Stephen Frye, a popular comedian in the UK, caused a stir a few years back when he was interviewed on TV.

Suppose it's all true, so the interviewer, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and you're confronted by God.

What will Stephen Frye say to him, her, or it?

Frye replied,

I'd say, bone cancer in children, what's that about?

How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault?

It's not right, it's utterly, utterly evil.

Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?

Often in situations like this, believers feel, on a bound to speak up on God's behalf.

In the words of the poet John Milton, they seek to justify the ways of God to men, to try to explain why this kind of evil exists in the world,

given that God is good, loving, and all-powerful.

This is what is known as a theodicy, which is a combination of two Greek words smushed together,

Theo being the Greek word for God, and Dechaos, meaning justification.

So a theodicy is a God justification.

Stephen Frye is in the first to raise the issue, of course.

For centuries philosophers have talked about the problem of evil.

It goes like this.

Given the indisputable existence of evil in the world, bone cancer in children, for example,

God is either powerless to do anything in which case he's not God,

or he does have the power to do something, but refuses to do so, in which case he's not good.

Either way, the argument goes, the biblical claim that God is both all-powerful and all-good

is absurd and untenable.

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