I would like to see if anyone can answer the following questions related to the problem of evil.

“Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?” — Epicurus

Most of the christians think this problem can be answered by appeal to free will.  It cannot.  The first reason is that even if the free will argument worked (it doesn’t) it only answers a fraction of the problem.  At best it could only resolve the problem of the evil that we do to one another.  What about natural evils -- diseases, plagues, natural disasters etc.?  Some however have argued that God allows for both moral evils and natural evils in order to provide for the conditions necessary to create virtues like ‘moral urgency’ and allow for the possibility of ‘genuine responsibility’ (Swinburne).  In other words, the idea is that, though pleasures are important, God desired to create a world that not only includes them but also is full of moral significance and includes higher moral virtues.  The claim is: without a certain degree of evils and suffering, this would not be possible; thus God allows them.  The key words in this defense, however, are 'certain degree' (enter the evidential problem of evil).  Thus, even if we accept that there be some ‘higher goods,’ could we not attain them without so called egregious horrors -- namely, the plagues of history, the holocaust, tsunamis, starvation and AIDs in Africa?  

Others argue that if God started intervening we would live in a world of simulated but not real moral significance.  Fair enough but even if one accepted this, though God may not then intervene in every case, surely he would still intervene in acts of egregious evil like the holocaust and would never have created things like cancer and AIDs.  Can it be that an all good god would allow such ineffable horrors as the holocaust for the sake of some greater good?  Was Hitler then an instrument of God?  But the real question then becomes: where is God's sense of moral urgency?  If this issue of moral urgency is of the highest moral order, how can it be that God utterly lacks it -- and lacks it precisely so that we might develop it?  And how can it be that ones ultimate reward for sufficiently developing these virtues is paradise in the next world where the, supposed, second order good of human happiness now gains first order status and is fully maximized, while the, supposed, paramount virtues like moral urgency are thereby rendered absent?  There is something clearly backwards about the logic of this sort of theological apology.  For there to be any really meaning to the claim that 'God is an all good god' one must be able to describe the sufficient conditions for this.  That is, one must effectively be able to describe what a world with a sadistic god would look like in contrast to ours.