God could create a perfect world of peace and love, the world isn't perfect - why would he choose it to be that way and not stop bad things happening? Why wouldn't he create humans who dont get sick? That's exactly my point.*
These are really important questions, and unfortunately I think some Christians tend to try and throw catch all pat answers that don't actually work in the reality of suffering. So, the free will thing - I do think it is all to do with this but think there are nuances to the whole question. I think we are broken because of free will - because we have choice. If we had no choice we would have no capacity to love, we would be preprogrammed to a certain setting and it would lead to a world without joy, because it wouldn't be based on our decisions but on our programming. Yet that doesn't give in any way a full answer to the question of theodicy, and I've never found a full answer. Yet I remain convinced of the love of God. I've heard all sorts of answers - Satan did it, Eve did it, we mess up (and we do.) But these give only partial insights into a mystery.
I live with pain. Every day. Sometimes great, shrieking agony. I was that child who had a disease she had nothing to do with causing. I was that child who continued in sickness and pain despite prayer. I'm still that child, really, still asking why, some days. Like today, when it's been too much to bear and I feel like I can't go on much longer like this. I'm being honest here, because as a Christian I do not want to indulge in the pretence that all is ok and we always have answers. I have lots of knowledge about the bible and the early church and that knowledge gives my faith a foundation of rationality, but in the end it is not that knowledge which keeps me believing. It is the experience of a God who gets into the pain with me, over and over again, holding me while I weep. It's the experience of a God who loves beyond measure, who weeps at the brokenness of the world, who longs for restoration. Of a God who this stuff matters to so much that this God did do something in Jesus - not only a life of radical kindness and goodness, but a death which shattered apart mess and pain and crap and sin, and a resurrection which conquered all of those things. It's the fact that God didn't sit apart from human weakness and brokenness, but entered fully into it.
And it's the hope i live in which sustains me through the worst of days, the hope of all being made right, of ultimate justice and mercy and there being no more death or pain or mourning. There promises are not simply ancient words to me and to millions of others, they are a reality, a peace that goes beyond any other peace I've ever known, a joy that warms me more than any other joy I've known, a hope that bubbles up and is too beautiful for words to describe.
I know, I know. I know it doesn't seem to make sense, in the light of what we see around us. I'm painfully aware of how it is not simply something that can be weighed and proven. But I think human capacity is for so much more than empirical evidence. We have capacity to love, for great creativity, for beauty. All of those things are intrinsic to the human condition and for me it is God who makes sense of all of those things.
Of course I get upset. Angry, even, about my pain and the pain of others. But I've also found something that soothes the pain, that burrows far beneath and brings me into a different place, a different perspective. In worship of God I find freedom, I find out who I am and who I am supposed to be, I find something more. So much more.
And it is a mystery, therefore attempting to answer the epicurean question ends up with me spilling a whole load of emotion instead of a nice well-balanced answer. Sorry 