The Problem of Evil makes it unlikely that God exsits

First off, your concluding point is just wrong. It would NOT be better evolutionarily for us to be emotionless – emotions have immense evolutionary advantages: they cause us to procreate when it is not strictly advantageous, look out for loved ones in defiance of cool reason and become violent to ward off other people. In fact, there are people born without the ability to feel pain and these people have really high mortality in early years because pain teaches really valuable lessons that are needed for survival. Further, you are basically suggesting that for no good reason God wanted to create us so that he could make sure we could suffer. That seems awful to me. But, I digress from real issues. Your response is to deny premise 1: God DOES want there to be suffering First, I want to point out that I actually define benevolence (and thus omnibenevolence) as the desire to avoid suffering in others, based on how I think we use the terms colloquially. Maybe this kind of definitional defense is a cheap trick, but I think you have to take the further step and reject God's omnibenevolence to make this argument fly. This means that you have no more reason to think of God as a good guy than a bad guy – that is, ‘God' is as likely to be the traditional Christian God as the devil without a specific claim in favor of his goodness. Your first claim is "Short of having observed other perfectly good gods in action, one cannot logically make a statement about what God would or would not do". I hope for your sake that you are mistaken in this claim. As I see it, the fundamental building block for all current religions is the idea that X human action will lead God to do something favorable for you in the afterlife. Believe in Jesus and you go do heaven. Blow yourself up and you'll get 72 virgins in paradise. If you want to make this argument, then you must take the further step and realizing that you cannot say that belief in Jesus (assuming you're Christian) will get you into heaven since you can't know what God will do. In fact, while you're at it, abandon all religion – we can't know what God wants or doesn't want and religion is built on knowing what God wants. The next argument you make is a concurrent, but slightly different argument about how the existence of evil is necessary to understand the existence of good. The problem here is that the existence of the knowledge of evil is all that is necessary for us to understand good, but evil itself does not have to occur. God could just show some films, for example, that tell everyone what evil is (or use that omnipotence thing to make us understand) and then let us go along out merry lives never actually experiencing evil, but knowing what it would be if it ever came up. This is also where you father and book analogies come into the picture. Would a perfectly good father make sure nothing bad ever happened to you? Hell yes he would! Of course, Earthy fathers don't do this because suffering is inevitable and children need to learn how to cope, but God can make 100% sure that nothing bad happens, and I think it would be an enormous kindness to do this. And, are books with more conflict better? Sure. But for three reasons. 1) it isn't happening to me. Conflict for others is one thing, but something awful happening to me is never enjoyed. 2) We have evolved to accept pain and suffering as a normal part of life. If God wasn't such a jerk, this wouldn't have happened. 3) we get bored with things being great all the time. But, this is part of our suffering which God could easily remove. Ultimately, the majority of your responses cannot take into account the amount of suffering that actually exists. In fact, the world as we know it is built so that one cannot avoid suffering. Take a lion for example: she can do one of two things, kill and eat a gazelle alive, causing it to suffer until it dies, or she can let her and her cubs starve until they die. Either way, suffering results. Another example is my argument from physical minds. There is no reason to make suffering endemic to life – a small amount of pain would both make life interesting (as per the book/ parent analogies) and allow us to understand what it means to be good. Why not achieve these goals with far, far less suffering? Finally, even if you win that it's not logically contradictory for there to be a God and evil, bear in mind that I only argue that God is unlikely because of the existence of evil. If we can make the claim that God is good (as the bible does) then it is likely that he would reject evil (based on the human notion of good).