He distinguishes between moral evil - evil human actions and the results of evil human actions - and natural evil, or the terrible events that happen without a clear human cause.  This includes things like floods, earthquakes, storms, etc.  All well and good.  But he's making the case that natural evil is not truly caused by humans - or more precisely, human sinfulness and the fall that resulted.  Rather, Wright argues the world has always been like this (full of natural disasters), and natural evil is not the result of man's fall from an initial state of perfection or grace.  

I find this problematic.  I haven't read his alternative theory yet, but his initial argument seems to not take the full Biblical witness into account.  He makes an interesting argument that God's curse regarding man and the ground is really best interpreted (exegetically) as the literal ground, and not as shorthand for all of creation.  So Wright assumes that certain aspects of the earth - plate tectonics, meteorological phenomenon - have always been the way we experience them today.  In other words, the world has always been a dangerous place with the capacity to destroy human life.  

An interesting thought, but not necessarily convincing.  What about Isaiah's prophecies about the "lion lying down with the lamb"?  This wouldn't seem to make much sense if there wasn't some sort of inference that the natural order as we know it isn't nearly as natural as we tend to think it is.  Our sense of outrage and loss in the face of catastrophic disaster would also seem to be profoundly misplaced, if this is just how things have always been.  And Wright's curious argument that, because we can't find evidence for anything other than the way things are today in the natural order, this must be how things have always been.  In my experience, the shards of a dropped crystal wine glass rarely lead one to assume that they are part of a single wine glass - particularly if one has decided that such a wine glass could not exist.

I'll be interested to see if he addresses this further.  But I'm very unconvinced on this one point.  Overall, the book seems good.  We'll see how it continues.