Welcome to this replay of Ask NT Write Anything, where we go back into the archives to bring you the best of the thought and theology of Tom Wright, answering questions submitted by you, the listener.

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ebooks. That's premier unbelievable.com. And now for today's replay of Ask EntieWrite Anything.

The Ask EntieWrite Anything podcast

We throw all kinds of things at you every couple of weeks Tom

and today is no different.

We're doing probably one of the biggest questions that has existed since time immemorial, a problem of

evil and suffering. I'm not expecting you to solve it necessarily today, but it is posed in some

interesting ways today. I suppose whenever we come to do a podcast and questions and you're

there as the person answering them, I suppose it's always with the caveat that there are some things don't really have very neat packaged answers, do they? And we can

only give people ways to try and think through things. And everyone's different as to how they're

ultimately going to resolve some of these big questions in their own mind. Sure. Yeah,

that's undoubtedly true. And the question of the problem of evil is

the archetypal one. And I've come to the view that even though we don't have a good answer

to the way the question is normally posed or has been in the last 200 years, 300 years anyway,

we do have a very good answer for why we should expect

that problem to come up in the way that it does. And that is, if we believe that God is the good

and wise creator, then evil doesn't make sense. And that's the point. And the danger then is,

if we as clever theologians or philosophers

think we can make sense of it, then we're saying that actually God created a world within which,

yeah, there's a place for evil and we'll let evil exist so that it can do this and that and

the other, which is actually a very dark conclusion to reach. And of course, people can

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