For many people the problem of evil is a major stumbling block to belief in God. A history professor asks, why did a good God permit Hitler to incinerate millions of Jews? A parishoner wants to know why his beloved wife must lie dying of cancer? A female Pepsis wasp plunges its stinger into its tarantula victim, injecting just enough venom to paralyze, but not to kill, the spider host, so that the wasp larvae may eat the living but helpless body. Why has the syphilis germ come to be in the course of the evolution of life? It lives, survives, and thrives only in higher organic hosts, which are its victims. Treat some kinds of bacterial disease with our modern “miracle drugs” and, in reaction to the medication, mutating genes produce new, hardier strains of the destructive microbe. Why is there pain — especially when it seems “excessive,” “prolonged” and “unnecessary”? If God is good and loving, and if His power is adequate, why is there physical and mental suffering in our world? If the evolutionary process is the divinely appointed, creative method, why has so much of it taken a course of brutality and aggression? Raising the question at the most fundamental level of process, why has evolution taken place by “mutations,” many of which must be classified as “evil” when they result in the suffering of living forms? For many minds the fact of pain, and back of it, the phenomenon of “evil,” or “inept” mutation remains the unhealed core of the problem of evil, and a barrier to religious faith.