Let us rephrase the question .
What is the opposite of suffering? Well-being, you may say.
What exactly is well being? A good life, you may say.
What is a good life? Good health, good work, good relationships, financial stability, a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Ok, and what is the goal of this good life? Happiness. Comfort. Maximizing happiness and minimizing pain.
All right, so you do you avoid a gruelling workout because it is painful? Do you avoid studying late into the night because it’s not pleasant? No. You would respond that you know that doing these things will give long-term benefit, so the short-term pain is acceptable. All right. So you agree that what may make you comfortable, and comfortable now, might not necessarily be good for you, right? You know that bearing the excruciating pain of your brutal workouts is important for those adonis cuts, and hercules biceps.
How can you then decide that a certain painful situation right now will not have a redeeming purpose later? Just because you cannot see what it will yield! How can you categorically decide that something is, unjustified, illogical evil with no good effect for the future? Do we humans have the cognitive sophistication to even know what might happen tomorrow because of what we did today, with any certainty? Hardly.
Human life is the epitome of uncertainty, we do not have the capacity to understand what is absolutely, equivocally, good or bad for us! Heck, we don’t absolutely understand how in a long chain of unconnected events we came to acquire our personalities and our bearings in life, do we?
How can we then confidently claim to make statements like this:
a) If God exists, God would prevent the occurrence of any instance or degree of evil that is NOT logically necessary for achieving any greater good or avoiding any greater evil. (If God exists, God would not permit unjustified and wholly gratuitous evil acts).
b) Hence god does not exist.
The idea of arguing for or against God’s existence is of no interest to me, but I use this argument to show how we make strong statements about evil and suffering, without even realizing that we might not be capable and qualified to make them. We might be limited, and acutely at that, in our cognitive abilities to make any such declarations.