Free Will Response To The Problem Of Evil

What exactly causes evil? Is it because of human actions or something bigger like God? Many philosophers argue to solve the problem of why we have evil if God is wholly good. There are many explanations for this, but first we need to understand what the problem of evil, the free will response, and divine foreknowledge is. After viewing the material, I concluded that free will is a possible response to the problem of evil because people choose their actions. Others say that free will is not the cause for evil because God has foreknowledge. However, even if God does know everything before it happens, this does not mean he forces us to take those actions and takes away our free will. First, the problem of evil is the attempt to understand why
A simple definition for the free will response is that evil was introduced because of humans and their actions taken because of free will. For example, Adam and Eve were living a great life, but were told not to eat from a specific tree. Given the fact that they had free will, Eve chose ate the fruit from the tree and gave some to Adam. Consequentially, evil was introduced into the world. J.L. Mackie wrote in “Evil and Omnipotence” that the free will response was “unsatisfactory primarily because of the incoherence of the notion of freedom of the will”. Mackie brings up the question of why God didn’t just create humans as beings that freely chose good on every occasion, leading her to say that this shows inconsistency to calling God both omnipotent and wholly
People were created to act freely, even if they chose evil, because it may have been thought that giving mankind the ultimate freedom would be the better option. If God made people this way, he could have easily made them freely choose good in every decision. Aquinas provides insight on the problem of evil with the statement that God knows everything, just not before it happens. This is because Aquinas said that God is outside of time so he cannot know what will happen in the future. In other words, he was denying that God obtained divine foreknowledge, which is the idea that God knows everything we will do before we are born.
Some philosophers think divine knowledge is not compatible with free will. This is because they assume that if God knows what we will do and when we will do it, we don’t have the freedom to choose the alternative action. However, Augustine mentioned that just because God knows what we will do does not imply that we are forced to take that path. We have the ability to make a decision and God would just know the final