Well, first off, I think Al Plantinga answers this 'problem' quite well in his book
The Nature of Necessity. In fact, he answers it so well that contemporary philosophers of religion don't argue about the problem of evil in the way that you pose it any more. No one thinks that the existence of evil
contradicts the existence of God. The argument revolves around to what extent the existence of evil is evidence against the existence of God, and so is referred to as the evidential argument from evil. But, of course, none of this is an argument.
I'll start out by saying that I agree with a lot of your points, so I'll only take issue with the ones I disagree with. A minor point is that you're missing a premise. You also need to assume that God is all-knowing, since otherwise, he might just not know about evil. But I assume that those you're arguing against will generally accept that premise. You make a brief point about the nature of God's omnipotence; I want to expand on that point and make a similar point about God's omnibenevolence.
It's often said that God is omnipotent; nearly as often, this is qualified by saying that God cannot do impossible things. To some this seems like a cop-out; if God is all-powerful, why can't he do anything? Well, because to be all-powerful means having all power. So God can do anything that power can do. But power cannot do impossible things, since there aren't really any such things. (As an illustration, picture a Platonic heaven of the forms. It includes the form of everything possible. When God creates, he takes one of the forms and actualizes it. But he can't actualize the impossible world*, because it doesn't exist in the world of forms. There's nothing there to actualize.) Second, his omnibenevolence neither entails that God will create a world without evil nor that he will create a world with the 'least possible amount' of evil (how would we judge that, anyway? How many 'malums' does this world have? How many could it have?) nor that we will understand why he allows the evils he does. It's possible that if God had prevented Hitler, 20 years later an even worse dictator would have come to power.
Which leads me to my next point; it's important to understand that CSflim is offering us a deductive argument with the conclusion "God does not exist". Now, deductive arguments are nice if you can get them. But all I have to do to refute it is show that it is possible -- not likely, not probably, not actual,
possible -- that the premises could be true and the conclusion false. You might think that my point about Hitler is implausible. It probably is. The suggestion made that we might have some sixth sense about natural evils, had we not sinned, isn't particularly plausible. But I don't see that either is impossible. And their possibility is all I need.
So we come to the meat of the argument. CSflim asserts that:
Quote:
2. "All evil comes from Free Will"
Again, both false and irrelevant: False for the same reason as above; the existence of natural evil.
And irrelevant for similar reasons.
If it were true, all this would mean was that God created us and gave us Free Will, in the knowledge that it would result in evil. The original argument still stands.
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First of all, it seems clearly possible that there might have been no world that God could create in which there is both free will and evil. (There are two sets of worlds that are relevant here -- the set of possible worlds and the set of feasible worlds. God can only create the feasible worlds.)** And it also seems possible that God might want to allow evil for the sake of free will.
Secondly, I'm sure you will want to argue that a good God wouldn't allow any evil at any price. But this seems obviously false. As humans, with our limited knowledge and foresight, we allow small evils for the sake of larger goods all the time. Consider a parent immunizing his child. He's allowing a small evil (the pain of the shot) for a larger good (immunity from certain diseases). Remember that there is no best possible world. There is almost certainly a limit to how much evil a good God would allow -- it seems unlikely he would create a world in which all the creatures were in constant pain. But it doesn't seem to me that the evil in this world, great though it is, is more than a good God would necessarily allow. CSflim argues that it could be better. Perhaps. But it could be much, much worse. There's an epistemological problem here. How do we quantify good and evil? How many bonums is a warm summer day? How many malums is a paper cut? It's easy to say that there could be less evil. But it's hard to prove. [For many of these points, I'm indebted to Tom Flint and Peter van Inwagen.]
Thirdly, it's important to realize that I'm not arguing that all evil comes from free will. I'm arguing that it's possible that God allows evil for the sake of free will. Plantinga has suggested that it's possible that, had we not sinned, we would be able to avoid natural evils. It's possible that free will is such a great good, it outweighs the evil we do. You might not think it likely, but the bare possibility is all I need.
*Just as a point of interest, yes, there is only one impossible world.
**This position is called Molinism, and if you're really interested, you'll want to check out Tom Flint's book
Divine Providence. Briefly, the position is this. We have free will. This means that God can't just create any possible world he wants; because we have free will, we can do what we want. So, there's set of propositions called "Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom". These are of the form "If Agent A is in circumstance C, she will freely choose to do action X." The set of feasible worlds are those worlds in which the set of true CCFs are true. So say the CCF "If A in C then X" is true in W (the actual world) and Y (some other possible world), but in Z (another possible world), the CCF "If A in C then ~X" is true. Then W and Y are feasible worlds, and Z is not.