If God exists, why is there evil?
The objection, in full
An omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good God could prevent suffering and would want to. Yet earthquakes flatten cities, children die of cancer, and the holocaust happened. Either God can't, won't, or isn't there.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
or, in plain terms —If God's so good, why did my dog die?
The argument equivocates on "good."
Premise 1 assumes that a perfectly good being would always eliminate suffering. But this conflates the good of an individual moment with the good of a whole.
A surgeon causes pain to heal. A parent permits a fall to teach balance. The act is not made evil by the suffering it produces if a sufficient countervailing good is unattainable otherwise.
The deductive form of the problem (Mackie, 1955) was abandoned even by atheist philosophers after Plantinga's free-will defense. What remains is the evidential form — and evidential arguments don't yield certainty, only probability weighted by priors. The theist's prior is not irrational.