Originally Posted by Neapolitan

Please say "please" when you ask, cause unless you respect my free will, I won't read your last post.

I think of the story of serpent tempting Eve with the fruit from the center of the garden as an allegory about free will. Really Eve should had been freaked out when she saw a talking serpent, maybe ran away. Instead she stayed and chat it up with the serpent and used her free will to eat the fruit.

Originally Posted by DeadChannel

There are a number of problems with this defence. I'll go through them:

1) The contention is that free will exists, and therefore evil exists because humanity is imperfect. However, in Christianity, it is usually believed that heaven is a perfect place free of suffering and hardship. Then, does free will exist in heaven?

If free will does exist in heaven, then that proves that there are ways that God could prevent suffering without infringing upon free will. Why then does he not use these tactics on earth.

If free will does not exist in heaven, then it isn't heaven at all.

2) Any imperfection in hummanity is ultimately the intentional result of God's actions. Yes, the serpent made eve eat from the tree of knowledge, but God is omnipotent, so he could have totally prevented that. Therefore, by virtue of his omnipotence, evil is still the intentional, fully consenting fault of God.

3) This goes back to the first point: surely God has other means by which he can stop suffering. Why didn't God just stop the gas from flowing into the chambers? Why didn't he make it so that there was a miscount in the votes, so that Hitler wasn't ever elected? For that matter, why didn't he kill Hitler outright? He seems to have no problems with that in the rest of the bible.

4) Not all suffering is the direct result of human free will. Why does God allow natural disasters to happen?