Question 3: what isn't the question?

There are always more questions than answers. This is a lazy aphorism but it is broadly true. The world is a complicated place and answering every single little question is neither possible nor useful. You need to decide which questions are important, and, perhaps more importantly, decide which questions are unimportant so you can avoid wasting time on them.

Here are some things that I'm not going to waste my time on:

Can God create an object too massive for God to move?

God can move anything. But God can create anything. Oh no! A paradox! It's easy to invent questions like this that appear to poke a logical hole in the idea of omnipotence. Try it for yourself. Literally minutes of fun. The fact that it is so very easy to formulate this sort of paradox ought to be a pretty good indication that it isn't a very useful paradox. It is, at best, an illustration of how you can invent a set of rules and (correctly or not) demonstrate them to be inconsistent. A simplistic version of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem if you like. (If you don't know about Gödel's theorem, it is well worth reading about. Good stuff to keep you awake at night.)

Bad things happen to good people.

God is omniscient and omnipotent but allows man to do bad things. This is a much (much) more interesting question than the first. But I'm side-stepping it altogether. Observant readers may have noticed that in the two previous posts I did not mention 'goodness' as one of God's attributes.

Two reasons for this:

1. there does not appear to be an unequivocal statement in the Old Testament that God is good. This may seem slightly odd, and the New Testament appears to be more committal on the subject, but I've had a good browse and a good Google and I've turned up nothing.
2. it does not provide any proof for the existence or non existence of God

The first reason may be a mistake on my part. (To repeat what I said earlier, I'm more than happy to be corrected on any biblical interpretation). The second reason is far more important.

If we assume that 'good' and 'bad' are subjective qualities, then the question "why do bad things happen?" can be reduced to a debate on whether or not the "bad things" are actually bad. This is moral philosophy. It should be taught as a compulsory subject to all children, but it isn't useful in the current context.

If instead we assume that there is an objective 'good' beyond the opinion of man, and that God is omniscient, then God knows with absolute certainty what is good and bad. But we do not. So we cannot derive any proof about the existence of God from the fact that we observe things that we consider to be 'bad'.

"Ah but!" I hear you myself say, "the Old Testament contains examples of God proclaiming that particular things are good or bad, and yet appearing to act in a contrary fashion."

Possibly true. But this would only be a conclusive contradiction if you were to accept that the words of God reported in the Old Testament form a comprehensive and infallible definition of what constitutes good and bad. There are, no doubt, some people who do accept this. Those people are unlikely to enter into an attempted rational debate on the very existence of God. This is probably the one and only circumstance where I will give any weight to the "God moves in mysterious ways" argument.