Now before you get too hot and bothered about such impudence, and we can certainly understand your feelings there, let's keep in mind two things. One, Mr. Fry is not asking God such questions for information and enlightenment but rather as an attack without a care about truth and rightness. He's made up his mind that God (if He exists) is a jerk and that's that. Fry isn't looking for truth. He's looking for a straw man to support his preconceptions of an all powerful being.
But point two is the one upon which we must expound. Let's be fair, friends: it is okay to ask God questions, even questions which at first glance may seem impertinent, if we indeed ask them in search of understanding. In that sense, it's okay to ask even of God what about bone cancer in children?
Any God worth having can answer that. The short answer by the way is this: philosophically, no creation can equal its creator. A man might create a chair, but the chair is certainly not equal to the man. It can't be: the man simply cannot give all of himself to something else. Ergo God, being perfect, can't give His perfection away because He can't give all of Himself away. This must mean that creations, being less than their Creator, will be imperfect. And that means that human bodies will suffer problems: they can't maintain themselves perfectly. It helps to stress that this is a philosophic and not theological point. It can be accepted and understood by the seriously religious and the scientist equally if each are willing to be reasonable.
Would Stephen Fry care to address that point? We doubt it, because his mind is made up: God is contemptible. Yet we Christians are the close minded bigots in the western world.
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