If your Biblical Yahweh God is so ALL-good-fantastic, how could Satan fall if he was with God and had the chance to witness his existence? God made Satan too, right? Seems God shares a bit of the blame for MAKING Satan prideful, yes?

The logic has a real edge: if God made everything and a creature turned evil, the causal chain does run back somewhere. The question is what “somewhere” means, and whether “made” and “caused” are the same verb.

1. Knowing God does not compel loving him. The objection assumes that direct knowledge of God would make rebellion impossible. James says otherwise: “even the demons believe — and shudder” (James 2:19). Proximity to overwhelming evidence is not the same thing as allegiance. You can know someone exists and still refuse them.

2. Scripture says remarkably little here. There is no biography of Satan. Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18); Paul mentions “the condemnation of the devil” for conceit (1 Timothy 3:6). Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 are primarily oracles against the kings of Tyre and Babylon, applied more widely by later readers. The doctrine is real but sketchily revealed, and honesty requires saying so.

3. Evil is a corruption, not a created thing. On the classical view associated with Augustine, evil has no independent existence; it is a privation, a twisting of something good. God made a good being — “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) — and the defection is the creature's act. “God made evil” misfires at the level of categories, not just of blame.

4. Love requires the capacity to refuse. A love that cannot be rejected is not love; it is programming. If God wanted beings capable of genuine relationship, he had to make them capable of genuine rejection. The capacity for love and the capacity for refusal are the same capacity, viewed from two directions.

5. Making a will is not causing its choices. If I give my son a car and he uses it to hurt someone, I did not make him do it. God gave a will; the misuse is the creature's act, not the Creator's design. Concede that this raises a further question — why permit the misuse at all — which is a different argument and needs its own answer.

6. God permits for a good he pays for himself. “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20); “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). The cross is the paradigm: the worst act in human history becomes the means of salvation, and the one who permitted it bore the cost (Acts 2:23; Colossians 2:15). Permission is not endorsement, and here it is not cheap.

7. The objection borrows its standard from God. “God shares the blame” presupposes a real obligation and real innocence — a moral law that binds even the Creator. On naturalism, blame is a feeling with a survival story attached. The complaint is only intelligible if there is a standard above the dispute, which is what the Christian says God grounds (Romans 2:14-15).

8. The alternative removes the good with the evil. If God had overridden every possible rebellion, he would have made puppets — and no love, courage, mercy, or faithfulness would exist to be praised. There is no possible world with genuinely free creatures and a guarantee of sinlessness. The objection asks for a coerced paradise and calls it kinder.

9. Pride is the creature's own act. Scripture treats the devil's conceit as self-exaltation, not an installed defect (1 Timothy 3:6). The tradition is unanimous that no external cause compelled it. God made a being capable of pride, which is what made him a person rather than a mechanism — and capability is not causation.

10. The story ends with the serpent crushed. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Romans 16:20). Whatever the permitting costs, the Christian claim is not that evil is a permanent rival or an eternal embarrassment. It is a defeated insurgency, and the cross is where the defeat happened.

“God made Satan, so God is to blame” assumes that making a free being is the same as causing its choices. It is not, and the alternative — a world with no capacity for refusal — would have no love in it. The harder question, why God permits the refusal at all, is answered in the New Testament not with an explanation but with a cross.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Augustine, City of God; Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics; Michael Heiser, The Unseen Realm.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!