Abstract
This paper argues that the problem of evil marks out a fundamental conflict between the abstract speculations of philosophical theology and the concrete demands of lived faith. Religious responses to evil and suffering do two philosophically important things: (1) they remind us of the cosmological framework needed to make sense of the language affirmative of God, and so they resist the demand for logical and ontological isolation characteristic of much theological speculation; (2) they are theologically and psychologically at odds with those who mistake analogy for literal description. Taken literally, talk about God, borrowed from our experience of personal relations, the world is transformed from natural reality into human artefact. Creation is reconstructed for our benefit: by an infinite Person for finite ones. Such realist literalism falsifies our experience of the world, so undermines the grounds of any inference to God, while simultaneously reducing God to a psychological projection.