Barney Zwartz, religion editor of The Age, argues:

One of the main problems with the debate as formulated these days is that the God it discusses is not a God anyone actually believes in. It is a philosopher’s model, it is an abstract set of attributes: perfect power, perfect knowledge, perfect goodness— but no personality, no historical context, no interaction with humans.  It’s purely theoretical. It’s not the God of the Torah, of the Bible, of the Koran, the God people actually believe in and turn to in trouble. It’s divorced from God’s character, which involves love and grace.

The question gets it the wrong way round because it puts us at the center rather than God. It assumes God is here to serve me, rather than the reverse. The idea has crept into society that God is relevant only to the extent that he benefits the believer, smoothes her path, makes her a winner.
This is an infantile faith, and one which struggles to accept suffering.  This is the faith that asks “why me?”, or “why do bad things happen to good people?” In fact suffering and moral merit are not connected.

Philosopher and critic Russell Blackford counters:

Most of the supposed explanations of evil make sense only in a pre-scientific setting. They are now absurdly implausible even at face value. In particular, most of the suffering that there has been on this planet took place long before human beings even existed. An all-powerful God did not need any of this. It could have created the world in a desirable form without any of it just by thinking, “Let it be so!” That’s what being all-powerful is about, if we take it seriously.
Barney Zwartz tried to defuse the issue, or dance around it, in various ways, but he freely admitted to having no explanation that was satisfactory. At least that’s honest. Someone else might have tried to push harder on the free will defense, the higher goods defense, or some other lame explanation. These explanations do sound glib, as Barney says. In fact, they sound desperate or even intellectually dishonest. Some of them are morally monstrous. They are the refuge of someone who wants to hold onto religious faith at all costs.
The fact remains that the problem of evil is a real one for people with a traditional idea of God. The problem rightly causes many honest people deep anxiety. It assuredly does not involve a God that no one believes in, but the God that most monotheists actually worship, and it has never been satisfactorily solved. Of course, if you don’t start by believing in gods at all, or you believe only in limited gods or metaphorical gods, the problem does not arise for you except as a hypothetical scenario. But for people who posit the traditional Abrahamic God, the problem assuredly does arise, and there is no adequate answer. The intellectually honest response, painful though it may be, is to stop believing in that God.