I was looking at the Facebook page promoting this event, and I realized I'm supposed to explain God, suffering, evil, sin, and creation in 45 minutes.

That's not going to happen.

That's way too much, but I'm happy to answer questions about any of those in the Q&A.

I'm not going to say anything about creation in this talk.

I'll say a little bit about suffering, but maybe less than you'd hope.

I'm going to say quite a bit about sin in order to set up what I think is it's central and enduring mystery.

And maybe we can say a little bit about how to navigate that mystery in your life,

given that you'll basically have to. I should also admit outright that I'm not going to solve

the so-called problem of evil tonight. You're not going to leave thinking everything is completely

solved and that Aquinas or I had it all figured out.

I think there's a kind of deep existential problem of evil that remains for us as human beings.

And the best that I can do as a philosopher is help you to think about that because I think that

your perspective on evil is probably the most important tool that you have for dealing with it

in a practical way in your life and that includes the evil that's in your heart, because there are some of that there

too, which is another mystery that, yeah, we will definitely talk about in this talk. So I want to

talk about how to think about evil conceptually, how I think about evil. And I want to highlight some of the

philosophical problems and puzzles that evil presents. I think there are philosophical resources

for sorting out how to think about evil from a philosophical perspective.

So we'll try to do that.

If you look at your handout, I have some of the classic philosophical formulations of the problem of evil

that you would be very likely to encounter in a philosophy class.

So there is what's called the logical problem of evil.

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