But there are (at least) two ways that the question gets asked. The first is to ask about some-thing, some incident, some phenomenon of which we have direct and personal experience - including of the actual degree and nature of personal suffering entailed.
The second, and most usual, form of the question is to ask about some-thing of which we have only indirect and essentially hearsay knowledge, usually from the mass media or educational institutions. This version of Why does God allow X refers to something somewhere place, involving strangers, often remote in history - something such as the Spanish Inquisition, or the Holocaust, or the victims of some "natural disaster or catastrophe (the Lisbon Earthquake was a popular example in the 18th century - see the novel Rasselas by Samuel Johnson).
The second form of the question cannot be answered satisfactorily, because it is an ill-formed question which contains assumptions that make it intrinsically unanswerable. It assumes the validity of our secondhand, remote knowledge, the competence and honesty of those who generated and transmitted this information, and many links of inference involved in constructing it.
And it assumes that we know what was the nature and degree of suffering of (often) large numbers of individual persons - and indeed it assumes we know what these people's attitude was, to whatever they experienced.
None of this is solidly knowable, so we are debating insecure inferences - and such debates never go anywhere useful or valid.
Indeed, I would regard such discussions of big, remote abstractions concerning phenpomena of unknowable validity as fundamentally unserious: merely idle curiosity, the dishonest seeking of excuses, or moral grandstanding ("virtue-signalling").
But even when we stick to valid questions concerning that suffering of which we have direct and personal knowledge, so that we feel absolutely confident of what we are talking about; such that we would literally stake our lives on its truth...
Even then, if a Christian answer is desired, then a Christian context must be assumed: and here must means must.
If the questioner asking "why does a Good God allow..." demands a this-worldly answer, an answer in terms of providing a reason for suffering that is justifiable purely in terms of some kind of measure of mortal-life gratification, an explanation within bounds of time only between conception and death - then he has already assumed that Christianity is untrue.
Because a Christian answer will ultimately strive to explain things, including all instances of suffering, in a large context of time - indeed an everlasting context that includes resurrected eternal Heavenly life.
If we have a valid question about the origin of suffering in this divine creation of a Good God, and with eternal life beyond salvation, then this question is what absolutely needs a satisfactory answer.
That is, an answer which is sufficiently clear and concise to be comprehensible, and whose assumptions are endorsed by that person's intuitive understanding. And an answer that really answers the source of suffering in the divine creation of a Good God - and which does not merely kick the can a but further away from the initial question.
To say "the devil did it" is just a can kick; if we assume that God made the devil - entirely, and from-nothing; and made the devil with his demonic nature.
And any explanation in terms of randomness is likewise an evasion; if God is asserted to have made everything as it actually is.
Also, it is not Good enough for Christians to say that such questions can't be answered because God the creator is too different from us - too Great, too inscrutable, or that His ways are not Our ways...
Christians can't coherently plead divine incomprehensibility because Jesus was a Man.
All Christians ought to have such answers thought-through and ready for deployment when required - because the question is vitally important, and not one that is going-away.
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