> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.