God is not a couch potato

 What I have concluded is that what we are calling evil is a necessary component of a loving world where everyone has free will. Evil comes from making bad choices (natural evil is a different discussion). If we did not have the ability to make bad or wrong choices, then we could not make good or right choices either. How would we even know what is good or loving without the contrast of the bad or evil? Imagine a world where there is only light and no darkness. We would all be blind? Without the contrasting shading and shadows of darkness we could not see anything. Imagine a world with only sound and no silence. We would all be deaf with no way to distinguish one sound from another. If there was only love and goodness in the world and nothing bad or evil, how could we even recognize it as good without the contrast of something bad? There would be no need for compassion or empathy. No need for forgiveness or grace. No need for loving or caring for other people. How would any of that work? If there is a 'Satan' then it would be an entity who has made a lot of bad choices, not a being which is somehow evil incarnate. God did not create 'evil.' God created us in his image and gave us the free will to be able to distinguish good from bad and choose to love. I don't know what philosophical category this definition puts me in. But this is what makes the most sense to me. I reject determinism because it puts God in the role of a spectator, like he is just sitting back watching his favorite move play out on DVD. Or maybe like a play that he wrote where he gets to play a part, but it is always the same. I don't see God as a couch potato or a theater actor - he is an active participant in his ongoing creation. Without free will, none of it makes sense. As to the thought experiment about the all-powerful demon, y'all used the analogy of a basketball game and predicting whether a shot would go in. To that I would say if it was a team of robots that had been programmed to play basketball, then maybe that determination could be made. But with a human there are too many variables because the player is making constant choices that would change the variables for making physical calculations. Does the player shoot the ball now, or hesitate and shoot a split second later, in which case all the variables have changed.