Some people seem to be instinctive theists. Belief in God comes naturally to them. I am not one of those. I am an instinctive atheist; on the whole, the evidence of this world seems to me to suggest that there is no benevolent and omnipotent presence guiding all things. When reading recently about some Yazidi women captured by so-called Islamic State, who were gang-raped while their daughters were murdered beside them, it appeared so shatteringly evident that there is no God that the breath was quite taken out of me. We use the expression “problem of evil” glibly; but this “problem” is so nauseatingly contradictory of everything we long for and look for in this world, so incalculably monstrous, that it seems to render the believer’s trust in a good God risibl