I'm confused. You began your comment by saying my points are commonly made in Christianity, and then you spent the rest of your comment explaining why those same points are incompatible with Christianity?

It's like you're trying to squeeze my words into a box they don't fit in, and then pointing out how they don't fit in that box.

I'm not arguing from a Christian perspective. I took "the problem of evil" from the philosophy of religion as a launching point, because that was the topic of this thread. But I made it pretty clear I wasn't making a theistic argument; the closest it could have been to that would simply be in the role of devil's advocate.

But if you look at the substance of my analysis, it's not "Some all-powerful deity can snap his fingers and change anything/everything instantaneously." It's "there are certain immutable laws of the universe which make life and existence possible, but because of those same laws, suffering and death are a package deal when you enter this world."

The bargain isn't between "God and the Universe." It's between "You and Life." And it's this: to live within the universe is to be subject to those immutable laws. And one of those laws is entropy.

There's no need for an omnipotent god to hold the universe together so that it doesn't explode. The laws of gravity, inertia, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, etc., they take care of that already.