Rochelle asked:

If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and all good, then how does evil exist? I am taking a free will
approach, but it is proving difficult to defend. I do believe God is all powerful, all knowing, and all
good, I am just not too sure how to defend it. I believe God could have made us to always choose
good, but simply chose to let us make up our minds.

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I would simply repeat Hume (in a different context) in which he talks about philosophers who create a
problem where there is only a difficulty. If I were to ask you, how could there be a plane figure which
is a triangle, but does not have three sides? I would suggest that the answer is, there can't be such a
plane figure. No problem. Similarly, there can't be such a Being and there still be evil. But, you won't, I
know, be happy with such a reply. There have been a lot of attempts to (as Hume also says) mount a
rescue operation. A celebrated attempt is Leibniz' which is to argue that: (a) All evils are necessary
evils. (b) These evils are necessary for goods which more than compensate for the evils necessary
for them. Both (a) and (b) are, of course, questionable if not implausible.

The free will defense says that evil is a consequence of man's misuse of his free-will. A glaring
problem with that is that it would explain (if it explained anything) only man-made evil. But there are
also "natural evils" (earthquakes, famines, cancer, etc.) which could not be explained as due to man
or his free-will.

But the objection to even the free-will defence is strong. There are, even Christians will admit, people
who have chosen only the good, namely saints. Mother Theresa, or Francis of Assisi. If God could
make such persons who choose only the good, and not deprive them of their free-will, why could He
have not done that with us all?

Kenneth Stern