Why Does God Allow Suffering?

There is no easy answer to this question, because only some of the material we need to answer the question is available to us, but what we do know we will try to share. Only God Himself has the wisdom and understanding to know the whole answer, and He has never attempted to explain it all to us - perhaps because no human could ever fully grasp the enormous amount of information that would involve.
But the charge is often made that God is cruel, or vindictive, because He "allows bad things to happen." Some of these bad things include deaths, diseases, deformities and accidents.
Before we…