exactly what you’d expect from a flawed craftsman, not from perfect divinity.
Your sense that something is wrong is validated. Many religious frameworks tell you that the world is fundamentally good and your discomfort with it is the problem. Gnosticism says: trust your perception. The world is flawed. You’re not wrong to feel that it’s not as it should be.
Hope becomes possible. If this world is the best a good God could do, we’re stuck with its limitations. But if this world was made by an inferior power, there’s something beyond it. The true God, the Pleroma, the realm of light: these exist, even if they’re hidden from the world’s creator.
The Response to the Demiurge
The Gnostic texts don’t leave the Demiurge unchallenged. When he declares himself the only God, a voice responds:
“You err, Samael, that is, blind god. An enlightened, deathless humanity exists before you.”
This is the cosmic rebuttal. The Demiurge thinks he’s alone, but he’s not. Above him is the entire Pleroma. And within his own creation, hidden in the human beings he fashioned, is a spark of light that came from Sophia, a fragment of divinity that the Demiurge himself cannot comprehend.
You carry that spark.
The Demiurge made your body and perhaps your soul. But the spirit within you, the divine fragment that remembers the light, didn’t come from him. It came from above, from the realms he can’t perceive.
Not Anti-Judaism
Before going further, an important clarification.
Some readings of Gnostic texts have led to anti-Jewish interpretations, since the Demiurge is sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. This reading is historically problematic and spiritually destructive.
The Gnostics were not primarily attacking Judaism. Many of them were Jewish Christians. They were wrestling with the same questions Jewish thinkers had wrestled with for centuries: Why does a good God allow suffering? Why does the world seem so broken?
Their answer, the Demiurge mythology, is better understood as a universal response to the problem of evil than as a critique of a specific religious tradition. The ignorant creator is a concept that explains the world’s suffering without blaming the highest divine reality. It’s not fundamentally about which religious tradition to reject.
Read it as philosophy, not as polemic.
Ignorance as the Root Problem
Notice that the Demiurge’s fundamental flaw is ignorance, not malevolence.
He doesn’t create suffering because he delights in pain. He creates an imperfect world because he doesn’t know any better. He can’t see the light above him. He can’t understand the divine patterns that would make creation whole.
This maps onto human experience in important ways.
Much of the suffering we cause each other comes from ignorance, not evil. People hurt others because they don’t see the consequences of their actions, don’t understand others’ perspectives, don’t recognize what they’re doing. Pure malice exists, but it’s rarer than blindness.
The Gnostic solution, therefore, isn’t punishing the ignorant. It’s awakening them. Gnosis, direct knowledge of divine reality, is the cure for the condition that created the problem in the first place.
The Archons
The Demiurge didn’t work alone. The texts describe him creating archons, rulers who help govern the material world. These archons are associated with the planets and with various cosmic forces.
But they’re also understood psychologically. The archons represent the forces that keep you asleep: compulsion, forgetfulness, fear, desire for material security, attachment to worldly success. They work through what the Pistis Sophia calls the “counterfeit spirit,” the part of you that mimics your true self while keeping you bound to the world.
When you feel driven by compulsions you can’t explain, when you keep choosing what you know doesn’t serve you, when the light within you is suppressed by patterns you didn’t consciously create: that’s the archons at work.
But here’s the good news: they can only control you while you’re ignorant. Once you have gnosis, once you know who you really are and where you really came from, their power breaks. They work through deception, and truth dissolves deception.
What This Means for You
The Gnostic answer to suffering isn’t just ancient mythology. It offers practical reframes for modern seekers.
Stop defending the world’s goodness. You don’t have to pretend everything is fine. You don’t have to explain away suffering as “part of God’s plan.” The world is genuinely flawed. Your recognition of that flaw is the beginning of wisdom.
Look for what’s beyond the flaw. The Demiurge isn’t the whole story. Beyond the ignorant creator is the true Father, the Pleroma, the realm of light. Beyond the world’s suffering is a reality untouched by suffering. Your longing for something better isn’t naive optimism. It’s the spark within you remembering its origin.
Cultivate knowledge over mere faith. The Gnostic path emphasizes gnosis, direct knowing. The cure for the world’s ignorance isn’t more ignorance, more blind faith, more acceptance of what doesn’t make sense. It’s awakening. It’s seeing what the Demiurge couldn’t see.
Have compassion for the ignorant. The Demiurge himself was a victim of circumstances beyond his control. He was born blind. He didn’t choose to create suffering; he just didn’t know how to create anything better. This doesn’t excuse the suffering, but it reframes it. The appropriate response to ignorance is teaching, not punishment.
The Hope Within Darkness
The Gnostic cosmology is sometimes accused of pessimism. Look at this dark vision, critics say. A world created by a blind fool, ruled by hostile powers, designed to keep souls asleep.
But the teaching actually contains radical hope.
If the highest God had created this world with all its suffering, we’d have nowhere to appeal. The suffering would be divinely sanctioned. It would be working as designed.
But if the world was made by an ignorant power, then the true God stands beyond it. The suffering here doesn’t define ultimate reality. It’s a local phenomenon, a regional disaster, not the nature of everything that is.
And within the disaster, the light remains. Sophia’s spark is within you. The Demiurge couldn’t create it or destroy it. It doesn’t belong to this world’s limitations.
The suffering is real.
But it’s not the last word.
Something beyond the suffering exists. You carry a fragment of it right now. And that fragment is calling you home to a reality where the ignorant creator’s limitations don’t apply.
A Meditation
Consider the suffering you’ve experienced or witnessed.
Instead of asking “why did God allow this?” try asking: “What if the power that made this situation wasn’t the highest power? What if there’s something beyond this that I can’t yet see?”
Feel the difference. The first question creates guilt and confusion: either God is cruel, or you’re failing to understand God’s goodness. The second question opens space: this suffering is real, but it’s not everything. Something else exists.
Then notice the spark within you. The part that knows the suffering is wrong. The part that remembers, however dimly, that things could be different. That’s not wishful thinking. That’s the fragment of light that the Demiurge couldn’t touch.
It knows the way home.
The Apocryphon of John and other Gnostic texts are available in translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (Marvin Meyer, ed.) and The Gnostic Scriptures (Bentley Layton). For philosophical analysis of Gnostic theodicy, see Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion.