The Problem of Evil makes it unlikely that God exsits

The real problem here is your definition of God. You are trying to disprove the existence of the Judeo-Christian God, using a flawed definition that would make Him obviously non-existent. Nowhere does the Bible say that God is omnibenevolent. In the future, I should include a caveat, saying that I will not debate things like this with people who have not read the Bible in any significant measure. If that were the definition of benevolence, and perfect benevolence were attributed to God in the Bible, then I would agree that your argument throws His existence into question. But the Bible does not say that God is unwilling to allow evil; therefore, your argument has nothing to stand on. Another sense in which the Problem of Evil argument is flawed, is that if there is no God, then there can be no objective standard of morality upon which to challenge God's existence. Evil, in a purely materialistic world, would not exist, nor would we be able to conceptualize it. The only way evil can truly exist is in relation to an absolute God who defines moral good and evil. In this sense, if evil exists, then God MUST exist. In order to say that God does not exist, you must at least reject the idea of moral evil, which is half of the foundation fothe traditional PoE argument. I will attempt to respond to your points, despite the erroneous foundation of the debate itself. Emotions have no evolutionary advantage. Animals are capable of defending one another and caring for one another through pure instinct, no emotional suffering involved. A perfect example of why emotions are counter-evolutionary is the mall shooter in Omaha (my hometown). His emotional inability to cope with life led to him killing over a dozen people who could. That hardly seems advantageous to survival. I agree that pain teaches valuable lessons, which is why God allows suffering. You pretty much explain away your own challenge with that observation. There is nothing wrong with my statement about observation. Christians can no, based on what we consider to be God's word, what He would, did, and continues to do. However, you don't accept the Bible as true, so how could I claim what we can know what God would or would not do on that basis? If we assume, though, that He did create this world, you would have to accept, in addition to the existence of evil itself, the existence of the various explanations in the Bible of why God allowed evil, in which case the problem of evil argument would fall apart. "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." You can't know about something that doesn't exist. Furthermore, if evil didn't exist and we never had to experience it, what would be the point in showing us a film about it? Why wouldn't he use his "omnipotence thing" to make us understand? An excellent question. The answer, of course, is that He would, and is. Ergo, the existence of evil in our world. I don't understand your point. You can't just "know" whave evil is. It is something that can only be known in terms of experience. You're also assuming that His point is merely to show us the difference between good and evil, which it is not. If you had ever read the Bible, you would know this. The point of the father analogy was to demonstrate that perfect goodness is not incompatible with the existence of evil, which is your assertion. There could be any number of reasons why a perfectly good being would allow evil. The point of the book analogy is to explain that the presence of evil in something doesn't make it not good. The question isn't whether evil exists in the world, but whether or not the ultimate outcome of allowing evil will be good or bad. If the outcome turns out to be good, then there would be nothing incompatible with the idea that a perfectly good God would allow evil, and the PoE argument would once again shatter. Moreover, we do not enjoy books because of the three reasons you just mentioned. At least I don't. We enjoy them because they have a point. A world without evil in which everything worked out perfectly for everyone all of the time would be as pointless as a book without a plot. "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?" How do you know the goals CAN be achieved with less suffering? Where is the optimum level of suffering? If you can't offer a perfect level of suffering, then what is your claim based on? My philosophy professor offered the same argument in class the other day. I responded then as I did just now and he was unable to offer a counter argument. "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." Assuming that all I have done is prove that there is no logical contradiction between God and the existence of evil, there would still be no basis on which to argue that His existence is unlikely. If there is no logical contradiction between the existence of two things, how does the existence of one make the existence of the other less likely? If there is a good reason for God to allow evil, how does the existence of evil make His existence unlikely? Do you have some numbers for me? How do you calculate the probability of his existence based on the presence of evil in the world? You can't. And because you can't, you can also not say that evil makes God's existence less likely. It may make the existence of your mental charicature of God less likely, but not the reality of the God of the Bible.