Love in the time of evil

It’s 2016 and the problem of evil is still unsolved. In the YouTube universe, the problem has found its megaphone in the British actor, comedian, novelist, memoirist, and hero of the British Humanist Association, Stephen Fry, a witty, out­spoken, charismatic public personality of the sort that inevitably gets called “larger than life.”

Philosophers tell us that there are two kinds of arguments from evil that justify atheism: logical and evidential. The logical argument maintains that, given evil, the existence of the God of classical theism is logically impossible. The evidential argument, less definitive but with a more devastating emotional punch, holds that the horrific kinds and quantities of evil make God’s existence at once improbable and morally indefensible.

Stephen Fry’s specialty is the devastating emotional punch. In an appearance last year on Irish TV he responded to broadcaster Gay Byrne’s question—“Suppose it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates and are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?”—with a tirade that captured 4 million views on YouTube. “I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? How dare you? . . . Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain? . . . Yes, the world is very splendid, but it also has in it insects whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why?”