Roger’s Version

p. 87

“’If God is so ingenious and purposive, what about deformity and disease? What about the carnage that rules this kingdom of life at every level? Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? . . . . Men disbelieved in God long before Copernicus, long before thunder or the phases of the moon were scientifically understood. They disbelieved for the same reasons men disbelieve now: the world around them feels uncaring and cruel. There is no sense of a person behind the wilderness of ingenuity you say natural phenomena present. When people cry out in pain the heavens are silent. The heavens were silent when the Jews were gassed; they’re silent now above the starving in Africa. Those wretched Ethiopians are Coptic Christians, are you aware of that?”