Your all-powerful God created the devil and evil - simply to set up "the fall." He did this KNOWING that most souls would ultimately suffer eternal punishment. You call this a good God? I call it evil.

This is a moral protest, not a debating trick, and it should be treated as one. The real question underneath it is whether a God who gives creatures the capacity to destroy themselves can be good — and that is one of the most serious questions anyone can ask.

1. Evil is not a substance God manufactured. In the classical account, evil is a privation — the absence or corruption of a good, the way rust is the corruption of iron rather than a thing in itself. “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). A hole is not a made object; it is the absence of soil. On this account God made a good world, and evil is what good things do when they come apart.

2. Love that cannot refuse is not love. The objection assumes God could have made free beings whose freedom only ever chose good. But a being that cannot choose otherwise is not choosing at all; it is a mechanism producing output. Scripture sets the choice before people as a real one: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Whether a world of genuinely free creatures who never fall is a coherent possibility remains a live philosophical question, and it should be labeled as one.

3. Foreknowledge is not causation. The objection treats God's knowing what Lucifer would do as identical to God making him do it. Those are different claims, and collapsing them is the whole engine of the argument. A parent can know a child will fall and still be right not to prevent every fall. Isaiah says God declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10) — that is a claim about knowledge, not authorship of sin.

4. The devil was created good and fell by his own act. Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 are traditionally read as describing a glorious being who fell through pride (Ezekiel 28:12-15). Scholars dispute whether those passages originally referred to a human king, and that should be admitted. What is clear either way is the pattern: a good creature, an evil choice, and no one to blame but the chooser.

5. Scripture is emphatic that God is not the author of sin. He is “of purer eyes than to see evil” (Habakkuk 1:13). James says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). Whatever the explanation of evil's origin, the Bible rules out the one the objection attributes to it.

6. “Most souls perish” is itself a contested reading. The objection depends on a specific eschatology: eternal conscious torment for the majority of humanity. Christians have never been unanimous about that. Annihilationists, universalists, and those who hold a wide hope all read the same texts differently, and 2 Peter 3:9 says God is “not wishing that any should perish.” The argument's force drops sharply if its grimmest premise is not settled.

7. God did not stay outside the damage. The accusation is that God arranged a catastrophe and watched. The Christian answer is that he entered it: “he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5), and “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). If the charge is that the cost of this world fell on someone else, the cross is the reply.

8. The turn: the protest borrows the authority of the accused. You say “I call it evil” as though evil were real and God were answerable to a standard. Where does that standard come from? On a naturalistic account, moral outrage is a biological response with no jurisdiction over anyone, including God. The very indignation that makes the objection powerful is a piece of evidence for the moral order the objection is using to indict its author.

9. What would a good God have done instead?. Press the alternative. A world with no possibility of evil is a world with no free creatures, no love that costs anything, no courage, no mercy, and no cross. It is not obviously a better world; it may not be a world with persons in it at all. The objection assumes the alternative is clearly superior, and that assumption has never been demonstrated.

The objection is right that a God who staged a fall for his own purposes would be monstrous. But that is not the God the Bible describes: it describes a good creation, a creature's own rebellion, and a Creator who absorbed the cost rather than watching from a distance.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce; Alvin Plantinga; William Lane Craig; Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil?; Augustine, Confessions.

Related challenges:
• Since God knows everything, He would have known how much suffering would eventually come into this world. Why didn’t He stop the process before it all got started, and save His creatures from all of the pain that would befall them?
• If the world was created by all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving God, why does he permit evil, pain and suffering in nature? Why does he allow disease, parasites, brutality, handicaps and natural disasters to persist?
• If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, why does he PERMIT starvation, child molestation, rape, torture and genocide? And telling us these VICTIMS suffer because of an inherited sin committed by Adam and Eve does not suffice!