What do you think the greater purpose is?
The first point we must make, is from our limited vantage point we feel it necessary to know, and even demand it from God—and it is fundamental that we be able to accept it without knowing, because this is honoring to God. We say, "Even when I can't see it, I'm still willing to trust and honor God enough to put him above my intellectual abilities and emotional feelings—and say God only does what is loving, just and right, and it is my feelings and intellect that are insufficient." See, this is the reverse of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve—it's like going in reverse. Eve knew in herself, "God has given me every reason to trust him—Adam and I have never observed a single element of the problem of evil, we have never known suffering, we have not see one logical problem where it looked like God was the bad guy—and yet, we are still going to believe God is a liar, God is holding out on us, God doesn't want what's best for us, and God is evil." And think of Job—Job had to endure some of the most significant sufferings and loss with no explanation whatsoever, as we read his words we see him cry out several times "Why did this evil happen? Why?! I don't get it, I don't feel like it makes sense, I don't think it's justified, I don't understand it." And that feeling of offense prompted Job to started accusing and blaspheming God.
The second point is, my best understanding of what must be behind it. The one thing fallen creatures just do not do, and even the sin nature of Christian believers, is we do not naturally value God above all others. Oh, sometimes we think we do, we say we do, we try to, but underneath all of that, without a direct miracle and intervention and process of grace, we just do not naturally value God. We don't think God is very important and we naturally devalue him. And my best answer would be, that I believe something about the principle of delegation, one person having responsibility and power to affect others, and something about the principle of free will, being able to freely choose to honor God instead of being forced to, brings more glory and honor and pleasure to God, thereby valuing God. And that value—that value that God put on that principle, is more valuable than all the suffering of billions of people this world has ever known. See, I think the Calvinists are half right—God does have the justified right to be evil if he wanted, he could deliberately make vessels of wrath and not be culpable, because he owns all things. But because God self-reveals and self professes to be maximally loving and just, he has told us that is not who he decided to be.
The heart of the objection, for both the atheist and the Christian, is a rebellion against making God more valuable than suffering. It is making the suffering of the creation an idol that must be worshiped at all cost, and God himself must bow before it. God is culpable, God is a criminal, God is blameworthy, God is evil and cruel, God is a jerk to us, when we insist that God just does not have much value and human well being is the single most important moral objective and goal that God must adhere to. And it is sourced in pride, self-exaltation, the independent valuation of the creation upon itself by the powers invested in it, leading to offense at God, and rebellion, and a necessary involvement with demonic powers who stand for all these things, a union and involvement with the power of Satan and his hordes—who all represent the independence of pride and rebellion. So this manifests in occultic activity of every kind, and a warping of perceptions, and a utilization of logic and the intellect to feed our sense that we are able in and of ourselves to figure it all out and understand the moral problems and resolve God as the true criminal—from a place of limitation and sinfulness.
And all of this can be averted and defeated and subdued by one simple principle: Humility. Admitting the way I intellectually parse the logic, the way I emotionally feel about moral problems, the way something inside of me screams when I see a victimization of terrible proportions and what seems to my natural self, unjustified, unnecessary, uncalled for, harm and suffering upon innocent people, people who did not in and of themselves choose this lot, or choose the nature they were born with, or choose to be born into a situation of horrific and unfathomable abuse, or choose to never know the light of day through no fault of their own decision, born without hope as much as if God had, in fact, been a Calvinistic God who created them only to be destroyed for his glory, but were, in fact, created lost and hopeless because of some man's choice way back somewhere, some Original Sin of our federal head and representative, everything in me screams out "That's not fair! That's not good! That's not just! That's not righteous! That's not loving! That's not holy! That's not caring! That's not justified!" and I cannot see any logical or emotional way past it, but underneath is devaluing God, the idolatry of pride, rebellion, and the occult, trusting in myself.
God is scary. God is different. God is particular and unique in a way a sinful creature just does not naturally understand, accept, praise, and adhere to. God is a force to contend with, and a force none will prevail against. But God is mysterious and strange to our natural logical interactions, he just doesn't naturally make sense to us and his ways seem so foreign and weird and incomprehensible, that there is a lot of room for offense and a failure of faith where we just can't comprehend or feel like we can justify God being good anymore, and we can crash and burn and give up on God, and accuse him of terrible things, because we think he just didn't have a good enough reason or excuse to allow all the suffering he did, it was just reckless, it was careless, it was needless, it was callous indifference, it was thoughtless endangerment, for him to allow one person's choice to open the Pandora's Box for untold misery and suffering and torment, as if God had a fetish for pain, as if God just loved the idea of hurting and destroying things he made, as if God were some cosmic masochist who just doesn't care when a person goes to hell without the Gospel or some little child suffers horrible molestation or when some young woman dies of Ebola and cancer and tumors and intestinal parasites, why is all this necessary just to give some value to measly old God who could avoid the whole thing altogether?
These are deep waters and deep issues of the heart, and to come out on the other side, to hold on despite all the possibilities of our faith failing us and the raging of offense at God within, is to reverse the Original Sin, it's to eat from a tree exactly opposite and inverse to Eve's tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it is to wake up in what sometimes seems and feels like hell, just as Eve woke up in heaven, and say I trust God anyway, I trust God when I don't understand, I trust God when I don't even feel capable of believing he is good and loving, I trust God even when I see no real evidence that convinces me, just as Eve only knew evidence of God's goodness, I trust God when the lights are out and the blood is on God's hands, and everything in my mind and heart points to God as the real criminal, I trust and honor and glorify God that somewhere, somehow, there's just something I'm not processing right, there's just something I don't understand and think I do, there's just something is too sinful in me to properly evaluate and weigh the morals, there's just something wrong in me and not God, and I am the criminal and not God, and I have insufficient moral purity and intellectual understand to properly understand what God is doing—behold I am vile, I put my hand over my mouth and say no more. And those monsters that only God can draw near with his sword, the monsters of pride and self-righteousness, were defeated in Job's life.
But we can avoid the correction, judgment and discipline of Job altogether and have a somewhat happier end to our story then he did, if we just discipline ourselves, learn to embrace and pursue and cultivate and earnestly seek and develop, and pray passionately for the one virtue and trait that will protect us from this problem of evil: Humility. And that virtue will lead us out of the trap of fixing the problem of evil by making God the author of it, so we feel safer and better about the whole problem, because the one thing that is so intense inside me is, "I don't want God to sacrifice my life for the principle of delegation, and I don't think that's justified and worth it." This is why removing free will makes me feel safer about God and less offended by his actions—I would rather sacrifice God's universal love, than embrace a logical problem that puts me in personal danger for my own safety and my own glory.
And this—everything I just wrote—you can object to it, you can shrug it off, you can argue with it—but it's not just a few arguments I slapped together to justify a doctrinal position. It's the anguish of a man wrestling with God, it's the inception and gestation and birth of a sinful man wrestling intensely with his own sin, wrestling with a problem that hurts and oppresses, that's made many forsake Christ out of anger or unbelief, that's gone to the very roots of the mountains, that represents hours of anguish and struggle and prayer and cries to God. And I hope something I wrote and help someone in some way.
Humility.