If God Created Everything, Did He Create Evil?

When God created the heavens and the earth, everything He made was good (Genesis 1:31).  There was no trace of evil – no shortcoming in anything God had made.

Our first parents, Adam and Eve, enjoyed uninhibited communion with God in the garden He had given to them.  They loved Him of their own volition, and obeyed Him freely.  The Bible does not define exactly how long this continued, but at some point, evil entered this world through the lie of the serpent (Satan) to Eve.  By placing doubt into her mind as to whether God really meant what He said, he convinced her that she would be like God if she were to disobey Him.  She believed him, and ate of the only fruit in the garden which God strictly forbade.  Adam, being at her side, failed to protect her in her moment of temptation, and ate the fruit as well.  At this moment, Genesis tells us “their eyes were opened,” and they made coverings to hide their bodies (Genesis 3:7).

At the heart of the “problem of evil” is the element of human freedom.*  The Bible speaks often about role of human choice in believing and obeying him (Romans 1:18-23), and emphasizes the need for us to make a decision about whether we will follow him.  An objection which is often leveled against Christianity is that God is a cosmic tyrant who says “you do it my way, or no way at all.”  In reality, God has always given us two options: His or our own.  C. S. Lewis wrote that there are two types of people: There are those who kneel before God and say “thy will be done,” and those who refuse to bend their knee to Him, to whom God then says, “very well.  Thy will be done.”  Freedom to choose is a mark of humanness. As God chose to love us before we were born, so we, being made in His image and likeness, also have the choice to love Him. But He will not coerce us, and this is evidenced in the fact that even our first parents had the choice to believe God, or to believe the lie.

The answer then, is that God created everything, including human freedom, and humanity chose to abuse this gift.  Thus He did not create evil, and He is not responsible for evil.  Evil is the result of human beings abusing the gift of free will. And free will, though it carries the capacity to be used for evil, is also the only way in which true love can exist.  If we did not have the freedom to choose evil, then neither would we have the freedom of choosing to truly love.

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