If God is infinitely good and infinitely powerful then why is there so much evil in the world? Why can't God figure out a way to lessen it? Couldn't the world work without so much pain and suffering? It seems that either God is not all loving and good, or He is not all powerful. For how could a perfectly powerful and loving God look down on this world and not do something to end (or at least lessen) the amount of suffering He sees?

What Evil "Is"

One's definition of evil has much to do with understanding the answer. If evil is a "substance" or some kind of "force", then God must be it's creator, and that would make God less than good. But is this what evil is? Can evil be contained? Can it be measured? No, because evil is not a substance like water that can be contained and measured. It is rather like darkness. Can you fill a jar with darkness? Can you take darkness and add more darkness to it to make it more dark? Does darkness take up space? No. Darkness is not a substance, it is the lack of substance... namely light. Light is a thing. It can be measured. In the absence of light we have darkness. In a like manner, when we have an absence of good, we have evil.

For instance, if I burn my hand in a fire, that may be considered evil as it involves suffering and pain. But what part of this action "contains" evil? Fire is good, my hand is good as well. The problem enters when these two are mixed in a way that they were not meant to. Let's take another example. No reasonable person can deny the harm that drugs like cocaine have caused in the lives of persons involved with their use. So cocaine is evil. But isn't cocaine natural? It is taken from trees just like cocoa is, and trees are not evil. The evil is introduced when that good tree is used in a way it was not meant to be used. Evil and good are not forces or substances, they are ways of describing actions or relationships.

Did God Create Evil?

Why didn't God just create the world good, then we wouldn't have this problem? The answer lies in the above examples. Evil only exists when a good thing is used in a way it was not created to be used.

"God saw all that He had made, and it was very good."
-Genesis 1:31

"For everything God created is good"
-1 Timothy 4:4

A good example of this is the current debate over gun control. There are some who argue that because people are killed with guns, guns must be banned. But is this reasonable? Are guns evil? No. If a gun is used to hunt for necessary food, that is good. If it is used to murder a child in a gang war, that is evil. But the gun has not changed. What has changed is how it was used. So what would God have to change to make evil disappear??? Us!

Free Will

Herein lies the dilemma. God had to make a choice when He created us. He could have chosen to make us automatons that cannot think for themselves and thus can never sin. He could have written "programs" onto our brains that made us unable to step outside His perfect will. But free will is necessary for real love, for real relationships. God is a God of relationships. He is much more concerned with our relating to Him than we can imagine. So, for God to create us without that possibility would have been evil - for it is not what God made us "for". And, as has been shown, when something is not doing what it was made for, we have evil.

Of course, free will necessarily involves choices. Where no choice exists, free will is absent. So, we are given the ability to choose between what God wants and what He does not want. We can choose to ignore Him, we can choose to "do evil" by doing what we were not meant to do. This is called corruption. When something is changed to what it was not meant for, it is corrupted. That is what sin is, not doing what God has perfectly willed for us to do. It is our wills that cause evil. The only way to rid ourselves of evil is to rid ourselves of our wills... or bend them to God's.

God will destroy evil, once every creature that will choose Him over themselves has chosen, He will come and destroy all that is not of Him. Then the Bible says we will be changed... We will become what we desire, perfect servants of God. Until then, we can only try.

Why?

But isn't there evil that is not caused by mankind's free will? No person is responsible for sickness (at least most of them). No person's choice makes earthquakes that kill children. Whose fault is it when disaster strikes good people? If God is all powerful, must we not blame Him?

First, we must realize that we are finite beings in an infinite reality. We cannot see the purpose behind most things. We ignore the "Why" of most situations because they are not bad or good enough to question. But if we required a reasonable and fully understood cause for every effect in our lives we would not get past our first breath. Just because we do not know "Why" that does not mean that there is not a "Because". Only an infinite being can know of the infinite reasons for an infinite number of events. So we must not be so arrogant as to assume that because we do not know the reason for a thing, that there can be no good reason.

Second, it is easy to see purpose behind some evil. Today it is the popular theory that spanking a child cause lack of self esteem and problems later in life. The outcome of this false notion is that children are growing up without knowledge of consequences. They are taught that they will not hurt or be punnished for doing wrong. This leads to greater acts of evil. Eventually they reach adulthood where punnishment does exist and they are destroyed. Now, to the child spanking is an evil, it hurts - it is not how things are supposed to be. But in the overall picture, to avoid a greater evil, it is not wrong. Because we can see examples of "evil" keeping us from greater evil, we need to realize that some things that seem evil while they are occuring will in the big picture turn out to be for the good. God has a purpose, He is in control, and He is good.

Conclusion

God has created the best possible world. Non-free creatures cannot love, cannot choose good (which is the highest good) and therefore it would have been less than perfect to create them without free will (which is evil). Without the possibility of evil we could not strive, we could not love, we could not really live. Therefore, the free world is the best possible world, although it must, by definition, allow for the possibility of evil.