God as Omnipotent/Omniscient/Omnipresent: 'Infallible/Omnipotent beings cant fail with respect to their intentions. God is the sole cause of everything in existence... Being omnipotent, God does not try, struggle, or strive to do something... Therefore everything that exists, is exactly as god intended. God intended suffering, as well as 'evil' in the world. God chose this particular instantiation of existence, in lieu of an infinite number of alternatives which had less suffering or evil.'

This is one of the most serious live objections within contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, and it deserves to be conceded as a genuinely difficult, actively debated problem rather than waved away — Ryan Mullins's critique (*The End of the Timeless God*; 'Simply Impossible: A Case against Divine Simplicity,' *TheoLogica* 2016) is a real, technically sophisticated argument, not a strawman. That said, classical theists have substantive replies. First, the objection equivocates on 'cause': classical theism (Aquinas, ST I, q.19, a.9; q.49) has always distinguished God's causation of being as such (creation and sustenance, primary causality) from secondary causality exercised through genuinely free or contingent creaturely agents, and further distinguishes God's positive willing of good from his mere permission of the deficient exercise of that agency (privation theory of evil: evil is not a positive effect requiring a positive divine cause, but a lack, a falling-short in an otherwise good created will or process). 'Sole cause of everything in existence' is true of being as such, not true in the sense of God being the univocal efficient cause of every evil act in the same way he causes the good in that act. Second, on the necessity worry: Edward Feser and others (following Aquinas, ST I, q.19, a.3) argue that while God's willing is identical to his simple, necessary nature considered in itself, what God wills ad extra (the created world) can still be genuinely contingent, because the necessity involved is 'necessity of the consequence' not 'necessity of the consequent' — God necessarily wills whatever he wills, but what he wills is not itself necessitated to be this rather than some other creatable good; there is real philosophical debate (including among classical theists) over whether this fully resolves the modal collapse charge, and it is intellectually honest to say the debate remains open rather than definitively settled in the classical theist's favor.

The free will defense (Plantinga, *God, Freedom, and Evil*) and privation theory together give a coherent account of how a maximally powerful, all-good God can create a world containing genuinely free secondary causes whose deficient choices he permits without positively willing or being the moral author of, for the sake of the greater good of a world containing real freedom and real love rather than mere deterministic puppetry.