Anon., you’ve raised a tangle of different questions that require some teasing apart in order to answer. Let’s start at the beginning.
You say that you “know about Alvin Plantinga's free will defense,” but I’m not sure you’ve really absorbed Plantinga’s response to the problem of evil. At a minimum, you need some lessons in pastoral counseling! You’re right that Plantinga differentiates between the intellectual and emotional problems of evil, the first lying in the province of the philosopher and the second in the province of the pastor. The reason he makes this differentiation, however, is so that you can reply more appropriately and sensitively to the person you’re conversing with. Once you discern that someone is really struggling with the emotional problem of evil, you don’t say to him, “Well, that is simply an emotional problem, you don't and cannot know Gods reasons for permitting it!” Is that how Plantinga responds to the emotional problem of evil? Of course not! He responds by talking about how God as our Heavenly Father suffers with us and shares and understands our hurts. He directs people’s attention to the cross and to the sufferings of Christ on our behalf as a source of comfort. If instead you find at that point that “I have nothing to say to them,” that only shows that you have not understood Plantinga’s response. The Free Will Defense is meant as a response to the intellectual, not the emotional, problem of evil. You responded to the emotional problem as though it were the intellectual problem and so came across as dismissive and uncaring. It was to avoid such a misstep that Plantinga differentiated between the two problems in the first place!
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