This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

There's no greater challenge to religious belief than the problem of evil. If there's an

all-powerful all-good God, why does he allow such terrible suffering in the world?

earthquakes, cancer, Auschwitz.

Traditionally, a variety of responses have been offered.

For example, God has given humans free will.

Marilyn Adams was a canon of Christchurch College Oxford before moving to the

Philosophy Department of North Carolina. She wants to turn the problem of evil on its head.

Marilyn Adams, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you. I always want it to be a sound bite.

The topic we're focusing on today is evil, the problem of evil. What is that? The problem of evil is a problem about the minuses in life.

You can take evil very broadly to mean all of the minuses in life, but evils come in various degrees, and most people don't get too worried about small and even medium size and sometimes even large size evils.

But the evils I like to focus on, as especially problematic, are evils, the participation in which threaten to ruin the

meaning positive significance of a person's life, evils that are cut so deep into who they

are and what they are trying to do in life that they don't see

how to go on in a positive way once they've participated in them.

Those are the ones that I'd like to focus on.

They're a problem for everybody and of course they cause special

problems for people's belief systems depending on what those are.

Perhaps we ought to talk about some specific examples. Are we talking about

...