Confidence in God’s Character

   The skeptic’s question has to be answered: 

                       "Would you create a world with pain, and if you did, could you at the same time still be called good?"

 
Two inferences can be drawn:
1.How can there be an all-loving, all-powerful God when evil is so evident and uncontained?
2.Even if God exists, how can He be called good while allowing death and destruction to happen, when we ourselves would be considered wicked if we did the same thing?

 

Let's see the perspective that C.S. Lewis gives in his book, “The Problem of Pain.”
"If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both."
With a characteristic conciseness and clarity Lewis sets the stage for the entire book in the first paragraph of Chapter 2 - "The possibility of solving [the problem] depends on showing that the terms 'good' and 'almighty', and perhaps also the term 'happy', are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meaning, then the argument is unanswerable".

Lets keep another day for a look at a philosophical dimension of this discussion as it begins to shape the character of God.