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A good and powerful God would stop it
The argument assumes that God could have no good purpose in allowing evil for a time. You could not know that without knowing everything, and you cannot even call it likely. A small child who cannot see why his father lets the doctor hurt him is in no position to say there is probably no reason. The gap between you and God is far wider than that (Romans 11:33). The Bible shows God with exactly such a purpose. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, and years later he told them they had meant it for evil and God had meant it for good (Genesis 50:20).
If you mean only that Christians contradict themselves, they do not. There is nothing contradictory in a good God allowing evil for a good reason. If you mean that evil is really evil, you are appealing to a moral law only God can give, as the page on right and wrong shows.
Sickness and disaster spring from the same root as the evil that men do. When Adam sinned, God cursed the ground for his sake (Genesis 3:17), and the whole creation has groaned under that curse ever since (Romans 8:20-22). A cancer is a mark of a fallen world.
And God will stop evil. He has set the day. But if he ended all evil tonight, where would he stop? It runs through every human heart, yours included. That he has not ended it yet is his patience, and his goodness is leading you to repentance (Romans 2:4).
Then God is to blame
The Bible holds two things together. God ordains all that comes to pass, and the men who do evil are guilty of it. The clearest case is the cross.
Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:
Acts 2:23 (KJV)
God planned the death of Jesus, and the hands that carried it out were wicked. God meant it for the saving of sinners, and the men meant murder. Guilt belongs to the one whose purpose is evil, and God’s never is. He is not the author of sin, and he never forces a man’s will (WCF 3.1). If he could ordain the worst evil ever done without sharing its guilt, and bring from it the greatest good ever given, he can be trusted with the rest.
The God of the Old Testament is cruel
The hardest case is Canaan, where Israel was told to leave nothing alive that breathed in the cities God gave them (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). It was judgment after four centuries of patience, for the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full (Genesis 15:16). By then they were burning their own children to their gods (Deuteronomy 12:31). God showed no favoritism, and he later threw Israel out of the land for the same sins (Leviticus 18:28, 2 Kings 17:7-8). Mercy was open even then. Rahab of Jericho confessed Israel’s God and was spared, and her name stands in the line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
Those commands belonged to one nation at one point in history, and they were never a standing order. Anyone who says God has told him to kill is claiming a word from heaven the Bible does not allow. As for the children, every life is God’s to give and his to take back. Job said as much on the day he lost all ten of his own (Job 1:18-21). What was unusual in Canaan is that God commanded men to carry out his sentence on those nations, and told us why.
The Bible approves of slavery
The law of Moses made it a crime worthy of death to steal a man and sell him (Exodus 21:16), and Paul names menstealers among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10). That is how the Atlantic trade filled its ships. The law did allow servitude. An Israelite who grew poor and was sold served as a hired servant until the jubilee, and those bought from the nations around Israel could be kept as bondmen for life (Leviticus 25:39-46). But the law hemmed it in. A servant who escaped from his master was not to be handed back (Deuteronomy 23:15-16), and a master who struck out his servant’s eye or tooth had to let him go free (Exodus 21:26-27). The law of Moses bore with some things because men’s hearts were hard, as Jesus said of divorce (Matthew 19:8). The apostles told a Christian slave to take his freedom if he could (1 Corinthians 7:21), and told a master to receive his runaway as a brother beloved (Philemon 16). Some Presbyterians in the American South defended slavery from the Bible, and they were wrong.
You are right to call the slave trade evil. But you can say so only by a law above every nation, and that law is God’s. It condemns the menstealer, and it finds the rest of us guilty too. Whoever commits sin is the servant of sin, and only the Son can make a man free indeed (John 8:34-36).
Under every objection
What God Calls You To Do
An objection can be answered and a man still stay away. Jesus said that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19). The trouble between you and God is not finally an argument. You have sinned against him, and you know it.
Christ came for sinners exactly like you. He kept the law you have broken, and on the cross he bore its curse for everyone who trusts him, and God raised him from the dead. So the call is the one Jesus preached. Repent, and believe the gospel (Mark 1:15). You do not have to settle every question first.