Resources
We’re starting off with what is widely considered the most difficult apologetic problem theists encounter. That we have included this most difficult problem here may come as a surprise since this is supposed to be Level 1 apologetics; however, remember that Level 1 apologetics is not about the difficulty of the problem but rather about the protocol of giving specific answers to specific questions.
That is, we’re not so much attending to how a person might construct an answer in a systematic way as an evidentialist or presuppositionalist (Level 2 apologetics) and wants to make sure she remains consistent throughout. We are also not here focused on constructing an answer with the benefit of a sweeping understanding of the history of ideas, and the benefits of a penetrating insight into epistemology, metaphysics and ethical theory (Level 3 apologetics).
What we’re interested in here is, what are the best books, papers and work done that we can find to get a handle on beginning to answer the question. As it turns out, as difficult as this question is for a theist, there is a lot of very good work on the problem out there and some of it is rather recent.
Also it needs to be said by way of introduction to this subject, the received tradition at the end of the 20th century regarding the problem of evil is that the so-called deductive problem of evil--the assertion that aspects of God’s nature and the existence of evil implies necessarily that some important attribute of God’s nature “has to go” has itself, gone by the wayside.
The current state of affairs regarding the problem has focused on the inductive or probabilistic problem of evil which argues that though it is too strong to speak of a logical contradiction, it is however, improbable or highly improbable that an absolutely good, omnipotent and omniscient God is compatible with the real existence of evil.
There are sophisticated answers to that sort of question and those are the ones to which I will refer you.