In the essay, Bayes considered the age-old theological question of how there could be suffering and evil in the world if God was truly benevolent. Bayes’s answer, in essence, was that we should not mistake our human imperfections for imperfections on the part of God, whose designs for the universe we might not fully understand. “Strange therefore . . . because he only sees the lowest part of this scale, [he] should from hence infer a defeat of happiness in the whole,” Bayes wrote in response to another theologian.
