From Thomas Hilton - Mormon Scholars Testify

One example I find particularly gratifying is the uniquely LDS response to the so-called Problem of Evil: How can God, being perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, have created a world containing evil? In syllogistic terms, it might go like this:

Syllogism I
Major Premise: God created everything that exists.
Minor Premise: Evil exists.
Conclusion: God created evil.

Syllogism II
Major Premise: God is perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing
Minor Premise: Any perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing being would never create evil.
Conclusion: God did not create evil (or more specifically, evil does not exist).

Thus are most Christians—most religions, actually—stuck. Many of my academic friends are non-Christian, even entirely irreligious, for precisely this reason. They see this fundamental inconsistency: either evil is some kind of fiction, or God is somehow not what we thought.

Now, enter Joseph Smith and the restored gospel of Jesus Christ: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). Thus we discover that God, although perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, is not the Uncaused First Cause that Aquinas asserted. We lesser beings “have no beginning; [we] existed before, [we] shall have no end, [we] shall exist after, for [we] are gnolaum, or eternal” (Abraham 3:18). Next we discover that, although God “rules in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath” (Abraham 3:21), He loves us so perfectly (per John 3:16) that He took us as He found us (see Abraham 3:21) and is glorifying us each into the most joyful beings we can be (per 2 Nephi 2:25 and Doctrine and Covenants 88:27-32). He didn’t create evil; each of us is our own, small, uncaused first cause of evil (as well as our poor pittance of good). Thus, Christ’s Atonement stands not as the poorly sanitized human sacrifice of pagan ritual that some of my irreligious friends perceive but rather as the Great Healing of us eternally flawed—damned—beings who, despite our fatal weakness, are nevertheless capable of great joy.