among the most important distinctions in philosophy of religion is the one between the intellectual problem of evil and the existential (or pastoral) problem of evil.
The intellectual problem is what we've been discussing: is God's existence logically or evidentially compatible with the existence of evil? This is a philosophical argument, and it proceeds by assessing premises and inferences.
The existential problem is something else entirely: how does a person of faith, or anyone, respond to their own suffering or the suffering of those they love? How do you pray to a God you're furious at? How do you maintain or rebuild faith in the face of something that seems to make faith incoherent? How do you go on?
Philosophers like Eleonore Stump (in Wandering in Darkness, 2010) and Simone Weil (as we've seen) have argued that addressing the existential problem requires something that no abstract theodicy can provide. Theodicies explain why evil in general might be permitted. They do not explain why this suffering, the death of this child, the destruction of this person, is happening. And what sufferers typically need is not a philosophical explanation but a presence: a witness, a companion in the suffering, a sense that the suffering is not simply meaningless noise.
Stump's account of the Incarnation is philosophically striking: if God became flesh and suffered, genuinely, not theatrically, then divine omnipotence is not the whole story of God's relationship to suffering. The God of Christian theology is not simply a God who permits suffering from a safe omnipotent distance; it is a God who entered into suffering. Whether this resolves the philosophical problem (it doesn't, in the logical sense) is a separate question from whether it speaks to the existential one.
The atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie and others have argued that the cumulative weight of horrendous evil constitutes not just an argument against theism but a decisive argument, that no theodicy, however clever, can make the actual distribution of suffering compatible with a loving God. Ivan Karamazov's argument in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is the most emotionally powerful version of this: even if there is a divine harmony at the end of history that justifies everything, Ivan refuses to accept a ticket to that harmony if the entrance price is a single child's tear. Some evils are not redeemable by subsequent goods. They simply happened, and no accounting makes them not have happened.
The problem of evil does not have a solution that satisfies everyone, and it may not have a solution at all, depending on your prior commitments. What it does have is a map of positions: the evidential argument is serious and the best theodicies are serious responses to it. Skeptical theism is intellectually defensible but practically cold. Soul-making theodicy captures something real about adversity and growth while failing before horrendous evil. And the existential problem remains, stubbornly, beyond the reach of philosophical argument, requiring, if anything, witness rather than explanation.