Will Bowen takes "uncomplaining" to an extreme. Bowen doesn't gripe about anything, ever. A reporter asks, "How are you doing?" "Great!" he answers. "Can't complain." Really? You can't complain? What do you do when your car breaks down? "I call the mechanic and ask him to fix my car." How about when something terrible and unfair happens for no reason? Everything happens for a reason, Bowen responds. "Absolutely. In my theology, that's what I believe." When he climbs into the pulpit of his church in Kansas City, Mo., each Sunday, he shouts, "God is good!" and the congregation shouts back, "All the time!"

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Bart Ehrman, Biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina and former evangelical Christian explains in his new book “God’s Problem” why theodicy – or the problem of suffering -- caused him to cease believing in the Christian God. Here's my interview with him.

The problem of suffering is the oldest philosophical problem in history. Why attempt to address it now?

The reason it’s an old problem is because people are constantly confronted with it. It’s the oldest problem for thinking people, but people still think.

Can you explain the problem, theologically?

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When you walk into Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago, the first thing you see on a Sunday morning are the people crowding the lobby, hugging and kissing, asking after each other’s children. The congregation is older and formally dressed: many of the women wear fur coats, stockings and heels; almost no one is dressed in jeans. As an usher leads a reporter upstairs to the pastor’s office, he rebukes a young boy: “Take off your hat in church, son.”

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