Since God knows everything, He would have known how much suffering would come. Why didn't He stop the process before it started, and spare His creatures all that pain?

This is sharper than the usual problem of evil, because it does not ask why suffering exists. It asks whether God should have preferred nothing to this — and that premise is doing most of the work.

1. The premise is that non-existence would be better. The objection assumes that, foreseeing all of it, God should have declined to create. That is a very large claim about the value of existence, and it is not obvious. Most people who have suffered severely do not wish they had never existed, and God is better placed to weigh that than we are.

2. Foreknowledge is not causation. God knowing that a person will do evil does not make him the author of it. A parent may know a child will struggle and still rightly give the child life. The objection slides from “God knew” to “God caused,” and the slide is the whole argument.

3. Freedom is the condition of love. “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart” (Matthew 22:37) presupposes the possibility of not doing so. A world of beings incapable of refusing God would also be incapable of loving him. The risk is not incidental to the good; it is the price of it.

4. Some goods cannot exist without risk. Courage requires danger; compassion requires suffering; forgiveness requires wrong; patience requires provocation. A world with no possibility of pain would have no possibility of these either. That does not make suffering good, but it means the ledger is not one-sided.

5. God can work evil for good without approving it. Joseph tells his brothers, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28) — a claim about God's competence, not a promise that the harm was small.

6. God did not stay out of the suffering. The objection assumes a distant deity dispensing pain from safety. The Christian claim is the opposite: “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), who wept at a friend's grave (John 11:35) and then died. Whatever else is true, this is not a God who has never suffered.

7. Our vantage point is a fragment. When Job demanded a hearing, God answered with questions: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). That is not a dismissal; it is a refusal to pretend that a three-pound brain can audit the whole. “My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).

8. Turn it around: “should have” needs a standard. The objection says God ought to have done otherwise. On what basis? If the universe is a mindless process, “ought” has no more authority than taste. The moral outrage in the question borrows a standard that theism supplies and naturalism struggles to ground.

9. Prevention would mean a different world entirely. To stop all suffering God would have to override every choice that causes it, or remove freedom altogether — and then the objection would be that he made puppets. There is no world with free creatures and no risk, and no world with love and no vulnerability.

10. The story ends with the undoing, not the triumph. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4); “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed” (Romans 8:18). On the biblical view evil gets a chapter, not the last word — and the final answer to the question is a resurrection, not an explanation.

The objection is not unreasonable, and no answer makes suffering easy to look at. But it depends on two claims it never argues for: that non-existence is preferable, and that a world without risk would be better. Neither is obvious, and the Christian story claims that God did the one thing the objection says he should have done — he entered the pain himself.

Sources: C.S. Lewis; The Problem of Pain; Alvin Plantinga; Clay Jones; Why Does God Allow Evil?; William Lane Craig.

Related challenges:
• If the world was created by all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving God, why does he permit evil, pain and suffering in nature? Why does he allow disease, parasites, brutality, handicaps and natural disasters to persist?
• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he PERMIT starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And telling us these VICTIMS suffer because of an inherited sin committed by Adam and Eve does not suffice!
• Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.