In her letter (April 29), Gabrielle DeMoras raised the question that people might be asking regarding the bombing in Boston: namely, “Where was God?”

In answering, perhaps the majority would contend that God was with the first responders who sprang into action to help the injured and suffering. In other words, God wasn’t absent; he was present, working in and through the responders.

Instead of giving an answer similar to the above, DeMoras alleges that evil came into existence, along with sickness and death, as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. To the modern mind, that is an explanation that strains credulity.

I can’t believe that a just and merciful God would punish all mankind for the sins of our first ancestors by afflicting all subsequent generations with “evilness, sickness and death.”

A better explanation for the evil in the world, and one that has the further benefit of absolving God of the blame for the bad things that happen, is the acceptance of the laws of nature, including Darwinian evolution, and the seeming propensity of some to commit evil.

However, what all followers of Judeo-Christianity are likely to affirm is that God endowed our species with the knowledge of good and evil and gave us free will: the exercise of which gives us the freedom and responsibility of choosing between the two.

Stanley Rice, Turner