God can make infinitely more special/valuable things than this universe

[Belacqua]

Maybe I'm not understanding you. Let me put it another way. 

Do you find this syllogism sound?

~ If there were a good God, X, Y, and Z would happen.
~ X, Y, and Z don't happen.
~ Therefore, there isn't a good God.

We could still make a reasonable moral judgement based on our intuitions and experiences whether something is likely to be created/allowed by a good God or not. For example, most suffering is not what we intuit to be good, and our experiences tell us that it's not good. Even less so when this suffering is perceived by us to be gratuitous (unwarranted given a good God), such as rape and torture.

We need not be omniscient in order to conduct a proper Bayesian analysis of the situation under debate. We just need to be reasonable and intellectually honest, even if we could still be mistaken ultimately.

I guess what I've been thinking lately is that all of these analyses will be according to our own human-based judgments. And that is absolutely how it should be: such decisions are based on whether things contribute to or deny human flourishing. 

The thing to keep in mind though is that if there actually were an omniscient and good God, it would be so vastly beyond our understanding that it would be impossible for us to judge. There could easily be huge swathes of reasons that we just have no way of knowing. Our conception of even the meaning of the word "good" is oriented to ourselves and those like us. Our minds are so limited -- there could be reasons for what we call suffering that we have no way of knowing.

I've been reading Simone Weil lately, and she has an elaborate way of thinking about what she calls affliction, and why a good God would be likely to let such things happen. She considers much affliction to be a positive, while also feeling an absolute duty to undo as much of other people's as possible. I don't quite grasp this yet, but I do find her skepticism about the human ego to be persuasive. We are understandably really full of ourselves and this makes things that are far vaster than us seem unreal. 

An example that's a little easier for me: when people make an argument that a lot of wasted time and space went into making a universe if God thinks that people are important, it reveals a pre-judgment about what waste consists of. As if a smart God would have got people up and running sooner, and made the universe all a nice usable space for us to get around in. And this means that utility is the criterion we are judging by. And this reveals our prejudice. We think that a good God would have done things with more utility for us. Yet many of the most interesting theologians write instead about the autotelic nature of the Good. Using things is not necessarily what they are for or what we are for. 

I really like living in the middle of my garden, which is big by Japanese domestic standards. Most people here consider it a waste of space, as they would put in parking or even knock down my house and put up three rental units. But I find the garden to be a pleasure in itself. So maybe all that vast space in the universe that people can't use is there because it's good in itself, or just because it's beautiful, or because people deserve to have such an enormous set of puzzles to keep our minds full of the pleasures of discovery. Judging that our tiny place in the universe means we're unimportant is, it seems to me, an application of criteria that might not be best here. And suffering might be something similar. 

I am not any way making an argument for suffering. It is important that we not find a way to excuse ourselves for tolerating other people's. What I'm interested in is the thought experiment-like nature of imagining what values and purposes would be like if our egos and habits didn't jump to so many conclusions. 

But I am not claiming this as proof of anything, or urging anybody else to ponder it.