God is Good--Depending on What You Mean By "Good"
Theodicy-the mystery of how an all-good God can allow evil and suffering to exist-has been dealt with here, especially by our theological dominatrix, Deborah909. Over the centuries, theodicy has driven multitudes of kindly and capable thinkers absolutely batshit. God is good-so why do I have a tootheache?
The most broadly promulgated explanation cooks down to, God has His Reasons and we're too dumb to grasp them and shouldn't try. (See the Book of Job, where God yells testily at Job: "Where were you when I poured the foundations of the Earth? Were you there handing me the rebar?") I never cared for this explanation, which is really a cruel dodge. The Book of Job is a metaphor of God's power, not his cuddliness. It's really the answer to a much different question, posed by a much different time and culture.
There is another approach to theodicy that I take, and first read in John Polkinghorne's excellent book, The Faith of a Physicist. (In print; go to Amazon.) In summary, the goodness of God is measured by the degree of freedom he allows his creations, not by the degree to which he keeps them from beating up on each other. An all-good God allows his creations complete freedom, meaning freedom from interference by said God. If this were not so, we would all be grinning plaster gnomes on God's front lawn, which doesn't sound like much fun to me. Freedom, of course, implies a conflict of desires between free creatures, which often leads to those creatures offing one another in gruesome ways.
Similarly, the physical world (the source of "natural evil" like being on the wrong side of Mount St. Helens when it blows) is free to be what it was created to be. It is the nature of volcanoes to flood the land with molten rock. That's their job. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't be volcanoes. God doesn't interfere. A volcano is free to be what it is. So if you build a village next to that mountain, rube, don't blame God when it goes up in smoke.
Many who recognize the fundamental importance of freedom have asked why we were not all given a balancing measure of moral sense at birth. That, too, may be an expression of God's goodness. We have to be free to be nasty, or we're not really free. God is smart enough to understand that, and good enough to let it be so.
In my view, the contradiction suggested by theodicy is resolved by theosis…but that's for another time and another node or five. Stay tuned.