Is God Evil for Creating the Devil? | Greg Koukl

Omnipotence and the Limits of Coherent Action

So, the question is, you said you can't create a morally free person without the potential for evil. How does that infringe on God's omnipotence? Can't God make a square circle?

No.

Next. This is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of omnipotence. Lots of times we have overly simplistic understandings about God, and so we learn that God can do everything. He's all-powerful.

That means He can do everything. And generally speaking, taken as a generalization, it's true. But when we say omnipotence, strictly speaking, what we're talking about is that God can do everything that power is capable of doing.

He has all power to accomplish any task that power can accomplish, essentially. Making a square circle is not a task. It's a faux task. It's a false task because the request does not make any sense. Please make an object that has no angles to it with four angles.

That's what the request is. Well, that makes no sense. It's incoherent. God doesn't do incoherent things because incoherent things don't even have any meaning. So God can't be called to account for that.

He's not faulted because He can't do that kind of thing. It's not a function of power. He can do anything that power can do because He has all power.

The Devil, Moral Freedom, and Divine Justice

Also related to the concept of evil, here's another question. The common question is, if God created everything, then He also created the devil. But doesn't this make Him evil?

Well, this is true until you get to the last line, which was a question. So the answer is no, it doesn't.

Next.

This is easy.

Yeah, yeah.

We're doing great. The devil was another creature who had the ability to do right and wrong, and chose to do wrong. There was that kind of moral freedom that the devil had as well. Now, we don't know a whole lot about the devil, certainly before his fall, but it's clear that he did wrong when he should have done right, and so did a third of the angelic host, and so they are under the just condemnation of God.

So all we have, pardon me, with the devil is the exact same situation before God we have with human beings. Maybe God didn't make evil with human beings, but God made human beings, so doesn't that make God evil?

And I might say, well, why would that make Him evil? Because human beings did evil. Right, but why is God responsible for something someone else did?

Okay?

It's the same question you ask of the devil. And the devil had the freedom to make choices himself, and he did, and he made the wrong.

Ones.

Okay, that doesn't mean that God is evil. So, now it does raise the question, as I mentioned before, well, why would he do that? And I got an answer, you ready? I don't know. That's my answer. Virtually every question that you ask that starts out with the word why regarding God is not going to be answerable, because God, the answer is in the mind of God and He hasn't told us.

Greater Goods, Moral Sufficient Reasons, and the Problem of Evil

That doesn't mean we can't speculate in some measure with things that we do know, but those have to be speculations. In this case, I just take the simplest, offer the simplest response that apparently God thought it was worth the risk, as it were, that His decision to make human beings and the angels that would fall and create evil had morally sufficient reasons to it.

That means that it seems there would, in principle, be a greater good that would come out of it. Well, what's that greater good? I don't know, but I don't have to show the greater good in order to show that it's possible God had a greater good, and if I show it's possible, that's all I need to do to show that it isn't a necessary contradiction.

It doesn't necessarily get caught in the hole. I think the problem of evil, in a lot of ways, is messy, and like I said, there's a lot of loose ends and the devil gets in the picture there and all kinds of other things, but one reason I keep coming back to Christianity is because, as I mentioned earlier, this Christianity does the best job of answering the questions in a coherent way that resonates with our deepest intuitions about the world, even if it doesn't, right now, answer all the questions that we have.

Nobody else even comes close.