Our series on Job suggests that no one can decide for anyone else the question of whether God is good. This cuts both ways

I would not have thought, when we started this page, that we could run to a 500 comment thread on theodicy; few British newspapers imagine their readership is that passionate about the Bible.

One thing does seem to me to distinguish this one from other theological arguments. This is that the answer must always be personal, and may legitimately differ between people.

If we take the particular question, "Can the goodness and justice of God be reconciled with what has happened to me?" there really is no one who can answer that satisfactorily except the questioner. This is why we reject Job's comforters. "When we are lashed, they kiss the rod, obedient to the will of God" as Swift said. They have no right to tell anyone else that their suffering is tolerable.

But by the same token, it can't be right to claim to anyone else that their suffering ought to be intolerable. A friend of mine, a Christian, suffers great anguish because her daughter is a junkie. Yet it would be a wicked impertinence of me to claim that this ought to make her realise that her faith is an illusion, and God does not exist. This isn't just because her beliefs are a comfort to her; as a matter of fact I'm not sure that they are. It's because I can't judge whether they are in fact false. She is the only person who can know whether her pain is in fact unendurable.

When I was a young man I was very much offended by what seemed to me the immoral stupidity of a relative who lost her faith after giving birth to a handicapped child. She wasn't, she said, going to believe in a God who could allow such things to happen to her. I was not angry that she had lost her faith, but because it had taken her so long. Had she not noticed that God allows much worse things to happen to other people? What made it different if it happened to her?

But while my position was logically correct I no longer think that it was true to the way that religious belief actually works. No attempt to construct a rational calculus of suffering can succeed. It's not as if even God can do so: he certainly doesn't in the Book of Job. But that really isn't the point. The question isn't whether we ought to reconcile ourselves to the horrors of the world, but whether in fact we can. And the answer only comes in individual sizes. You may hand back your own ticket, but you can't hand back anyone else's.