Dear Mr. Fry,
The reason you gave in your interview for being an atheist is probably the most common - the suffering of innocents. And as you appear to be a reasonable man, I believe you might consider a reasonable counter argument (rather than a knee jerk fundamentalist response).
I propose that your reasoning is based on the false premise that God's will prevails absolutely. Ergo Evil would be God's will. It is commonly overheard at funerals that a person's death was God's will. As if that is supposed to comfort the grieving rather than foster resentment.
Since you don't give credence to the existence of a divine being, it would be ill advised for me to quote a body of work supposedly revealed by that being as if it were an irrefutable definition of things, but let me borrow from it as from an inspired literary painting of a collective* concept of a spiritual paradigm.
At the base of that concept is the word Yahweh. One translation of the Hebrew word is "I am that which is becoming."
And since Christian scripture tells us that God is Love and those who Love are of God, participating in His nature, I shall occasionally use the words Yahweh or Love to refer to God as I attempt to address a common misunderstanding of the paradigm.
In Thessalonians the artist expresses that death is not Love's will. Well if not, then how can it happen? We're told that everything that happens is God's will, right? Or rather "everything happens for a reason" in the sense that it is part of some master plan. I argue that it's not. Bad stuff happens. Because evil does exist. Separate from God. There is light and there is dark. The "master plan" doesn't redact it, but does offer a provision for redeeming the painful experiences and turning them around to the good.
The misconception that Evil is God's will is perpetrated especially by some fundamentalist preachers when they suggest that disaster is visited upon us by a God angry about our sexual proclivities. (No mention of slavery or letting children go hungry.) They ignore scripture (e.g., Luke 13:4 and Matthew 5:45) suggestive that evil has become a stream in the natural order of things in this world, affecting all of us without bias.
Why didn't God create a world without Evil? He did. Yahweh's will was that creation would grow into fullness of being, in Love becoming Himself. Then somehow humans screwed it up. They wanted the knowledge of good and evil. And in so doing gave over some of the reins to Evil (maybe just to see what would happen?) putting things on a different trajectory. A trajectory that could be derailed and turned around only by divine intervention.
An incarnation: Love, no longer abstract, but made flesh - temporal, visible, touchable, a Love that could be tasted and could permeate our being and move us to enact Love's will in this world. To become the Light that the Darkness cannot grasp, to become the Grace that abounds even more where Evil abounds.
If one allows that the physical world is a metaphor for the spiritual, then the discovery that every cell in our body contains the genetic code for the whole body would suggest that we are all cells in the Mystical Body of Christ. That we are One. Collectively becoming God. Becoming Love. And as God in this world we act to alleviate and prevent suffering, to enact Love's will not by snapping our fingers but in temporal service - to make Love visible, reachable, touchable here and now.
*The collective attribute is supported by gematria or theomatics - a study based on the ancient Hebrew and Greek practice of using letters of their alphabet to represent numbers. It can thus be demonstrated that the themes in scripture are mathematically consistent.
