. I agree that the book of Job provides a good (?) introduction to the Problem of Evil which every Christian must face up to at some point. I also agree that I find the major works approaching this problem less than helpful.

However, I would like to take a somewhat different approach (being a scientist at heart). I see the bible as recording an ongoing process of discovery of the nature of God, from creator, law-giver, ruler through to the personal counselor it seems we now worship. Job (the book) is part of that process of discernment.

The problem of evil can, I think, be divided into two parts: that caused by random events (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, epidemics etc.), and that caused by man. The first are often called  ¨acts of God ¨, certainly by insurance companies who don ¨t want to take responsibity for them. Job had his share of these.

But isn ¨t all our life just a set of random happenings? We are, after all, just a random set of genes selected from those of our parents. Our world is amazingly random. How many of the events which shaped our lives were just random, based on which school we went to, which friends we had, which courses we chose, who we sat next to on a plane, which newspaper we happened to read etc. And even more so, on who we sat next to that gave us which disease, or which driver just happened to be inattentive as we approached?

Life is a series of random events, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out why? As Jesus said, did this man sin or his parents? The answer is as Job found out, its just bad luck! Don ¨t we all know someone who is jinxed?, and someone else who is born lucky? But if God is omnipotent, then we must blame Him for everything, good and bad. And surely this is what religion has always been about. Something bad happens, we must appease someone, so we sacrifice an ox. Something good happens, we must offer our thanks, so we sacrifice an ox (and have a jolly good party as well)!

So is our God the god who tormented Job? Is there an answer to evil? I think we are all tormented, perhaps only be the realisation that the world is just random – there is no grand plan except that forming the basis of life, the creative force that made us from the dust of the heavens (I mean that literally), and the power of self-organisation that has created and sustains all living creatures. It has no goal, no purpose other than to continue to reproduce itself, and no morals about how it does this. We humans have morals – we are the only solution to the problem of evil, because we understand the difference between good and evil and we can choose.

And what is the basis of our morality? I think the bible gives a pretty good analysis from the vengeful God of the OT through to the forgiveness offered by Jesus and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Just don ¨t quote bits out of context. And for those who want something more scientific, I think that the recent discoveries in neuroscience and psychology offer a lot. It is really all to do with the wiring of our brains and the relationship between our conscious selves and the actual hardware of our brains which deludes us into thinking that all events have causes and that we can find them. We are also remarkably sensitive to injustice (at the level of brain function), so its not hard to see where our ideas about God come from.

[A netfriend]