Stephen Frye, a popular comedian in the UK, caused a stir a few years back when he was interviewed on TV.

Suppose it's all true, said the interviewer, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and you're confronted by God.

What will Stephen Frye say to him, her, or it?

Fry replied, I'd say, bone cancer and children, what's that about?

How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right.

It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?

Often in situations like this, believers feel on abound to speak up on God's behalf.

In the words of the poet John Milton, they seek to justify

the ways of God to men, to try to explain why this kind of evil exists in the world, given that

God is good, loving, and all-powerful. This is what is known as a Theodicy, which is a combination of two Greek words smushed together.

Theo being the Greek word for God and de chaos meaning justification.

So a theodicy is a God justification.

Stephen Fry isn't the first to raise the issue, of course.

For centuries, philosophers have talked about the problem of evil. It goes like this. Given the indisputable existence of evil in the world, bone cancer and children, for example, God is either powerless to do anything, in which case he's not God, or he does have the power to do

something, but refuses to do so, in which case he's not good. Either way, the argument goes,

the biblical claim that God is both all-powerful and all good is absurd and untenable.

It's important to say, first of all, that although the problem of evil is a significant

problem for believers to address, it's a much bigger problem for non-believers.

Because to even talk coherently about such a thing as evil requires moral

absolutes grounded in some transcendent truth. Without that, how can we judge whether something is

evil or that something is good? All we would have in the universe are things which happen. No right,

no wrong, just things happening. But saying that the problem of evil is bigger for non-believers

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