God's goodness and benevolence, according to the Augustinian theodicy, remain perfect and without responsibility for evil or suffering.
God's goodness on that level is certainly not disputed, but there is a bug in the ointment.
Rousseau believed in God's existence, professed his love for God, and his faith in God's goodness ("everything is good, coming from God"), as well as his certainty that there was an afterlife and that the soul was immortal, which "all the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment".
I think that the 'God is good to us' understanding of God's goodness is ruled out on this approach: for the notion of 'good to us' is a normative notion.
There seems to be little justification for thinking that God's goodness could not be moral goodness simply from the fact that God is necessarily perfectly good.
Augustine thinks that all divinely-created things – including, of course, human beings – are good in so far as they share in God's goodness.
The goodness of God may be articulated in various ways, either by arguing that God's perfection requires God being good as an agent or by arguing that God's goodness can be articulated in terms of other Divine attributes such as those outlined above.
Thus, Hartshorne can say that God's goodness is not diminished if a fragmentary being is heedless of the good of others, by indifference or harmful intent.
At Three Quarks Daily, Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin expound two traditional defenses of hell's compatibility with God's goodness.
Leibniz coined the word theodicy for the defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in the face of human suffering.
This belief in ultimate divine justice provides a rationale for theodicy, the reconciliation of God's goodness with the existence of evil in the world.
