Actually the problem of evil and the problem of free will are both troublesome issues for modern theistic belief. Free will, of course, can only be an illusion in a universe with an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Framing the 2 issues as if they somehow resolve each other is a piece of apologetic legerdemain that holds water like a sieve.
If the supernatural creator spirit being knew every decision you would make before he made the earth (and a few days later the sun?), and had the power to change any detail of the creation - then the word "will" is without meaning for any entity but him. (So if you are roasting in hell for eternity, or reincarnated into a life full of suffering as penalty - the responsibility can only lie with the only one who truly made a decision.)
But if we leave that aside, and pretend that will could have meaning, it is no answer at all to the POE. Do those who manage to live up to the expectations of the deity have free will? If so, then why cannot all be created with the moral strength, or whatever characteristic those acceptable people have, that allows them to make the right choice - despite being totally free to make the wrong one?
The only interesting phenomenon here is the bizarre contortions the human mind will perform to prop up the obvious nonsense of supernatural belief systems.

Yes, Aaron, you have raised the ?only interesting issue? very succinctly. So,
DEFINING GOD
What or who is God?: Humans seek 1. An object for the great gift they feel of being able to give their love to someone or something, and 2. Confirmation of what they think is good and right. For these purposes, they refer to a consciousness outside of their own ? technically impossible to do, but they do it anyway. It is instinctive in the human. Prayer is one method.
The greatest evidence of the ?belief? being instinctive is the statistical fact that 99.9% of humans believe in some form of consciousness after death: heaven and hell, or reincarnation, or other forms of justice visited on the ?surviving? consciousness. If you don?t believe something like this, you are statistically not human.
What is ?existence,? as in the question ?Does God exist?? My consciousness is my only evidence of existence. We are told that God is a consciousness which exists outside my own. The only evidence I have of the existence of a consciousness outside my own is (and this is the crucial point): my decision that certain events selected by me (as well as those convincingly (for some purpose) proposed by someone else), are evidence of God?s consciousness.
The only criterion for selecting such evidence and attributing properties to God ? defining God ? is to justify our (whoever ?we? or ?us? might be, social or individual) purposeful beliefs and practices.
There is no real point in arguing about the attributes, logical or illogical, of God; but it is great good philosophical fun.

If God is merely another name for infinitely everything, equitable Oneness, the Universe, who is to say it has free will, you and me? =

Well - and there it is.
Mirugai - the few parts of your post that I found comprehensible, I disagree with.
Philosophical analysis of the attributes of gods is exactly equal in fun (and usefulness) to analysis of the attributes of Santa Claus.
Discussions on the the topic of what people believe about these alleged attributes of this alleged entity have the advantage of being discussions about
actual rather than imaginary phenomena. Those discussions can be useful, and fun - but also deadly serious, since people are much less likely to torture and
murder each other over their Santa Claus beliefs.
Sayak - the "big picture" defense was already hamstrung in the original article; you have done a nice methodical breakdown further exposing its lack of
substance. I actually think Voltaire said all that needed to be said on the "best of all possible worlds" hypothesis. But believers just don't care. If
believers were willing to think rationally about their beliefs for a few nanoseconds, they would recognize it as the childish, primitive, superstitious
nonsense that it is.
But faith - in the sense of the word that applies only to religious belief, is nothing else but a technique to forcibly suppress critical thought about the
particular flavor of fairy tale favored by the believer's family, friends, culture, favored internet sites, whatever.
That is why the whole concept of "reasoned faith," or any attempt at rational discussion of the objects of faith, are such exercises in pointlessness.
MJA - if God is merely a name for x, then why use "God" instead of x, being that God, in common usage, carries a whole lot of meaning with it that clearly
you do not intend if you embrace some sort of pantheism?
And - if free will and consciousness are phenomena that we observe only in the context of evolved biological systems - the only context in which the concepts
make any sense - why would we feel any urge to project them onto a rock or a galaxy or a universe (or an equitable oneness, whatever that may be)?
To discuss the Problem of Evil context of serious modern philosophical thought is just silly.
The simple and obvious "solution" to the "Problem" is to not place our faith (normal version of faith, not blind religious faith) in the absurd and plainly false belief system that spawns the imaginary paradox.

Regarding Augustine's big picture argument, the implication is that if an omnipotent God can pull the strings any way he wants, then he can make a world with both good and evil in it no matter how incompatible they might seem. Explanations like this always seem too facile to me, a little too convenient, almost a cop-out. On the other hand, if you look at the really big picture, what you see, in my view, is the laws of physics. The big picture argument wouldn't have to be changed much to make it compatible with Darwinian evolution. But if we take that skeptical, scientific attitude, then it's a bit of a stretch to think that the same natural processes could produce both Adolf Hitler and Pat Boone. So the question is, which of these two arguments is less plausible?

A New Plan
I think it is time for a new divine plan, One that unites mankind equitably with not only himself but with all of Nature. One that removes the uncertain measures of science and the religious dogmas of faith or doubt that have so clouded our vision and led us so astray. One that leads us to real justice, not the grey area of fairness we see today. A new plan that equates the governed and the governors, One that declares a new independence led by our inalienable right of self-evidence and the strength or power of self-reliance, One that unites us All. It is time for a new plan, One based on the light of truth, built on the foundation of absolute, a plan that will takes All the Way, to the promised land of free at last.
The divine plan is equality, equality is freedom, the truth we've been fighting and searching for.
When All is equal All is One
Equal is the plan,
Truth is the Way.
=

.Dear Dave,
Search no further than Oneself. =

I am certain of three things and only three:
1. I am alive now, and have, therefore lived once. I'm thankful for this.
2. As with most living units, I will die, sooner or later. I accept this, thankfully.
3. All notions connected with item 2 and its finality, or extensivity, are speculative. And, boring.
Cordially, Neuman.

K(NO)W GOD
The question: ?Why did God, the all-powerful and all-knowing, allow [whatever terrible thing] to take place?? 
Those who want to know who or what God is search the sacred books and sacred stories for evidence of Him.  These portrayals are full of seeming contradictions about what God does, and his apparent goals for his followers.  All searchers, regardless of the degree of their orthodoxy, sift through the portrayals for concrete guidance, and piece together the nature of their God from what they select.  Un-fundamentalists faced with the contradictory evidence, simply make up their own God, usually based on what they ?want,? to the extent it conforms to what they view as ?good?? and ?bad?: moral outrage is man?s greatest pleasure, and piety displays are a close second.
So, we have the most orthodox believers debating and piecing together God from analysis of sacred texts and stories; and the less fundamentals completely making up their God. By the way, I don?t have any objection to either approach as ways of attempting to connect with ?Other Consciousness,? let?s call it.
What I do find faulty in the reasoning of God followers is: the expectation that God should or shouldn?t do something, or allow something?that God must follow some human rules of morality or behavior.  Under the all knowing, all powerful view of God, it is not for believers to ascribe any explanation to God?s will; ?reason? and ?understanding? and ?meaning? and ?justice? are human constructs (mostly with nefarious purposes, in my view) which do not constrain God.  If anything, whatever your God does or allows is more certain, more ?right? than any of these human constructs.
A better inquiry for philosophers is ?If God, what is He doing,? not ?why.? ?If God,? then what he does and ?allows? is the best evidence of His nature. The inquiry needs to be free of ?good? and ?bad.?

Ancient gods are often little more than a language to give events coherence. Monotheism is the fantasy of induction. That is why it is so protean. There is no logical induction, but there must be terms that warrant or give surety to reductive reasoning. It is therefore impossible to reason without intuiting induction, induction that is not warranted logically. Therefore the god offers itself as the abstracted term of the more concrete divinity the polytheists found rendering events coherent or at least able to be characterized. But the point is, if you think you have the indiuctive term sussed, why preach? Why insist on convincing the world? Why evangelize? What does the true believer care that others don't? What skin off god's nose? And if there were such an inductive term, reductive reasoning would be the matter of faith, not god. And so the whole matter is a vapid battle over a conviction in an intuition that has no warrant to it at all, and yet is prerequisite to reasoning.
The Biblical gods, and there are any number of them, all orbit the promise of time unworthy of us, if we but believe in it and follow its law. The fallacy here, of course (if we conceive it clearly), is that worth is what time is. There is no other time that is anything of what worth is. Time is the stranger is nigh it is through us, and we will do anything, conceive anything, to keep that stranger at bay so that we can recieve that facile term that time is unworthy of us and that we are right to believe in whatever revision to the intuition of induction that is required by the reductive rigor that always ends in evidencing its fallacy, and so proving the promise of time unworthy of us eternally unkept.

When Einstein says god doesn't throw dice he really only means science must subscribe only to determinate cause and explanation. But if reality is at rock bottom randomness, then who wins? You see, only if the one throwing the dice, the random event, effaces itself in the interest the rest of time space and matter has in finding itself more completed in the character of that otherwise inexplicable event than any determinist principle can  render coherent is there anything we could rightly call "time". Time is the stranger, the rebel against the normative, that is most real defying the norm at that moment just as that norm seems closest to clinching its grip on it. That elusive quality no quantifier can bring to heel is the worth of time espousing all the inductive terms we assume are quantitatively prior to what is real. No god can supply such an explicative term.
 
A couple other matters of interest, though perhaps off topic. A recently released study that shows cyber-cars twice as accident-prone as human operators claims that all the accidents recorded were really the the fault of human driving. I am reminded of all the times Han Solo pleads "It's not my fault!" IT's a form of cyber road-rage, I suppose. But it goes to show that even artificial intelligence has its subjective side, and that its reasoning is flawed, even if its driving is not.
Also, it seems we have proof that the so called law of supply and demand is a hoax after all. One expert states that the Saudis believe that oil is going out of fashion and that the oil they do not pump today will not sell tomorrow. But, it seems, the renewable juggernaut is off the drawing-board and out of the barn. And that economists have to revise their fundamentals.

The subject of why the innocent must suffer needlessly is a good argument against religion and philosophies influenced by religion.

I believe that it also poses a problem for the secular part of our modern society, as we don?t seem to accept anything less than perfect in the same way religious people speak about a perfect God and how evil, ugliness and suffering are dimensions that really don?t fit with belief in the all-mighty. In our secular modern society there is zero tolerance to pain (physical and emotional/spiritual); therefore, we have developed paths and drugs to attempt to eliminate it from our lives. Also, secularity has, to say the least, certain aesthetic cannons that exclude almost anything that is not shaped by them, so we really try hard to avoid confronting problems like physical and mental diseases/imperfection. The way the secular society seems to resolve the existence of evil is by somehow accepting that it is OK as long as it is happening out of your personal/familial bubble.

Sounds like a combination of NIMBY and Realpolitik, on the moral front. There is no personal evil any more than there is a personal goodness. As Morse says to Lewis (quoting an author I do not remember and have not been able to identify by the use of any search engine): "There may not be a devil, but there's deviltry!" But the motive of giving the "absolute" or generality a name is to render it amenable to categorical determinism. But far from promoting relativism, the absence of that determinacy rescues us from the most relentless mode of relativism that determinacy is. The relation between the personal and the divine is the heart of all vexation in moral matters. What keeps us from ditching the appeal to divinity in hopes of differentiating good and evil is that we assume the alternative is that each is a determinate personal possession or attribute, when good and evil is a dynamic not of possession but of loss. The four great heresies of the Christian era have to do with the relation of the personal to the divine, and the most abiding resolution on offer is the idea of a hermetic seal between them that is only breach as a divine gift. The pernicious result, however, is that the gift and its receipt, too, get differentiated, each obviating the other. That is, the recipient of divine grace is the subjective determinacy of the inaccessible absolute. And so, there cannot be a personal good that is not, by fiat of its being received the gift, the voice of the idea of absolute good. And thence, of course, the arbiter of those who are not received it. But such possession is the best candidate for what evil is. It is not being so possessed of good that we can name the bad that brings home what good and evil is. It is only where the greatest discipline of the matter is that we do not know that we are most possessed of it. We are most possessed of good judgment where we are most disciplined in finding our certitude incomplete. It is the disciplined changing of the mind that is the life of morality, not the presumed determinacy of our judgment that always somehow falls short of that extreme rigor of finding certitude the unfinished project of our time. Or any time.