As a believer who used to be an atheist, I certainly get where you are coming from. The Problem of Evil seems intractable. If God is infinitely good and all that, why would God allow evil in God’s creation? I’m going to provide a link to my five (so far) part series where I explore this in so unserious a fashion that one Christian reader accused me of flippant treatment of scripture, but since he didn’t go on to tell me I was going to Hell, I wrote out a long thoughtful response. Anyway, here is part 1 (Parts 2–5 accessible from part 1):
But since you probably don’t want to read that whole song and dance, amusing though it is, let me try to put it “in so many words” as they say.
God gets lonely, creates free will beings so that God can have friends. Since free will beings are capable of evil, they promptly start fucking up. To complicate matters, since the future state of a free will being is indeterminate, so that not even a universal intelligence can entirely predict it, God does not always know what they are going to do next. Hilarity ensues.
This part not written yet: God gets sick of it and starts giving them greater and greater powers, deliberately putting the universe at risk. Swim or sink is God’s attitude, I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t even.
