Philosopher Scott LeBarge has pointed out that ancient thinkers understood that viewing the natural order as well-designed has a tactical, therapeutic value: a world that is too harsh would be unexplainable.

Accordingly, the Stoic Epictetus asks: Has rationality been given us by the gods for misery and unhappiness, for us to spend our lives in sorrow?

He prods us to answer “no.”

But if we were not designed for suffering, then why are so many of our lives full of the deaths of our closest loved ones? Our children? Our spouses? What kind of design is that?

The Stoics took it upon themselves to answer, but their effort at explanation stops short of others. They do not suggest we should rejoice in the idea that loved ones might make it to heaven; they do not offer a cosmology in which our loved ones return to the world over and over.

Instead, the Stoics emphasize that loss is part of nature’s order. It is capable of devastating us, but it is not evil. We are not made........

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