The secret irony pervading these arguments [on objections to the goodness of God] is that they would never have occurred to consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.
There is a sense in which Ivan's love of that little girl [in The Brothers Karamazov] is always in danger of becoming a kind of demonic compassion: a desire that she not exist at all, a conviction that it were better she had never been summoned into the wounded freedom of cosmic time or called into rational union with God than she suffer the wrongs done her at the hands of fallen creatures.
Unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power.
Christ is a persuasion, a form of evoking desire... Such an account [of Christ] must inevitably make an appeal to beauty.
Beauty crosses every boundary, traverses every series, and so manifests the God who transcends every division.
The final encounter with God, or an encounter with God that would take you beyond doubt, wouldn't have the character of a metaphysical proof.