A God who suffers alongside us while having the power to prevent the suffering isn’t comforting; he’s complicit. A parent who lets a child be tortured and then cries with them is not admirable.

This is the emotional heart of the objection, and it should not be sidestepped. The Christian answer is not that presence replaces prevention. God’s presence in suffering is joined to a promise to end it and to a purpose in permitting it for now, which the other claims in this case lay out. The parent analogy assumes the parent could prevent the harm at no cost to anything the child values more; the free will and soul-making responses argue that God cannot prevent all evil without removing the conditions for love and moral growth. Whether that is true is the real question. God suffers too is only an answer inside that larger framework, and it should never be offered on its own.