Realization of the Truth i.e. One Universal Self at the root of all being, expresses as eternitycentric harmlessness and love.

This would be the monist or non-dual approach to God.

The dualist approach, whether theist or atheist always leverages the illusion of separation.

There is no logic in claiming that problem of evil makes God unlikely. What you are claiming is that evil makes good unlikely. Or that lies make truth non-existent.

Do you see where you are wrong?

I had written a longer essay here, but it was deleted for some reason.

Such a view of "god" is actually post enlightenment. It is not the ancient view. God has no obligations to His creatures and is not a moral agent so He is by nature not subject to moral evaluation.

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/10/god-obligation-and-euthyphro-dilemma.html

God is metaphysically good and ontologically good so is the ground of all the good in created existence but God is not morally good. I can say the rootbeer I drank for lunch was a good soft drink but I cannot say it wasn't one just because it didn't stop the Holocaust. Rootbeer is not a moral agent and by nature cannot be evaluated morally. By analogy God in the Classic Sense isn't a moral agent either and moral evaluation of God is absurd and incoherent given His nature in classic theism.

So when we say God is Good we have to understand what that means and what it doesn't mean. Rowe's evidentalist argument from evil is devestating to any view of divinity that sees God as a perfectly moral being. But as a Catholic, a Classic Theist and a Thomist I am already an Atheist toward belief in such a "god".

See the writtings of Brian Davies for details.

I recomend Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil or The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" both by Brian Davies. A Classic Theistic view of God needs a Theodicy like a fish needs an i-phone.

Why God doesn't stop suffering? Or .. if god is good, powerful, knowing, but there is evil and suffering, then he is either, not good or not powerful.
That seems like a logic statement but the conclusion is not.

if God is all good, and powerful, yet humans suffer and do evil , the conclusion is .... **Humans are not God**.
As Russell and others point out, when creating a syllogism
type, class or set (even one thing can have multiple characteristics )
So to avoid a paradox, the entity is not necessarily part of the subsequent subset.

Brian's premise also presupposes what God should do
but by whose standard?
If, the premise is ... God is all knowing then the conclusion must be.... God alone defines what is good, not Brian.

deGrasse Tyson gave a presentation mocking gods power and ineptness for creating a flawed universe.
He explained the destruction of asteroids, elliptical orbits and concluded with deformed fetuses.
Scientist (or atheists )shouldn't personify... projecting human values onto the universe is silly, You can't say the Sun is bad and uncaring because it can cause skin cancer.
The end of deGrasse Tyson's presentation used pictures of deformed dead(cyclops) infants( was that to mock "the sanctity of life" ? )
Pure theatrics ( his audience must go for that type of thing ).
Notice, his first (implied) premise is... Christians think Gods creation is perfect
and his second is...the Universe is flawed
and therefore his conclusion is God either lacked the power to make it perfect or
he didn't care enough about us to make it so.

However notice....he begins with a false premise.
Christians don't think this is Heaven(perfection) they accept it's the Universe
They don't want a tree to fall on them, but they don't think trees have it out for them.

Atheists of course don't believe in God, except by extension, if a tree falls on someone then they think God should stop it.
Why don't they Publish... * A Scientific Proof: How the Universe Should Have Been Created* or *Your God got it wrong and I could do Better*

Let's find common ground
We are dust.
Theist just hope God takes some interest in that
Theists or anti-theist could wake to hear there's been a disaster or that some madman killed a group of people.
If you don't believe in god, you can't claim god desires suffering .
there is no god to blame or shake your fist.
If you believing in God
know God does not desired suffering.
(but none-the-less some might shake their fist at him anyway)

Atheist and theist can agree..This is not heaven.
It makes no sense though for atheists to long for heaven, a wonderful place with no evil and no suffering. But atheist can't help keep talking about it
They deny a personal relationship with God, but can't help having
unmet expectations of him, evident in this quote from Brian... he (god) "would
eliminate all evil and suffering"

Theists and anti-theists both try to explain evil and suffering.
But go ahead Brian, let yourself go and.... pray for an end to evil and suffering, theists do.

I think that the number of people who died in all combined wars throughout the history of Christendom up to 1900 was less than 3 million.

Why do you think that? Can you tell me your data source?

As a percentage of the world's total population, the casualty rate
throughout the 20th century was less than that of many previous
centuries.

I don't think that's right, because you have to take into account how many people lived and died over the entire time frame in question.

Out of curiosity, I got data estimates for world population here:

http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php
and here:
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/graph_population.php

and integrated over the ranges from 0 AD to 1900 AD and from 1900 AD to 2000 AD to find out how many "people years" were lived in each time frame. (To keep things simple I'll give the results in terms of people-years, PY, rather than figure out the total number of people who lived. I'll divide the PY out in the end anyway.)

From 0 to 1900 AD I get 737901 MPY.
From 1900 AD to 2000 AD I get 316680 MPY

Now, I'm just going from memory here (I can look up the #s later), but I think that the number of people who died in secular war, genocide, and purging (ie, Soviet Union, China, etc) during the 20th century is about 300 million. And I think that the number of people who died in all combined wars throughout the history of Christendom up to 1900 was less than 3 million.

Now dividing the number of people killed per PY in those two periods I get:

4e-6 deaths per PY for 0 to 1900 AD

and

9.4e-4 deaths per PY for 1900 to 2000 AD

Dividing that out, we see that the death rate per PY in war etc is about 240 times greater for the last century than for the preceding 1900 years combined.

Now, you might object that it's not quite fair to compare one century to a span of nineteen centuries, but remember that if we take one-nineteenth of the deaths in the 0-1900 frame and divide by one-nineteenth of the PY we will get exactly the same result for a hypothetical average single century in that time frame. Of course, the actual century-to-century numbers will fluctuate about the average, but I cannot in any way see how the fluctuations would be so great to make up a 240x difference in a given century.

Now, part of that is our technological ability to kill so "efficiently", but I do not think you can discount the effect of the human resolve to actually do so. The secular leaders of the last century certainly seemed to have reveled in it in a way that undermines secular criticism of, say, the crusades.

. . . when hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered over the course of the last century alone . . . I cannot agree that moral evil is in any kind of decline at all.

I have no idea how you're quantifying it. It's obviously bad when 100 million people die violently, but how bad might depend on whether the initial population to which they belonged numbered 200 million or 2 billion. As a percentage of the world's total population, the casualty rate throughout the 20th century was less than that of many previous centuries.

I'm still working on a response to the rest of your post.

David, I really dont know if we can get more out of this conversation. I find your last two responses to be all over the place.

I tend to agree. For my part, I have enjoyed the effort to connect our viewpoints, but I believe we start from fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of knowledge, morality, and the degree and type of evidence needed to make provisional conclusions regarding the existence and nature of God. This makes such a connection difficult. That you do not see the connection to my earthquake analogy makes it fairly clear that there is a disconnect despite our best efforts. However, I appreciate your attempts to clarify your position, and I do think that I understand it, although I do not agree. If my responses seem "all over the place", it is probably because I am not directly questioning your position, but the fundamental assumptions that are needed to hold it. Thank you for the interesting conversation, it has certainly been different from most I have regarding the problem of evil.