ABSTRACT
Human beings can be incredibly cruel to each other. Since God is almighty he could have created a world in which such cruelty is impossible. In the philosophical tradition the problem of evil has usually been stated in the form of a dilemma. Epicurus, for example, stated it as follows: either God desires to eliminate evil from the world but is powerless to do so, or he is able to remove evil but is not willing to do so. The usual attempts to solve the dilemma therefore involved the denial or at least the weakening of one of these propositions. Either God is not perfectly good or God is not almighty or evil is an illusion or maybe a necessary condition for good. The traditional response to theodicy problem regarding active evil is the so-called free will defence that might be stated as follows. God chose to create human beings as persons with whom he could establish personal relations.
