Check out this fascinating (if I do say so myself) essay we’ve just published by Frederica Mathewes-Green on suffering and perfection. She writes in response to a host of voices, from James Woods in The New Yorker to Bart Ehrman on this site, who have been revisiting arguments against God from theodicy: If God is good and all-powerful, why is there so much suffering in the world? FMG’s response is to consider what, exactly, a perfect world would look like. An excerpt follows the jump, and the whole piece is here.

People often cite the story told by the character Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: parents punished their little daughter for bedwetting by locking her in a frozen outhouse. Ivan cannot accept a God who would let that happen.
OK, how would you prevent it? Can you imagine a world where there is no child abuse? Not just that one awful case–there’s no point in stopping only one act of abuse. How would you stop child abuse entirely? Would you make it so that an angry parent could not think of any way to hurt a child?
Could a parent imagine striking a child, but be paralyzed and unable to raise an arm?

Could he strike at the child, but the blow would not land?
The blow would land, but the child would not feel it as painful?
Maybe you could make it so that parents could not get angry in the first place–how about that? Would that mean that no one, anywhere, could get angry? Why stop with parents?
(We’ll get to earthquakes and tsunamis later. One thing at a time.)
How about making it powerfully instinctive to protect children, but with some small room for evil people to do wrong? Child abuse would be so contrary to normal human nature that people would recoil in horror, as they do to Ivan’s story.
Wait–that’s the system we have now.