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Wrong question, wrong approach to the problem of evil. What happens over here is finite, what happens in the afterlife is infinite. If anything the question should be why doesn't God save all his followers like he did with the ones in Lisbon in 1755? Why does He grace only a few infants with death before they get the chance to sin? But the real question is another: can an infinite punishment for a finite crime really be called good?
Once we take that seriously though, shouldn't an urgent cause be raising child mortality? Gotta get those kids dying of diseases before they can sin, pump out more kids too, be just so reckless as to not be actually murdering them... But Jesus also went around curing the sick. So what's going on here? Is children dying good or bad?
Real Christians naturally wouldn't fall into this kind of gotcha. The values and outcomes are mostly fine but they rest on a weak foundation. There are arguments assembled like epicycles to prevent and evade these kinds of inconsistencies including the general-purpose 'you can't understand God's plan, just trust that he knows what he's doing and has your best interests at heart'. Whereas if we abandon the all-loving omnipotent everything falls into place smoothly. Children dying is bad in an uncomplicated way. They're lost forever. Sometimes natural disasters wreck you in an impersonal, mechanical world. They need to be worked around via warning and sturdy buildings. If you pass the test (however wildly difficult and unfair it may be), you live. If you fail, you get wrecked and die.
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C.S. Lewis, former atheist, explored that in The Last Battle. It wasn’t the creatures and talking beasts who had sinned greatly who went to the left, into Aslan’s shadow.
Each man, dwarf, centaur, talking dog, and other diverse being met Aslan at the door of the afterlife. Those who felt joy on seeing Him in His full glory walked inside gladly. Those who saw the loving God of their universe and rejected Him with disgust walked away from Him into the darkness.
Even the dwarves ended up in Heaven who’d shot the Narnian cavalry and sneered at the idea of Him due to propoganda. Aslan was invisible to their self-delusion.
It’s a fantastic exploration of the idea of eternal damnation, and worth bringing into the conversation.
Claiming that Lewis was a "former atheist" is an exaggeration. He still heavily believed in the spiritual and supernatural, and his atheism was based on hating God for the bad parts of his life, not on the kind of intellectual atheism that matters here.
It also seems a little harsh to send someone to eternal torment because he says "I can't tell the difference between you and someone psychically meddling with my head".
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That sounds swedemborgian to me. He went further and said that hell basically wouldn't suck that bad from the perspective of the souls that chose it, I don't know what Lewis imagined. But I don't think it's the canonical view, that you get a final saving throw after death.
Does it work for you? Imagine the worst person ever, kills and rapes his whole life away, but after death he sees god, says "yep, I guess I was wrong" and just like that he gets the same reward as the most pious of humans. My position has been for a long time that the problem of evil is mostly psychological.
Jesus went out of his way to tell us a parable about exactly this.
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