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I actually take the exact opposite view. Because of all the horrendous evils in the world, I feel there has to be a God to make everything worthwhile in the end. Else there is no goodness, and life is just a cruel joke.
Exactly what position I take on God's providence depends on what direction I look at it from. From the human perspective, we have free will, events are 'random', and God's providence takes the form of working with what we give him to bring goodness out of evil. From God's perspective, everything is pre-ordained, even though he is constrained to some extent by our free choice. (In brief, God knows that in circumstance C we would freely choose to do A, and he can put us in C, but he can't make it so we would freely do ~A in C.)
Now the answer to the question "Why doesn't God act?" is threefold. First of all, we don't know why he acts in some situations and not others. We are not God, and we don't know everything he knows. Secondly, he refrains from acting in order to respect our freedom. If he intervened whenever we were going to do something evil, we wouldn't really have free will, would we? Thirdly, he is not up on high, watching disinterestedly as we suffer -- he suffers with us, as he suffered on the cross.
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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."
"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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