The Problem of Evil fails

Thank you for the insightful response!Properly Understanding CausationI wish to first address what I believe is a problem with your argument: you seem to have erroneously narrowed the scope of causality to a degree that humans do not generally accept legally, logically or philosophically. When it is stated that someone is inflicting gratuitous harm, this can be at both a direct and indirect level as seen from each of these standpoints. While God's intention was not to cause harm, he still indirectly caused it because he did not take appropriate steps within his capacity to prevent the harm.Our legal system is full of crimes of this nature. Allow me to give one example. Suppose you are an employer who mass manufactures dough. As such, you have a giant mixer that, if a person were to fall into it, would immediately shred them to pieces. As an employer, it is your legal responsibility to provide a guard rail to that employees do not fall in this mixer. If you neglect to take the appropriate safeguards against an obvious and imminent danger, and an employee falls into the mixer, you as the employer who neglected to do this are held legally responsible. This problem is further compounded in the example of God because he is omniscient, which means not only does he neglect to ensure reasonable safeguards against harm, he knows harm will result and still opts to eschew safeguards. Walter White may have had noble motives for producing methamphetamine, but we would still hold him logically, legally and philosophically responsible for causing gratuitous harm.Having established that God can be held as an indirect cause, I also wish to dispute your claim that he is not also a direct cause of suffering. You claim that, "I have never seen God inflict gratuitous harm on anyone. I can't even imagine what this would look like. Does a voice come out of the clouds and say "I will now vaporize Joe", and then "poof", Joe is vaporized?" In the bible, there are many direct references to him doing exactly that. The Bible makes clear that this is indeed, his policy. It states, "But God will strike you down, pull you from your home, and drag you away from the land of the living." -Psalm 52:5"The Lord will send wasting disease, and burning pain, and flaming heat against you, keeping back the rain till your land is waste and dead; so will it be till your destruction is complete." -Deuteronomy 28:22With this kind of language, we can't ever actually know when God is directly harming an individual, even perhaps under the guise of the free will he so "nobly" created.Rebutting My opponent's Problematic AnalogiesIn the case of Frank, Frank has no stake in indirect causation and God does. This is an extremely poorly thought out analogy and I'm not sure why it was included.In the case of the parents who have created children with free will, while this a better analogy than the previous, it does not hold simply because there is a large discrepancy in knowledge. God is omniscient; parents are not. If, as a parent, your child drinks bleach while you are at work, you are not held responsible. If, however, you are sitting in the same room watching the child, you see them pick up the bottle and begin to drink it, fully aware of its toxicity and the harm that will result, and you fail to intervene you are absolutely held responsible in our society.It's important to understand the differences between knowing and not knowing in terms of causality. It is also important to differentiate between capacity and a lack of capacity. One cannot make the argument that humans necessarily have a capacity to stop a mass genocide (look at how many assassination attempts were made on Hitler and failed). God is omniscient and omnipotent and therefore has greater responsibility.The Free Will Revocation ProblemThis was the crux of my argument, and I'm afraid you did not address the issue. There is still a large imbalance as previously described in my argument above. I challenged you to give me an example of inflicted harm that does not take away from someone's free will in order to disprove that an improportionality occurs. You claim you can give me examples; if so, please do. Otherwise, my argument holds. You say, "according to your logic, wouldn't humans using free will to help others thereby increase over all free will? If so, giving humans free will to help each other also increases the amount of free will those humans have." This leads me to believe you perhaps don't understand my argument as it in no way entails that. In fact, I made explicitly clear that in the absence of harm, humans have greater capacity to exercise free will as my argument clearly states that harm minimizes available free will.If, as you've claimed, God was doing a noble thing by giving us unabashed free will without restrictions in place that might reduce harm, then it is logistically impossible for our capacity to exercise free will to grow. It is in essence, infinite. Any harm, no matter how slight, will therefore only diminish the options available for that free will to be exercised. Suppose, for example, I want to take up soccer, but as I am walking to the office in which I would sign up, I am attacked on a side street and beaten. Due to injuries in my leg, I am no longer able to play soccer (or any other rigorous activity for that matter). I believe that this argument is key and, until you address it, the problem of disproportionality in free will allocation stands, rendering unabashed free will a detriment to it's own aims; something an omniscient and omnipotent being would have know and rectify.