The God of Love and the Reality of Evil and Suffering – Prof. Chris Baglow
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prof. Chris Baglow explores how the God of love can allow evil and suffering by showing that a world created for freedom and love—not as a deterministic machine—necessarily entails the risk of physical and moral evils, yet opens a deeper path of redemptive goodness.
This lecture was given on October 30th, 2025, at Mississippi State University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Baglow is Professor of the Practice of Theology and the Director of the Science and Religion Initiative of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. His work is the culmination of 20 years of faith and science scholarship and educational program creation, as well as a lengthy career in Catholic theological education spanning high-school, undergraduate,
graduate and seminary teaching. In 2018 he was co-recipient of an Expanded Reason Award in Teaching from the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid) and the Vatican Joseph Ratzinger Foundation (Rome) for his work in integrating faith and science in Catholic education, for which he has also received numerous grants from the John Templeton Foundation.
Baglow is the author of Faith, Science and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge (2nd edition, Midwest Theological Forum, 2019) and Creation: A Catholic’s Guide to God and the Universe (Ave Maria Press, 2021). He serves as theological advisor to the Board of Directors of the Society of Catholic Scientists. He authored the transcripts for Wonder: The Harmony of Faith and Science, a Word on Fire film series directed by Manny Marquez and narrated by Jonathan Roumie. His work has appeared in Church Life Journal, Culture and Evangelization, and Joie de Vivre Quarterly Journal.
Keywords: David Hume, Evil, Freedom and Moral Evil, God of Love and Suffering, Joseph Ratzinger on Freedom, Problem of Evil and Suffering, Providence and Natural Laws, Redemption and Human Freedom, Risk of Love, Theodicy and Divine Goodness
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.7 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.3 | To learn more and to attend these events, |
| 0:21.7 | visit us at to mystic institute.org. |
| 0:24.9 | Like I said, I work in faith and science, |
| 0:27.3 | and sometimes those things seem to be very, very far apart, right, in people's minds. |
| 0:33.2 | But actually, they have a lot of commonalities. |
| 0:36.7 | In theology, for that matter in philosophy, just like in science, there's a lot of commonalities. In theology, for that matter, in philosophy, just like in science, good explanations shed light, but then they also create new questions, right? |
| 0:49.0 | Brilliant insights deepen our understanding and science, and they deepen our insight in theology and philosophy, |
| 0:55.2 | but that deepening never resolves the mystery at the heart of reality. |
| 1:01.1 | In the words of the late Catholic physicist Peter Hodgson, |
| 1:05.6 | in both science and faith, there is detailed knowledge that guides our lives, |
| 1:09.6 | one in the natural world and the other in the supernatural world. And in each there is detailed knowledge that guides our lives, one in the natural world and the other |
| 1:11.6 | in the supernatural world. And in each, there is a mystery at its heart. This reminds me of an |
| 1:18.6 | anecdote about a great scientist, William Thompson, who is also known to history as Lord Kelvin. |
| 1:25.8 | You guys heard the name Kelvin before. One of the great pioneers |
| 1:29.6 | of electrical theory, after whom the standard measurement of electric current was named. The story |
| 1:36.2 | goes like this. He once made an anonymous tour of an electrical equipment factory in England. |
| 1:42.1 | And a young factory apprentice gave the tour and explained to the people |
| 1:48.4 | elementary facts about the machinery and the bolts and amps and all of these kinds of things. |
| 1:54.6 | And he listened patiently until the very end when the apprentice asked everyone for questions. |
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