Greetings in that Divine and Most Precious Name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!
^^ kudos to the above poster, I would just like to add something
How about this classic chestnut by Epicurus, it always seemed to confound me:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”
This should be completely and thoroughly ignored and discredited. It is not valid in the slightest, nor do we need to use it a yardstick to understand God's activity. To suggest God is not omnipotent because our own selfish and limited desires are not always addressed, and our prayers are not always answered and God is not merely some gimmicky, geenie in a bottle to answer our every fickle wish and call, is just that, selfish and short sighted. God must simultaneously address the needs of 7,000,000 people at every millisecond of the day, we can not try to even fathom how this is possible, nor offer any criticism from out weak and inherently limited perspectives and emotional griping.
Is God malevolent because He does not answer our every beckoning wish and call? Nonsense, that is silly and naive to say the least, and this kind of silly, self-righteousness is precisely what Orthodox worship and lifestyle offers to counter through the heartfelt prayer, "Father, Thy Will be done and not our own" and also "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, the Sinner."
Whence cometh evil? That is a matter of perspective.. Lets look at something obvious like WWII for instance, the so-called "Good war" where America was the so-called hero and everything was gravy. To the Americans, the Japanese were evil monsters and the atomic bomb was the solution, but from the perspective of Japanese kids on the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that bitter August, there perhaps was no more genocidal and evil person than America. Things get complicated, and only God is above it all enough to be clear-sighted and level-headed about it all..
And fundamentally and existentially, this world we live in transitory, illusory, temporary, so even
if God was being malevolent, cruel, and capricious in
this realm, it is not permanent, so how could we get so caught up in ourselves and take it all so vitriolically serious? God lives in Infinity where there is only oneness, where as we are made of division, of composite elements of physicality and spirit, so we just simply can never understand the divine, how could we even attempt to discuss it without realizing that our very discussions are flawed and in the scheme of things not even real! The only reality is God, and in Orthodox we seek direct contact with God, to worship Him directly, not ideologically. Our worship of God precisely is NOT supposed to make any kind of logic or sense, the Divine is by its very substance illogical.
stay blessed,
habte selassie