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to mystic institute.org. So the title I have is suffering in the communion of saints.

I want to start off just to acknowledge this is a difficult topic. And the way philosophers

approach the topic of thinking about why would God a perfectly good,

perfectly powerful, loving being, create creatures in an environment where we experience

so much intense suffering?

It's obviously, there's a theoretical question there, and that's the question the philosophers

are interested in, but for most people it's an intensely personal, visceral kind of subject

when people are undergoing intense suffering.

So I just want to acknowledge that what we're doing, it's not meant to address.

This would be the worst kind of, the kind of things that we'll be talking

about today would be the worst thing to say to someone, or it would be the worst. It would be profoundly

unhelpful to get, get engaged in a theoretical inquiry about, well, you know, maybe we could think

about suffering like this, kind of thing. That's a kind of pastoral problem of suffering, right? Your breast, best off

talking to your priest, a good therapist, your parent, a good friend, somebody like that,

not a philosopher. So what good is a philosopher? Well, philosopher can be useful because suffering,

what philosophers call the problem of evil,

is the chief reason that people give for disbelieving in God's existence, right?

And people implicitly take it to be a kind of evidence even overwhelming evidence against the existence of God

...