no problem

When religious, I never went far into the 'problem of evil' issue, partly because it never struck me as dire. It seemed to assume a relatively high weight to the resulting attendant human (and other) suffering. But that weighting, in the mind of God (or a God), isn't knowable except by the assertion (or revelation) that it is weighty. And that isn't useful: what we'd need to know is the relative weight of human suffering compared to the weightiness of producing an interesting human world (for which one needs both good and evil), or of having an exposition (for which things need to play out), and so on.

In other words, the 'problem' of evil is largely the 'problem' of suffering, but there are things worth suffering for in our conception (achievement, freedom, etc.), and the same things, when necessary, are worth permitting others to suffer for - again, in our conception. So it would be no surprise if God had things that were, in his conception, worth making us suffer for.

The problem of evil becomes a productive subject, however, when we step back and consider it in relation to how people accommodate themselves to religion. This is why the problem of evil becomes is more pronounced for a liberal than a conservative theologian.

In fact, this latter point can be backed into a point that isn't specifically religious. One crude account of the conservative impulse (contrasted with libertarian or progressive impulses) is that it flows from, and in proportion to, the considered view that human evil is widespread, salient, and persistent - in which case virtue had better set its jaw, gird up the loins of its mind, and set out into the world armed to the teeth.

My own view, admittedly a heuristic in the absence of solid evidence, is that any human individual, institution, or community is, by default, unless shown otherwise, to be taken as exactly half evil, half good, with the halves admixed: neither offering a division of each in two nor resolving into a third state neither good nor evil. This balance does strange things to conservative, libertarian, or progressive assumptions, and stranger things still to the implicit formulae that result from those assumptions. Those strange things are, I tell you, my convictions. They are why I must be an exile from politics, from religion, and from the other thoughtful societies - my thoughts are sports, neither hybrid nor purebred.