How Did Voltaire Contribute To The Enlightenment?

In November of 1775, a great catastrophe struck Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, leaving more than just rubble and ash behind. “The earthquake happened in an area of Europe where there was rethinking of the nature of personality, knowledge, science, and religion (Dynes).” These ideas would later become known as The Enlightenment. The ideology that fueled The Enlightenment was to “flee from dominant Christian thinking and move towards new ways of knowing (Dynes).” The immense destruction from the earthquake gave philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau reason to quarrel in belief. “Voltaire was a prominent figure during such time due to his opposing ideas of the church and government (Dynes).” Voltaire did not agree that we all lived in the best of possible worlds and he did not believe that God only punished the deserving. He used his poem on the Lisbon earthquake to attack the philosophical idea of optimism in which the world is good.
In Voltaire’s poem he mentions that if God was as good as we believed him to be, he would not cause such pain and suffering. If God is all powerful and all loving as he is said to be why would he sit back and allow such devastation to occur instead of doing something to prevent such destruction? Could it be because he isn’t in fact all-powerful? In a way Voltaire is calling God’s power into question here which most Christians would not appreciate because that goes against nearly all Christian