Sometimes you hear debates where people say that if God is all good and all powerful but still bad things happen it proves that He does not exist because surely He would have stopped the things that were bad. So either He does not exist or He is not all powerful (or possibly He is bad).
However this doesn’t take into account why God created this world.
It was to create a sandbox environment where autonomous beings could exercise their own free will without feeling accountable to an obvious observer.
When you give free will to autonomous beings you always have the risk that they may do bad things. That cannot be avoided. To give free will is a very risky thing. Therefore you need to also sandbox it to shelter the real world from these beings so that they don’t mess up everything.
We humans are soon going to face the same dilemma with Artificial Intelligence. We can make a fighter jet autonomous but who knows what will happen. What choices will it make. What will it decide to attack and how do you control that. We might need to create a simulated world. Let our AIs interact with it for several years to establish their inclinations before we let them loose in the real world. With some types of AI we don’t even understand the nature of the intelligence, it is too complicated. In such cases we are unlikely to be able to calculate what their actions will be. The only way would be trial and error in a test world.
With us humans God gave us a free will so we could learn and grow and be free to do good things.
However many of us choose to do many bad things although we know that the outcome will not be very good for others. But we justify ourselves in many ways. So in many if not most cases bad things are perpetrated by humans upon humans directly or indirectly.
Lots of bad things happen simply out of negligence because we are too busy with our own schemes to care about improving the safety of communities we are not part of. Here you can compare the death toll during similar events in well run countries versus countries where the leaders and population are very corrupt.
God clearly told us that we must manage the world. We are therefore responsible for what happens here. Not God. If we involve Him he will help us to put in place great systems but in the end it falls to us.
Therefore this argument is invalid because it doesn’t take into account why this world was created. The argument sounds very correct and unassailable but actually is based on wrong assumptions.
Once you die this will be explained to you and you will be astounded when you understand the WHY behind everything.
You might say but why give free will?
Are you then considering it would be ok for an eternity to have autonomous beings who are never allowed to exercise their autonomy. Who have to unquestionably tow the line with not even a historical experience to draw from. Surely in such a scenario sooner or later someone would rebel because you would always have these gnawing what if questions in your head.
Of course humans will tend to say God shouldn’t have given us free will - look at the mess. But if He didn’t sooner or later we would have said He is a cruel dictator and we would have rebelled and then there would have been no other option but to quarantine us humans somehow. That would have been very bad too
At least now we have all seen the effect of evil. And some have also seen that they themselves do not have special circumstances exempting them and that they too have done inexcusable things. When we leave this world and enter the real one we will be unlikely to repeat the same mistakes.
And those in the real world, the beings we refer to as angels etc. who maybe never had the ability to exercise free will to the same extent as us will also now have seen the effect of evil. No more Lucifers in future.