Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Lee,

literary editor of The Spectator. My guest this week is a former religion editor of the TLS,

Rupert Short, whose new book is The Hardest Problem. Now, the hardest problem in this case, not being

consciousness, but it's even a harder one than that. It is the problem of evil, an ancient subject

to which Rupert provides a fresh approach. Rupert, welcome. Now, gosh, what an ambitious thing to take on. Your book is quite short,

and it's very clear. Can you start by telling me what made you think this was a subject you

needed to or even could address? And who were you hoping, hoping you know was the audience for such a book

thank you sam well i cut my teeth as a biographer i'm in a strange little class of one in being a

biographer of both a pope and an archbishop of canterbury. When I entered an essay prize, the Hazlitt

essay Prize a few years ago with an essay in defence of Christianity, my agent said, why don't

you make this the first chapter of a brief reply to the new atheists? And that was the seed of a book

called God is no thing.

And I've made, my smudge on the wall of life is not a large one,

but I've beavered away a little bit over the past few years,

trying to demystify philosophy and theology for a general readership and in particular to an audience of

skeptics. I worked for many years on the TLS, as you mentioned, in an office where I don't think

anyone else went to church. It was about as far from being a religious bubble as you could imagine.

And for a long time, I've been exercised by this business of how you can defend the

coherence of a religious take on reality, in my case a Christian one, to an audience of skeptics. And at the

beginning of last year, a publisher approached me and asked if I'd like to write a book about

believing in God in a climate where, of course, most intellectuals, most professional philosophers

are pretty devout atheists.

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