A good God and a cruel world

Anyone who has sat in a children's hospital ward, or watched the news after an earthquake, has felt this question arrive uninvited. It is never an abstract puzzle. It always comes as one particular child. The Book of Job takes it on directly. Job is a good man who loses his children, his wealth and his health, while his friends insist he must have done something to deserve it. When God finally answers from a whirlwind, he gives no reason at all, only a torrent of questions about the making of the world that Job could never answer. Yet at the end God rebukes the friends and takes Job's side. Philosophers turned it into an argument. The Christian writer Lactantius preserved a version he credited to Epicurus, though nothing that survives of Epicurus contains it: a god who could stop evil and doesn't is not good, and one who would but can't is not all-powerful. In 1710 Leibniz replied that a perfect God would create the best world possible, so ours, suffering included, must be it. Then on a holiday morning in 1755 an earthquake leveled much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of people, many of them in church. Voltaire answered with Candide, whose tutor Pangloss goes on preaching Leibniz's optimism through shipwreck, earthquake and the Inquisition. The hardest version came from a novelist who believed in God. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoevsky gave Ivan Karamazov a collection of cases of cruelty to children, clipped, he says, from newspapers and books, and a refusal: even if everything is reconciled at the end of time, he will not accept a harmony that has a tortured child in its price. Dostoevsky spent much of the rest of the novel trying to answer him, and readers still argue about whether he did. What answer, if any, could you give to the parents of one particular child?