On the contrary. God would have to be evil to eliminate evil. Since He is good he allows evil...
These statements are absurd and self-evidently false. You present no coherent argument that evil has to exist in order for there to be good. You do not need to have a broken arm in order to have a healthy one. You do not need to be tortured in order to appreciate the need to avoid torture.
God has given everyone an opportunity to avoid evil but hardly anyone avails himself of it. The reality is that most people enjoy evil too much to give it up.
By your logic, a person who is continually tempted to commit murder has MORE opportunity to be good than a person who is never tempted to commit murder. That is patently absurd. It is also absurd to claim that most people enjoy evil. What about the victims? Surely you are not claiming that
they enjoy the suffering caused by evil.
Evil is not a creation. It is a perversion of creation.
Not all "evil" is human-generated, and we have been talking about the horrible suffering caused by natural disasters. You are completely ignoring that aspect of the discussion. You also ignore the fact that victims often have no opportunity to thwart evil, so blaming evil on humanity alone is pointless. God is putatively the only being with the ability to actually prevent evil. The question here is why he permits it when he could prevent it.
This is an old argument. If no one had free will, there would be no evil.
That is not the question. The question is whether the prevention of evil by God would rob us of free will. Please explain how that works, because I have never heard a coherent defense of the claim.
This does not mean the person doesn't have free will. I know how my wife will behave (I ought to; we have been married 40 years) but I am not likely to change that behavior although at times I can manipulate it.
Don't put yourself in God's shoes. You are not God. You cannot change your wife's behavior, but God certainly can. In theory, he is not as limited as human beings are in what he can achieve. What may seem an impossible hurdle for you is not necessarily impossible for an omnipotent being.
Since everything was created good, how does that make God the creator of evil?
Everything was not created "good". His creation led inevitably to the occurrence of evil, and he did nothing to prevent it, even though he was theoretically capable of preventing it. If a human being stood by and let preventable evil occur, we would judge that as depraved indifference.
However I would agree the risk of evil occuring, lies in creating intelligences with a free will. It is most likely that God knew this would happen but like any risk/reward situation, He must have thought the reward was greater than the risk.
"Most likely that God knew...?" Don't be absurd. We imagine God to be omniscient. He
had to know. How else could his prophets make prophecies unless God knew enough to inform them of the future? Since he knew how people would behave, he was unable to create beings that could surprise him by their behavior. Indeed, technically speaking, an omniscient being cannot create any events whose outcomes would be unknown to that being. Hence, from God's perspective, people have no free will. Free will can only exist in those who are ignorant of future outcomes, and God does not fall into that category.
