“It’s called free will.”
This jogged my memory about something I learned in school a long time ago.
One of the main philosophical arguments against the existence of God has to do with the existence of evil. If God is all good and all powerful, then evil would not exist. However, there is evil in the world. Therefore, If there is a God, He is either unwilling, or unable to to prevent it. This negates the Judeo-Christian idea that God is both all good and all powerful. The other possibility is that there is no God.
The counter to this argument is that it is not “analytical”, since what we call “good” and “evil” interact in a complex way. Unless we are talking about mathematically defined quantities, the whole may be more than the sum of its parts. For example, a story with a “bad” tragic ending may be more uplifting or more interesting than than the same story with a “good” happy ending. So the fact that “evil” happened in the story elevated the status of the hero (”Gran Torino”). Or demonstrated the depth of a man’s love for a woman (Romeo and Juliet).
Your “free will” response was interesting. Even a priest would admit that God can’t or doesn’t do things that are logically contradictory (like make a square circle). So if the best of all worlds required men to have “free will” then He would have to allow evil to exist.
“So if the best of all worlds required men to have “free will” then He would have to allow evil to exist.”
At a more mundane level, conservatives believe in liberty with the full realization that it will lead to inequality (of income, wealth, batting averages, free shot percentages, etc.). Those on the left fault liberty because it results in inequality. They prefer forced equality - at the expense of liberty. Some value freedom more, some less. God could have created perfect robots who only did good. But what’s the point in that?