Universal Good and Bad

When some bad thing happens, its often asked why would a good God allow it? That's not an unfair question quite honestly, if you're actually trying to understand what's at work. But too many people who ask it mean for us to infer that the fact of evil in the universe must mean God isn't good.

Well, then, let's try something. Let's remove God from the equation. Let's say, only for the sake of argument, mind you, that He doesn't exist. What would we have? 

A Godless universe which also allows bad things to happen. Are you ready to infer that the universe is evil? 

My point is this. I believe that we've set ourselves up for failure when we say God can't be good if he won't stop evil when we would have evil in a universe left alone anyway. Perhaps the universe as the universe is only neutral; but if the issue is good and bad I can't see neutrality as anything except a benign evil at best. At worst, and I think this the most likely scenario, it would mean we could do anything we wanted for whatever reason we wanted. Or for no reason at all. That doesn't strike me as a moral positive.

So we can have a universe with a God and bad things happen, or a universe without God and bad things happen. I'll take the former. We might at least accomplish something good there.