In regards to your question which is essentially, ‘how could God allow evil?’. I believe one of the more convincing arguments for the allowance of evil is Alvin Platinga’s defense for free will while still maintaining an omnipotent, omniscient and all good God. In this view, Platinga argues that perhaps while flawed, free will is the ultimate good. Free will however, must involve the opportunity for people to commit evil by definition as it could not exist without the chance that some who possesses it could use it for wrong. Free will thus would be so good, that it’s allowance outweighs the evil that it comes with it, making it the greater good. While there are some who oppose this replying that surely a world would exist where everyone possesses freewill and yet all still choose to use it for good. To this, Platinga states that such a world could exist however God could not create it to exist. Therefore, a world could exist where Adam and Eve never ate the apple of truth however, God could not make Adam and Eve not eat the apple of truth because that would counter-act their free will. So, while Adam and Eve could freely not eat the apple of truth, that is not this world, as obvious by the prevalence of evil. However, as long as the world is majority good (be that 51% good) then it is surely better than the existence of no world at all. I believe that is a good explanation for the beginning of your argument, in regards to your reference to soul making theodicy within your statement, “suffering is inconsequential when compared to spiritual gain”, I have written another post regarding this argument. In short term, I think that you could be correct that soul-making (enhancing spirituality) could be the greatest good thus justifying suffering, again so long as it serves a greater good.

After reading Buckareff and Plugs thoughts on escapism, I believe that there is an important distinction to be made regarding the nature of hell that has not been addressed yet here. Buckareff and Plug specify that they have no intention of defining the state of hell, or how bad it may or may not be. They only state that hell is less good than heaven, therefore, hell’s inhabitants may not “perish miserably” or be forced to exist in, “eternal flames”. If hell is simply not as good as heaven, would your response change? For all we know hell could be similar to life, not fully bad but certainly not perfect. While heaven’s perfection does seem to be preferential, I don’t know that people should be deprived of their free will solely on the basis that an option is less good than the other. Secondly, an issue I hold with your example regarding the mother/son is that the mother being human is motivated by her own desires to keep her son alive, thus putting herself first over her son. If the son would rather die than face public ridicule then it would be more loving for her to put aside her selfish desires in regards to her own fears for her son and to prioritize his needs, allowing him to die.

It appears as if what you are arguing for is escapism, that hell will exist but as a place that allows it’s inhabitants the opportunity for salvation. Within escapism, it would give way to these “shades of grey”, as those who went to hell who where faithful in God would receive immediate salvation while those who where on the journey to faithfulness could take a longer amount of time yet still in the end receive salvation. Therefore, hell is not binary yet hell still exists in some form or another while eliminating the need to create a new un-biblically confirmed location being purgatory. However, even if you where to side with the view of escapism, the issue would still exist in your frame that, “all beings experience a purgatory of sorts where they will eventually enter into heaven”, effectively leaving out all option for free-will. If all people will enter heaven then they do not have the choice to choose not heaven. If people do not possess the free will to deny God in the afterlife then what is the purpose of it’s allowance in life? Free-will is supposed to be the ultimate good, this opportunity to choose good is considerably far better than having no choice but good. Therefore, by eliminating the opportunity to choose good, it not only goes against biblical doctrine but also means that the problem of evil must yet again be addressed. I am curious to know if you have a response to this, otherwise I think that a viable option is the way of the escapist where those who still wish to deny God possess the opportunity to do so and stay in hell. In this way, everyone would be capable of achieving heaven but not everyone must achieve heaven. This is also considerably more in-line with your argument than the universality claim, which does not support hell existing in any form.

I do not see innocence as @TheMadFool brings up to be in relevance to Adam and Eve, as at the beginning God stated that they could not eat from the forbidden tree. They where aware of the law, there was no innocence. I do not know that Adam and Eve failed to understand good and evil so much as they showed disregard for it’s existence. By establishing that there even was a rule to be followed (not to eat from the forbidden tree) creates the existence of good and evil. However, I question the reason that they would even have the opportunity for evil.
As I stated in a response to another post, if God is omniscient then God knew that Eve would be tempted and eat from the tree, my response then is a classic one. If it was immoral for Eve to eat from the forbidden tree then shouldn’t it be immoral to create a forbidden tree you know will be eaten from? What responsibility then should be taken on part of God for his creation? I do not follow that a perfect God could knowingly create anything other than a perfect creation. One might argue that one could create something perfect but that does not mean that circumstances outside of your control could not make it flawed. However, God is all knowing, so if you are all knowing there is no circumstance that is out of your control. God is also all powerful, which means that he possesses the capability to ensure that nothing were to flaw his creation. God therefore knowingly created the existence of sin (sin is immoral) and permitted it’s presence, so then is God immoral?

In order to understand this argument a bit more clearly, I have taken @TheMadFool ’s concept of a dictator and changed it to fit the model of a Roman Emperor/gladiatorial ring and God/world. Within a gladiatorial ring, the Emperor get’s to create the circumstances, knows the results of the circumstances and yet still determines who will live and who will die.
So for example, the Emperor can choose to put someone born a household slave against a professional gladiator, knowing in advance who will win the battle and who will lose, however at the end of the dual, when presumably the gladiator has won over the slave, the Emperor still gets the final say, he can choose to let the slave live or let the slave die. In this case, let’s say he tells the gladiator to kill the slave. The slave was put in an impossible situation, the second he set foot in the arena, he was destined to die.
We see an all powerful God do this, however the impossible situation exists in the form of our own lives, will we prove ourselves enough for God to choose to award us eternal life, or will we get an eternity in hell? God presumably knows as he is omniscient, therefore many of us exist just to see the same fate as the slave. However, we do not exist just for a certainty of death, we exist for a certainty of eternal death. For many Christians, this is just, if you do not follow God then you get the later fate. However, I see not how this is just, if again, like the Emperor, God chooses the circumstances, know’s the result of the circumstances and yet still determines their fate. What of the people who are born into other religions (presumably because an omniscient God put them there), where never exposed to Christianity (because God decided so) and where then still condemned to hell (because God decided so).
Like the household slave, who had no say in whether he was born a slave, with an all knowing, omnipotent God, we have no choice whether we are born to follow God or to be born to not follow God, it has been decided for us. Thus, I do see why @TheMadFool could come to the conclusion that inconsistency exists. With the stakes far greater with an all powerful God, why do we recognize that all-powerful rulers are unjust in our current reality but support it when it comes to eternity?

I do agree with @TheMadFool’s conclusion that we do not have free-will if we have an “omnipotent, omni-benevolent and omniscient God”. If we are to believe that God is omniscient, then we are to believe that he is all knowing by definition. Therefore say tomorrow morning I wake up and choose to drink coffee instead of tea, God will have foreknowledge of me choosing coffee. However, for God to have foreknowledge of an event, the event must be certain to exist. I will drink coffee over tea on October 1st. Therefore, tomorrow I may think when pouring my morning cup that I have control in choosing my breakfast beverage, however, I do not. God has foreknowledge of that event, so If I where tomorrow to choose tea instead, that would mean that God’s foreknowledge was fallacious.
An argument to this could be that knowing an event is going to occur does not cause the event. God knowing I will drink coffee tomorrow does not mean that he made me drink coffee, but it does mean that no other option will not exist. However to this I would say that for no other option to exist, it assumes that the choice is absolute and if my choices are absolute before I make them, then I do not have free-will.
Following writing this response, I read further down the thread that @TheMadFool later says that God’s omniscience is causality based, meaning that God has access to each decision in our lives but that he did not “calculate our positions in advance”. @TheMadFool uses the idea that God could flip to a frame as in an old time movie and access the next frame to see what will occur before it does. However, the same issue still persists, that if God has certain knowledge of an event, it must come to exist. Maybe an event in the “frame” before causes me to drink coffee tomorrow morning. Say perhaps, my sister drinks my last packet of tea, so tomorrow morning I drink coffee because I do not have tea, yet I will still drink coffee. The events that led up to me drinking coffee matter not because regardless the certainty exists that I must drink coffee. In order to do this, I would still have had no free will because God created the circumstances in which my decision was generated.