THE author of this impressive work, having become a Christian as a teenager, spent ten years working in hospitals and then 20 as an inner-city GP. He was ordained priest in the diocese of Southwark in 2008 and ministers in south London.

The book is a theodicy, an attempt to reconcile the omnipotence of God with the existence of evil. The first third consists of a sophisticated engagement with science and theology to suggest what he terms “evidence of God’s love for the cosmos”, explaining convincingly why it is perfectly rational for a scientist to believe in God. The second section tackles the existence of moral and natural evil — evil caused by humanity and that which is not. The author then considers how God might act in the cosmos and, finally, what the implications of his proposed theodicy might be.

At times, the author is disarmingly personal — as in the epilogue in which he tells us that he is no longer afraid of his own death. At others, he enters into surprising conjecture — as when he tries to reconcile the biblical account of a Fall with what science tells us by suggesting that the Fall might not have taken place within the current geographical and historical framework, but in some supposed eternal mode of existence, a “pre-archaios”, which pre-dates the existence of any sentient creatures on earth.

I admire the book and, from what I learn of him from it, the author. His fine mind is evident as he grapples with the age-old problem of suffering. Sadly, I cannot be as confident as he is when he claims that he has answered the problem of suffering in a cosmos created by a loving God. He suggests that The Brothers Karamazov is so often quoted because there are few other sources of literature that question why God allows suffering to happen. Another factor might be that it articulates very well a problem that will not go away.

I have always been haunted by the words of John Austin Baker, who, after presenting one of the most sophisticated theodicies that I have read in his magisterial book The Foolishness of God (1970), wrote: “Throughout their history men have approved of love; they have never approved of making love absolute. And that the all-good who is also the all-powerful should renounce the exercise of power and allow goodness to be ground under the heel of evil may be magnificent — but it revolts our common sense. At the end of the most fundamental and significant of all its quests the wisdom of Man finds itself face to face with the foolishness of God.”

I suspect, to be fair, that the author himself would not really claim that he has answered the question for all time. I recommend reading his book to assess for yourself how convinced you find his (very good) arguments. As I see it, St Augustine of Hippo is right when he tells us that “To reach out a little with the mind is great blessedness, yet to understand is wholly impossible” (Sermon 117).


Dr John Inge is the Bishop of Worcester.

Good God: Suffering, faith, reason and science
Michael Brooks
Sacristy Press £16.99
(978-1-78959-328-0)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29