Crypto-Marcionite talking points aside, I think it might be misleading to treat this separately from the question of natural evil.
Not if the concept of 'natural evil' from a theological perspective was in part postulated in order to give a justification or at least a framework for god ordained biblical atrocities.
'Natural evil' is not a concept a non believer would need to grapple with as he has no reason to judge naturally occurring atrocities in moral terms.
So I think it should be treated separately from that branch of apologist theology.
The idea that 'natural evil' is a concept that only 'apologist theology' would want to deal with isn't one I've encountered before. One needn't be interested in 'apologist theology' or even religious to have a desire to account for a morally significant universe.
Even if it is only relevant to 'apologist theology', I don't really understand why you think that that makes it irrelevant here. Obviously it would be irrelevant to
your interested, but the OP was asking all of us, and the question posed presupposes (
even if only for purposes of argument) that God exists, so for those of us who do believe in God it falls into the same category of 'questions that require God's existence in order to be interesting' that you think the question of natural evil does.
Put another way, '
if God did exist, would he be a mass murderer?' is the sort of question that can be--you'll probably disagree that it should be, but it can be--answered in the same sorts of ways as '
if God
did exist, whence ebola and hurricanes?'.
