If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he permit starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And don't tell me these victims are suffering for Adam's sin.
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You are not asking a theoretical question, and the size of it should be admitted before anything else is said. Anyone who has watched a child starve, or sat with someone who was abused, has earned the right to be suspicious of a tidy answer.
1. The Bible does not minimize this. Scripture's own vocabulary for the world is not "basically fine." Creation is "subjected to futility" and groans for rescue (Romans 8:20-22). The psalms scream "How long, O LORD?" (Psalm 13:1) and are not scolded for it. A book that contains Job, Lamentations, and the cry of dereliction from the cross is not pretending the world is in order.
2. Most of this evil is human choice. Rape, molestation, torture, and genocide are not weather. They are decisions, made by people, most of them free to stop. Alvin Plantinga's free will defense is often caricatured, but its core is modest: a world with creatures who can genuinely love is a greater good than a world of puppets, and such a world logically permits evil. That explains why evil is possible. It does not yet explain why it is this common and this severe, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
3. Natural evil is a separate problem. Starvation from drought and disease is not caused by a perpetrator, and it needs its own answer. The Bible puts it inside a creation that is out of joint and awaiting repair, not inside a creation God regards as finished and good as it stands (Romans 8:22). That is a diagnosis, not a solution, and the honest Christian should say so.
4. Suffering is not a punishment ledger. Jesus explicitly rejected the arithmetic that says suffering equals guilt. Asked about a blind man, he said the blindness was not due to his sin or his parents' (John 9:2-3). He said the same about the eighteen killed when the tower fell (Luke 13:4). And God calls Job's comforters liars for running that calculation (Job 42:7). Whatever suffering is for, it is not a receipt for a specific sin.
5. Adam's sin is not charged to a child. The version of inherited guilt you are rejecting is not the doctrine. Scripture says plainly, "The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father" (Ezekiel 18:20), and Israel's law forbade executing a child for a parent's crime (Deuteronomy 24:16). What the Bible describes is a damaged inheritance, not a courtroom where God bills you for Adam's theft. Christians differ on how to state this — the Western tradition leans on Romans 5:12-19, the Eastern churches talk about inherited mortality rather than inherited guilt — but no serious reading says a raped child is being punished for Eden.
6. God did not stay outside it. The Christian answer to suffering is not a formula; it is that God entered the worst of it. Isaiah described the servant as "pierced for our transgressions" and "crushed for our iniquities" (Isaiah 53:5), and the New Testament identifies that servant as God himself in flesh. When Job demanded a hearing, God did not hand him a theodicy; he showed up (Job 38-42). That is either enough or it isn't, but it is not indifference.
7. Your outrage assumes a real standard. Here is the turn. You are not merely reporting that children suffer; you are indicting it. That is a moral judgment, and it only has force if there is a real good that suffering violates. If pain is just electrochemical noise, "why does God permit it" collapses into "why does the universe contain events I dislike." Your compassion is not nothing — it is evidence that you believe in a standard you did not invent, which is exactly what the Christian account says is written on your heart (Romans 2:15).
8. The story ends in judgment and repair. Christianity does not say the perpetrators get away with it. The same doctrine that puts God on a cross puts him on a bench, and the Bible's last picture is not an explanation but a repair: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more" (Revelation 21:4). If that is true, the accounting is not closed yet. If it is false, your objection is not an objection to Christianity so much as a description of a world with no accounting at all.
The objection is strongest where it is most honest: this is too much to explain, and Christianity does not so much explain it as absorb it — God on a cross, and a promise that no tear is lost. That is a claim you can reject. It is not a claim that was never made.
Sources: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; Alvin Plantinga; Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil?; D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?.