Problem of Divine Freedom

[Tonus]

Now one response I anticipate is the claim that God could do evil, but he simply chooses not to do it. Despite being in contradiction with Divine Command theory, this makes it mysterious as to why God created beings who had the ability to do evil, and whom inevitably do so. After all, it's logically possible for God to have actualized the possible world where agents with libertarian free will never do evil.

I'm trying to remember how I would have approached this when I was a believer. I am pretty sure that I would have said that god could indeed perform evil acts if he so chose, but would not do so as there was no reason for it (as the most powerful being in the universe, he cannot be coerced). There was the Bible verse that said that "it is impossible for god to lie." I took that to mean that god was capable of lying, but had no cause to-- who would he need to lie to?

For the question of why there is evil in the world I would probably have gone with a modified version of the "we chose" approach. Something along the lines of freedom to choose would necessarily entail the freedom to do what was evil in the face of known consequences, otherwise it was not real freedom. I still think that works on some level, though I think that a literal reading of Genesis creates many more problems that cannot be so easily explained away.

I think that in the end it comes down to looking at what we ended up with, and having to accept that this was the best possible solution to the problem of two clueless humans who couldn't follow a direct order when it was countermanded by a talking snake. I... can't accept that.