This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

That's W. There's one powerful objection to those like Christians, Jews and Muslims who believe in an all-powerful all-good God.

Stephen Law is here to discuss it. He teaches at Heathrop College in London and is the editor of the journal Think.

Stephen Law, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for inviting me.

The topic we want to talk about today is the problem of evil.

Could you just outline what that is?

Well, there are really two problems, not one. If we begin with the thought that God is all powerful and all good and indeed all knowing,

the question then is, why then does evil exist or why does evil exist in quite the

quantities that it does?

There are two different problems here.

One problem is called the logical problem of evil.

Some people would argue that the existence of God is logically

incompatible with the existence of any suffering or evil whatsoever. The other problem of evil is this if you believe

that there's an all-powerful all-good God why is there quite so much suffering an evil in the world, surely an all-powerful all-good

God. He would have the ability to produce a world with far less suffering in it, and

if he's all good he would surely desire that the world contain far less suffering,

why then is there quite so much suffering?

So on the evidential problem, it's the quantity of evil that's really the issue, whereas on the logical problem, it's the existence of any evil or any suffering at all is deemed to be a problem.

So you're treating suffering as evil. Is that the basic definition you're using of evil?

Well it's clearly an evil and it tends to be the evil that gets focused on

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