Are there really any reincarnation of humans and a law of karma deciding how good people are and

determining their following lives accordingly or is it not more likely that this is just made up by humans? did God or gods really reveal themselves to those central religious persons who claimed (or about whom it is claimed) that they spoke on behalf of God or is it not more likely that it was just made up? Are there really any evil forces responsible for diseases, natural disasters or are not the scientific explanations more plausible? And so on. Naturalism, understood roughly as the belief that the world of space-time is all there is, presents itself as a very challenging alternative to religious ontologies. Naturalism is able to explain very much in a coherent manner, receiving new verifications from natural science all the time. There is more to read about religions and science than anyone can cover. Based on what I have read it is my opinion that religious world views in general make a poor case compared to naturalism when it comes to offering a plausible ontology. But I do think that there are versions of Christianity which can stand up to the challenge. I will present quite much of such a version in this book, but again I must refer to the authorships of Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and L.B. Puntel for a thorough version. Since it is the only plausible religious alternative to naturalism I know of (which may of course be due to my own ignorance), Christianity is the only religion I consider in this book. But I believe that the conclusions I draw are interesting for people belonging to different religions, and could well become part of the reasoning on the problem of evil in other religions too. Within Christian theology, it is common to believe that God exists, and that he 8 is perfectly good and omnipotent. I shall return to the question of how to define Gods goodness and power, but as long as Gods goodness is taken to imply that he both wants to and has the power to prevent more evils in this world, it is a problem to understand why God does not do so. Some understand God as being itself or ground of being, but God may nevertheless be understood as personal, omnipotent and good so that the problem remains the same. If God is understood as being itself or ground of being, but not personal, good and omnipotent, then the problem of evil dissolves, but so does any reason for religious attitudes towards this God, or hope for a good afterlife. 9 Such a God would be little different from a unifying force of physics, so that one could question the use of term God at all. Various arguments can be given that the ground of being should be understood as personal, 10 and I will not discuss the idea of an impersonal God in this book. As shown above, there are many different theoretical questions connected to evil. The following formulation is common in literature on the problem of evil in a Christian context: There seems to be a contradiction between on the one hand believing that there is a good and omnipotent God and on the other hand that evils exist. When I read thorough attempts to solve this problem they include answers to most of the other theoretical problems of evil as well. In this book I focus on this theoretical problem, which means that I will not answer existential problems connected to how people should live their lives. How people should live their lives is very different from person to person, but the theoretical problem I have just mentioned is either consistent or not, and a problem that many people experience as a problem. This means that I also leave out more practical theodicies, which focus on what God has done to fight evil. 11 I have nothing against theo-

ries about what God has done to fight evil as such, but they do little to answer the theoretical problems which are the focus of this book. I find that a crucial theoretical problem is why God in the first place would create a world where suffering is possible, and the mentioned practical theodicies have no answer to this. Many philosophers and theologians have tried to solve the theoretical problem, but there are also some who believe that there is a God who is good and omnipotent, but they reject attempts to give a theoretical solution to the problem. The reason can either be that it is impossible because of the character of religious language, or that it is immoral to try to solve it, and I shall now briefly reject these two critiques.