Limited Power or Limited Love: Mackie's problem of Evil

Like Ivan in Dostoyevsky's "Rebellion", Mackie wants to look at the problem of evil and its implications for our understanding of God and religious belief.  While Dostoyevsky focuses on the moral issue (returning ticket and not accepting a universe/God that allows children suffering), Mackie wants to focus on the logical issue of how the existence of evil can fit with our notion of an all-powerful (omni-potent) and wholly good (all-loving, merciful, etc) God.  So, Mackie's challenge is the following:  Given the existence of evil, is belief in the Classical or Traditional or Orthodox understanding of God rational?

Now, Mackie acknowledges that 'rational' here can mean a couple different things.
rational1=  to believe in anything, we need proof or some 'public' demonstration or justificaiton of that belief (think Clifford here).
rational2= But we can also understand rational to mean having good or some strong reasons, even subjective or experiential reasons for something.

Mackie wants to suggest that there are many people (like Otto and James) who argue that religious belief is not rational1 but could be rational2 or still susceptible to a proof, but a non-rational or irrational proof for God's existence based on feeling or experience (direct experience of God, or maybe miracles).

Mackie's critique is supposed to challenge both rational1 and rational2.  Because Mackie wants to argue that their is a logical contradiction between our concept of God and the existence of evil.  While this contradiction is not immediately apparent, it becomes noticeable when we 'unpack' or explain what we mean by 'omnipotence' and being 'wholly good'.  Once we explain these notions, evil and the God of Western Monotheism are logically incompatible.  

Now Mackie admits there are ways to meet this challenge.  The easiest is just to simply say that religion is NOT rational.  But here, Mackie points to what I have called rational2 to show that to go this route would require a radical rejection of rationality and logic.  We would have to say not only that proving or believing in God is not necessarily rational (and could be based on other reasons/means like direct experience) but instead that God himself or the concept of God doesn't really make sense or isn't logical.  Mackie suggests this wholesale rejection of reason and logic is too big a bullet to bite.