A fawn burns to death in an unobserved forest fire, suffering for days with no one to learn a lesson from it. William Rowe's thought experiment opens this impartial tour of the problem of evil, beginning with Epicurus and the logical trap created by a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. We explain why traditional monotheism cannot simply drop one of those traits, and how Alvin Plantinga's free will defense offers a logical key while leaving the victim on the sidewalk unaccounted for.

From there the episode moves to the evidential problem and natural evil, including Darwin's horror at the ichneumon wasp, and the responses of skeptical theism, the soul-making theodicy of Irenaeus and John Hick, Marilyn McCord Adams on horrendous evils, and Augustine's privation theory that evil is like rust on iron. We then strip out the ...