Vince vitale stephen fry biography

Mark Woods

It's the big question, and sooner or later almost everyone has to deal with it.

How can God really be good when we experience suffering? We might manage to get through it when times are hard and we're in pain or distress – or worse, when we see someone we love in pain or distress – but often we're left with unanswered questions. Furthermore, if suffering is protracted and intense, we might wonder if we can maintain our faith in a good and loving God, or if there'll come a point when we'll just break.

In a Spring Harvest talk yesterday, Tom Price, who lectures for the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, told his audience that meeting the right kind of question with the right kind of answer was vital – or, as he put it, "Don't try to fix your computer with water." It's good for mopping floors and cleaning clothes, but not for mending electronics. So there are intellectual questions and there are relational questions, and it's important not to get the two mixed up.

Some writing and speaking about suffering and the problem of evil is inherently unsatisfactory because it doesn't seem to recognise the scale or the depth of the problem. Price addressed that issue head on. Christians, he said, shouldn't "sett