 But as Peter van Inwagen has argued—most recently in The Problem of Evil—there is a very different possibility, and one that he thinks is much more promising.  The basic idea is as follows. First of all, one begins by focusing upon abstract formulations of the argument from evil, and one attempts to put forward a story that makes it plausible that the existence of, say, a great amount of horrendous suffering in the world, is actually desirable because there is some great good that outweighs that suffering, and that can only be achieved if that amount of suffering is present, or some greater evil that can only be avoided if that amount of suffering is present. (This story might either be a theodicy-style story that specifies the great good in question, or a defense-style story, which does not do so.) Secondly, if that story provides a satisfactory answer to an abstract version of the argument from evil that focuses upon the existence of horrendous suffering, one can then turn to concrete versions of the argument from evil, and there the idea will be that God had good reason to allow a certain amount of horrendous suffering, and the terrible case of Sue is simply one of the cases that he allowed.  It is not that Sue’s suffering itself had some property that made its occurrence good all things considered.  God could very well have prevented it, and had he done so, he would have eliminated an occurrence that was bad in itself, all things considered.  But had he done so, he would have had to have allowed some other horrendous evil that, as things stand, he prevented, and the reason that he would have had to do that would be to ensure that the global property of there being a certain amount of horrendous evil in the world was instantiated—something that was necessary to achieve a greater good, or to avoid a greater evil.