Yes.According to Christian belief,he created EVERYTHING.That would include "evil".

According to irrefutable, unquestionable Biblical "truth" and Christian "teachings," God created everything, including Evil.  Even if one assumes, in contradiction to the Scriptures, that God created the capacity for men to commit Evil, he was the locus of germination of it.  Thanks, God, for such a fine invention!!!  Glad to see that you took a crap in the punchbowl of your own making!!!  Thanks for creating dogsh*t, too.

Evil is not a thing or an object. Evil is the improper use of the abilities that accompany free will, genuine free will. God created the potential for evil, but He did not create evil.

  What WILL the preachers DO...

When the DEVIL is SAVED?

-- Brother Dave Gardner

Update 01/07/2007: It was the Devil that gave the oppertunity to us and it was us that brought sin into this world, when we took from the tree!

I think you will find that God gave free will, but did not invent evil. The being that crossed God invented it and it started with the Devil. God has given everyone free will, even the angels in heaven. It is what we do with that free will that counts!! Remember it was the serpent that tested Man by telling Eve, that God surely won't kill her if she took from the tree! Just think if Adam and Eve did not sin, what a world this would be!!!!

Great question; but I don't find it all that perplexing. God created the core, the center, the circle. What derived and evolved from that core was a process of natural progression. Good and evil are opposite sides of the same coin..."For without the dark, there could be no light".

I always thought that this is one of the great theological questions of all time.

Now most of you know by now that I am more of an historian than a theologian, and I have no answer for it. If God created everything, then He must have created evil, so would logic conclude.

This was one of the great stimuli for the various dualistic sects that came and went over the centuries. The god of good created the non-material world and the god of bad created the carnal evil world.

Many believers could not believe that God created evil and thought there must be another force that created the bad.

ORIGINAL COMMENT ON 12.12.2006: As much as we can perceive the reality of evil, virtues, sin and so forth, pondering God's inducement before man of any of these issues and many such others cannot ultimately be explained satisfactorily given our limitations as mortals, unless we are willing to accept that our intellectual acumen regarding matters Divine cannot reach levels of understanding beyond true puzzlement.

We should be satisfied in being able to conceive these notions, if to accept or challenge them. And yet, to paraphrase 'gth', the question is indeed one of the most challenging.

UPDATED FEB.14,2007: Evil would be found in men (or women) who, stripped of Love for others and of Faith of any kind, would willingly or otherwise find themselves in that barren condition: those in whom the 'Divine,' so to speak, is absent.

It's a good question, but I don't think that He did. Evil is really only a concept of our own Free-will. We can choose to be, "evil" or we can choose to live a good life.

God most definitely created evil, as stated in Isa 45:7, Amos 3:6, I Sam 19:9, etc.)So many people want to say that the words "evil" in those first two verses should have been translated "calamity", or "disaster." But the hebrew word used for evil in each of the 3 verses I listed is ra, which eveytime it's used in the old testament meant EVIL. It's the same word used in the tree of GOOD AND EVIL, and the same word in Gen 6:5,..."and every imagination of the thoughts of [man's]heart was only EVIL continually. If the author of those books meant to say "calamity" or "disaster", they'd have used the proper hebrew word which is "ed." Yes, God created evil, and God ALLOWS evil, and it's ALL in His divine plan. Evil has a purpose, and God uses it to bring His perfect plan into fruition. That's why "the suffering of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us...creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now."(Rom 8 18-23)

I believe that Evil has no time spand, and it always was there, just like God.

Evil is not something that was created as if it were a solid substance. Evil is more like something that is missing or that is used for the wrong purpose and not a created object. People are evil when goodness and humanity is missing from them. It is more like a ladder that is missing a rung that is suppose to be there. If we are created in the image of God then we are good, but something died in us at the fall and became missing. Jesus came to redeem us from the fall and help us to be fully human again by loving one another and overcoming evil with good. It is through life in the Spirit or bearing the fruit of the Spirit that allows us to be the humans that we were created to be. In Pauline vernacular, living in the flesh is to be less than human and to live with our true humanity not in tact. Evil is probably broader than this, but I think that it is at least this. It is not something that God created, but it is when God's creation is distorted from the good purpose that it was intended for.

This is an enigmatic question thats hard to answer, but i would say man created evil.

Doubtful. . .but people have sure mastered the art. . .

I don't believe He did. But, like free will, He allowed it. It may actually even be necessary for free will to exist at all.

The Jehovah of Biblical lore most certainly DID create evil (Isaiah 45:3, Lamentations 3:38, Jeremiah 26:3, Ezekiel 20:25-26, Jeremiah 36:3, Amos 3:6, Micah 2:3, 1 Kings 21:29, etc.). Trying to leave this divine problem at humankind's doorstep has always exposed religion to the scholarly dishonesty and inherent fraudulence it insists upon aspiring to. Boiler-plate double-speak (when accompanied with the sword) rectified past ponderings, but today's thinker demands a more discerning approach that increasingly discards the woolly burble of Adam and Eve and like-minded starting-point speculations.

On the whole, no. God is good and pure. But there are verses where it indicates that God created both good and evil. But God created the evil for a good reason. What I think it means when it talks about God creating evil is when eg people like Judas Iscariot was created. When God created him, He knew that he was going to betray Jesus. But He allowed that to happen because that act brought the salvation of the whole world. God's original intent was for us to live in paradise. But God wanted to see if Adam and Eve were faithful so He gave them a test (the tree in the middle of the garden). But they weren't. In the end, all this evil will end and there will be no such thing as evilness. Because in Revelation, it talks about the new heaven and earth, and how the old order of pain, evil and suffering will pass away and a new order will be in place, one of goodness, love and peace. Creating evil certainly wasn't God's original plan because in the Bible, it says that we were created for good works, all the Law and prophets hang on love so we were also created to love God and each other and the fact that in the beginning, even before humans existed, God created the Angels. They were all good and that would have been something that God would never do in that time, create evil. God's will is good and His original creation was good. But it is only because man has mucked things up that God has had to try to counteract the problem by letting evilness be created.

If you believe in a god that created everything then, DUH, you can't have one without the other. According to the stories god's enemy was originally a member of his utopia. When ol'Lucifer tried to take over the ship Captain Almighty ended the mutiny and put him someplace where he couldnt directly cause any problems in wonderland. Wow, sort of like what Lord Bush does to anyone who disagrees.