1. Bertold Brecht, Mother Courage, scene 11.

2. Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Scientists and Religion in America,” Scientific American 281 (September 1999): 90–91.

3. B. H. Roberts, The Truth, the Way, the Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch, 2d ed. (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994), 339, citing Epicurus.

4. The Problem of Evil, ed. Mark Larrimore (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), and Joseph F. Kelly, The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition: From the Book of Job to Modern Genetics (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002), provide good overviews of writings on theodicy throughout history. For Latter-day Saint writings on this topic, see Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1980); Robert L. Millet, I Will Fear No Evil: How the Lord Sustains Us in Perilous Times (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 2002); and Wayne E. Brickey, Making Sense of Suffering (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2001), who all approach the existential problem of evil. David L. Paulsen, “Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil,” BYU Studies 39, no. 1 (2000): 53–65, and Kathleen Flake, “Evil’s Origins and Evil’s End in the Joseph Smith Translation of Genesis,” Sunstone 21, no. 3 (1998): 24-29, both approach the theological problem of evil from a Latter-day Saint perspective. Paulsen’s essay has appeared in an expanded form as “Sin, Suffering, and Soul-Making: Joseph Smith on the Problem of Evil,” in Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen, ed. Donald W. Parry, Daniel C. Peterson, and Stephen D. Ricks (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2002), 237–84.

5. Paulsen, “Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil,” 60. Paulsen shows that Latter-day Saint doctrine defuses the theological or soteriological problem of evil through baptism for the dead and the preaching of the gospel in the afterlife to those who did not receive it in mortality on earth, thus giving all people a full opportunity for salvation.

6. As John Cobb and Truman Madsen describe, in Latter-day Saint thought humans individually share “creative complicity” with God in our earthly trials and sufferings because we each made an active choice in the premortal life to enter this mortal realm. John Cobb Jr. and Truman G. Madsen, “Theodicy,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 4:1473–74.

7. Frederick W. Schmidt, When Suffering Persists (Harrisburg, Penn.: Morehouse, 2001).

8. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Avon Books, 1981), 51–52.

9. The Book of Abraham refers to the creative days as “times,” which are measured “after the Lord’s time . . . for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning” (Abr. 5:13). Latter-day Saint doctrine does not subscribe to the traditional Christian idea that God created the entire cosmos in a single creative stroke but rather sees the creative process as involving many times and seasons, phases and stages, not only on this world but on worlds without number as well. F. Kent Nielsen and Stephen D. Ricks, “Creation, Creation Accounts,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 1:340–43.

10. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Collins, 1940), 16.

11. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square, 1984), 135.

12. John Fiske, “The Mystery of Evil,” in Studies in Religion, Being the Destiny of Man; The Idea of God; Through Nature to God; Life Everlasting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 242–43, 249–52, quoted in Roberts, The Truth, the Way, the Life, 335.

13. Roberts, The Truth, the Way, the Life, 337.

14. William Smith, ed., Dictionary of the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1948), 18.

15. Modern descriptions of the genesis of society generally start with the individual. Society is generated later as individuals band together for protection against other individuals. Two influential examples include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan.

John Sutton Welch

BYU Studies Publications