by Edyta Tehrani

Created on: February 24, 2007   Last Updated: May 25, 2011

Evil is simply the abuse of free will. When we ask why God allows for evil, we are really asking why He honours our freedom of choice. This freedom comes with responsibility and a risk of misusing it, but without it much good would also not be possible. People who  argue that God is not good because He allows for evil in the world, did not really think through what not allowing for it would really mean for all of us.

When there is no possibility of making wrong choice there is really no possibility of making genuine good choice either. Society values the members who make good choices only because they did not have to make them,  and because they were free to do wrong.  If there was no choice and everyone automatically did what is right, it would not be any virtue in it.

In the same way, no one would want the love of someone who loves us because he does not have any other choice, such love would  not be love at all. If we, human beings, cannot be satisfied with this kind of love, why would  we expect God to be happy with it?

 Some could argue further that God does not need to take away our freedom of choice in order to do away with evil. Why doesn't He simply intervene every time someone is about to do wrong and prevent it from happening? The most famous Christian apologist of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis,  wrote about this in his book titled, "The Problem of Pain." In it, he argued that the world in which God does not allow for evil could not be stable.

He wrote : " We can perhaps conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of free will by His creatures at every moment : so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that would carry insults. But such a world would be the one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which therefore, the freedom of choice would be void...All matter in a neighbourhood of a wicked man would be subject to unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions,  by modifying the behaviour of matter and produces what we call miracles, but the very conception of a common and therefore stable world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare."

Another argument is to say that God could destroy Satan and us and start all over, but it would not really change anything.It would mean that God failed. He, however, does

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