An atheist friend of mine asked me about God and suffering in high school, and I tried explaining it with The Sims, because you are effectively "God" in that situation. When you're controlling your Sims, you generally ruin their lives in various hilarious ways by micromanaging everything they do. Having babies with multiple other married Sims, burning the house down and killing someone, refusing to use the toilet cuz a pile of dirty dishes was in the way, etc. But if you had set up the same game and walked away from it for a few hours, your Sims probably would have caused much of the same mayhem all on their own. In so many words, God doesn't cause/allow bad things to happen, people do those things. God is there for us in the aftermath, because that mayhem is inevitable and can't really be prevented. He's the almighty creator, nit a wish-granting fairy at our beck and call, after all. It was a stupidly simplistic answer, too, but it made sense at the time.