 But one need not take the story of the fall literally to think that there was a primal sin. (For a discussion of the historicity of the fall as it relates to sin, see McLeod-Harrison 2019; Smith 2017; and McCall 2019, appendix.) Even if one rejects the notion of a historical fall, Christianity nevertheless traditionally holds that all that God creates is good. But if both humans and angels are created good, how is it that at least some of them do evil? (This is what John Hick refers to as the problem of the “origin of evil ex nihilo”; see Hick 1968: 595.) The answer to this question, of course, is that an agent does evil because it wills to do evil. But this answer immediately raises another question: where does will for evil originate in free agents? This question is especially pressing given that many Christian traditions have held that free agents were created able both to sin and to refrain from sinning, a state sometimes called the status integritatis. While a creature’s having free will in the status integritatis might account for the possibility of evil, it isn’t sufficient to explain why that possibility was actualized by an otherwise morally untarnished creature. The primal sin can thus be seen as a specific instance of what Peter Kivy calls “the secular problem of evil”: “cases of evil [action] in which the perpetrator appears to pursue no real or apparent good” (Kivy 1980). One might say that the initial choice to sin involved a perceived good, perhaps the assertion of one’s own independence from God in an act of pride, self-love, or envy. What is perplexing is how that sin could come about in a non-sinful being—why is it that a non-sinful agent would wrongly but culpably conceive of such as act as good? How could a non-sinful agent be drawn to a sinful action in the first place?