&gt; As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true &quot;good&quot; requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork.<p>This doesn&#x27;t really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn&#x27;t means he&#x27;s either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how &quot;no-evil&quot; somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly <i>logical contradiction</i> if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.