Article July 1, 2013 Issue

Love above all

Iain Napier

If God is so good and all-powerful, how come the world is so evil?

Everyone confronts this question, or a variant of it, at some point. And everyone has his or her own response, including the apparently logical conclusion that there cannot be a God and the religious position that evil is allowed or even sent by God to test the faithful.

The absolute answer offered by Christian Science (which states that if God is real, then good is, by definition, infinite, and therefore evil is unreal) can initially appear to be mere sophistry. I’ve felt so at times. Several years ago I even hurled the open Bible as hard as I could against my bedroom wall in disgust, closely followed by the open Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I even hurled my copy of the Christian Science Quarterly, which contains the weekly Christian Science Bible Lessons, against the wall for good measure.