
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 the sharpest form of the problem of evil, because it isn't about one tragedy but about the whole arrangement. It deserves to be answered at that scale, and anyone who answers it in three sentences has not understood it.
1. Evil is not a created thing. Classical theology holds that evil is a privation — a corruption or absence of a good that ought to be there, the way a hole is not a substance but a missing floor. "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). On that account God did not create evil; he created goods that creatures can corrupt.
2. The devil was not made as the devil. The being later called Satan was created good and fell by his own choice. It should be said honestly that the usual proof texts — Ezekiel 28:12-15 and Isaiah 14:12-14 — are addressed in the first instance to the kings of Tyre and Babylon and were applied to Satan by later tradition. The doctrinal point stands on other grounds: the fall is a creature's decision, not a divine design.
3. Permission is not authorship. God permits evil because he has a reason, and the reason has to be weighed against the good he intends. A world in which evil is impossible is a world in which no one can choose love, courage, mercy, or faith. Those goods are not add-ons to freedom; they are made of it.
4. Love that cannot be refused is not love. C.S. Lewis's argument in Mere Christianity is that God could not create a love that is both genuine and automatic. Freedom is what makes love possible and what makes evil possible, and in a world of persons the two cannot be separated. You can have puppets or you can have children, not both.
5. "Most will be lost" is a warning, not a census. Jesus says the gate is narrow (Matthew 7:13-14) and tells his hearers to "strive to enter" (Luke 13:24). He never gives a number. Meanwhile "he desires all people to be saved" (1 Timothy 2:4) and takes "no pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 33:11). The objection supplies a statistic the Bible does not.
6. Christians disagree about hell, and it matters here. Traditionalists hold to eternal conscious punishment; conditionalists argue the finally lost are destroyed, and that this is what "perish" in John 3:16 means; a minority hope for universal reconciliation. If either of the latter is right, the scale of the objection shrinks dramatically. This is a live intramural debate, not a settled embarrassment, and the objection's force depends on which side of it is true.
7. God did not stand outside the cost. On the Christian account God entered the world he made and bore its evil in himself: "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). If the charge is that God arranged a world with terrible risk and then watched, the cross is the denial of the watching. Whatever else is true, he is not a distant engineer.
8. The turn: the objection needs a standard it hasn't grounded. "I call it evil" is a moral judgment, and it assumes a real standard of good that God is failing to meet. If nature is all there is, moral outrage is a feeling with no authority behind it. The objection is powerful precisely because it borrows the theistic premise that good and evil are objectively real — and then uses that premise to indict the only worldview that grounds it.
9. The objection assumes what it denies. The charge is that God knew some would be lost and created anyway. But the objector also knows the claim and rejects it, and expects that decision to be taken seriously as his own. That is a free choice, not a determined output. The argument requires genuine agency to make God culpable, and the same agency is what makes the lost responsible.
10. There is a limit here, and it should be named. Paul ends his longest treatment of this subject not with an explanation but with doxology: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33). That is not an argument, and it is not offered as one. It is a claim that the scale of the question exceeds the vantage point of the questioner.
The Christian answer is not that the cost was small. It is that evil is a corruption rather than a creation, that freedom is the condition of love, that the number of the lost is unknown, and that God paid the price himself rather than watching from safety. Whether that is enough is a judgment you have to make, but it is not the picture the objection painted.
Sources: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain; C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil?; Norman Geisler; Robin Parry.


