The Problem of Evil and Suffering

I'm researching a talk I'm giving in Haiti. William Lane Craig wrote a short book called, Hard Questions, Real Answers. I have not read the whole book, but the two chapters on Evil and Suffering are good. The following quotes summarize rather unfairly the argument of the first chapter. I hope the quotes will encourage the reader to read the whole book.

William Lane Craig on Hume's Theodicy
The eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic David Hume summarized the logical problem of evil nicely when he asked concerning God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" (p. 82, Hard Questions, Real Answers)

William Lane Craig
We can go even further than this. Not only has the objector failed to prove that God and evil are inconsistent, but we can, on the contrary, prove that they are consistent. In order to do that, all we have to do is provide some possible explanation of the evil in the world that is compatible with God's existence. And the following is such an explanation:

God could not have created a world that had so much good as the actual world but had less evil, both in terms of quantity and quality; and, moreover, God has morally sufficient reasons for the evil that exists.

So long as this explanation is even possible, it proves that God and the evil in the world are logically compatible.

So, to sum up our discussion of the logical problem of evil, we have seen that there is no necessary incompatibility between the presence of an all-good, all-powerful God and the presence of evil in the world. And I'm extremely pleased to report to you that after centuries of discussion, contemporary philosophy has come to recognize this fact. It is now widely admitted that the logical problem of evil has been solved. (Praise the Lord for Christian philosophers like Alvin Planting to whom this result is due!)

But before we breathe too easily, we have to confront the probablistic problem of evil. This we shall do in the next chapter. (pp. 86-87, Hard Questions, Real Answers )

According to Craig, Plantinga laid out his argument in the following book: The Nature of Necessity (Clarendon Library of Logic & Philosophy)