out of evil, and with a little luck he might (but only might) succeed in the end. The other way out of the apparent impasse is to deny the goodness of God as expressed in Baudelaire’s celebrated statement that: ‘If there is a God he is the very devil’. The writer Archibald MacLeish conveys the same sentiment in his play ‘J.B.’, which is a reworking of the story of Job, with the refrain: ‘If he is God he is not good, if he is good he is not God’. Nevertheless, the traditional Christian claim is that