i know this is an old philisophical question, but i need to ask it. if god is the omni benevolent all powerful all knowing god that i have been led to believe he is, how am i to reconcile this with the existence of evil. i understand that evil is considered to be the actions of a morally free agent, but my problem is that evil actually came into existence in the first place, how did lucifer utter the "i" statements in the first place. i think what im trying to say is that if god is all-good and also the author of everything then he therefore must be the author of evil also, this would mean tha either he is not all good or that he is not the author of everything. am i to revise my idea of what god is meant to be? have i misunderstood who and what god is?

Ah yes, the philosophical questions. The sooner you realize upon what wisdom such questions are based the less you'll keep banging your head against them ... unless of course you enjoy it. Simply put, you'll never come to an understanding of the things of God through the philosophy of man. You and I by this reasoning would only redesign our own newer versions of the same old gods and goddesses found in any given culture or religion. After all, they philosophized about the very same concepts.

The faultiness of the reasoning is found because we imagine God as being made after the image of man, rather than the other way around ... even if we supposedly hold to a Biblically correct doctrine stating otherwise. The logic simply forces the view of both man and God to correspond with a wisdom that understands neither. Revising your "idea" of what god is meant to be would only replace one blind concept with another. Christ himself is the wisdom and understanding of God, and in him God is seen, and in him the former reasoning is understood as being total futility.

Jim