Why create people he knew would reject him?

This is the objection underneath several others. Not why is there evil, but something sharper: if he saw all of it in advance, he chose it anyway. Making someone knowing they will end badly looks less like love than like negligence.

What the alternative would have to be

Start by describing the world the objection is asking for.

It contains only beings who will certainly choose God. Which means either they cannot do otherwise, or God has arranged that they will not.

Now ask what their love is worth. If a person cannot decline, their agreement is not a response — it is a specification. We already know what we think of this: nobody wants a partner who is with them because they were built unable to leave. That is not a stronger relationship, it is a different kind of object.

So the freedom that allows someone to walk away is not a design flaw that God tolerated. It is the same capacity that makes any of it mean anything.

Existence itself is a gift, and it is theirs

There is a second point, and it is uncomfortable enough that it is worth stating carefully.

The objection assumes that a person who ends up rejecting God would have been better off never existing. That is a judgement being made on their behalf, and they have not been asked.

Most people, including people with terrible lives, do not think their existence was a mistake. To decline to create someone because of what they might later choose is to remove the choice by removing the person — which is not respecting their freedom, it is deciding for them in advance and calling it kindness.

Where honesty is required

Christians should not pretend this closes the question.

It works well for a world containing refusal. It does less work for the scale and the horror — the specific children, the specific centuries. And the answer above sits inside a doctrine of hell that Christians themselves argue about, and anyone who says the whole thing is comfortable is not being straight with you.

What the New Testament offers at this point is not an explanation but a demonstration. Whatever God knew before making the world, he did not stay clear of the consequences: the claim is that he entered it and took the worst of it personally. That is not a proof. It is the difference between a designer who watched from outside and one who did not.

Objections answered

Couldn't God have created only the people he knew would say yes?

Some Christians hold that he did something like this, and there are serious versions of the argument. The difficulty is that the people who would say yes only exist in the circumstances in which they said it — including the people around them who did not. Extracting them means creating a different world with different people, not the same ones minus a few.

A human parent who knew would not have the child.

The analogy assumes God is a parent making a risk assessment. He is also described as the judge of everything, which changes what the decision is. And a parent who declined to have a child because the child might one day do wrong would never have a child at all.

This makes God sound like he needs an audience.

He is not described as gaining anything — he needs nothing, and lacked nothing before creating. If you take that seriously, creation is not something he did for his own benefit. It is the least self-interested act available to a being who already has everything.

How to say it

Ask them to describe the alternative

“What would a world of beings who couldn’t refuse look like?” Let them build it. Most people, describing it out loud, notice they have described something they would not want to be.

Use the relationship point

“Would you want to be loved by someone who couldn’t do otherwise?” Everyone answers no, and the answer is the whole argument in miniature.

Say where it stops working

“This explains a world with refusal in it. It doesn’t explain the amount.” Then point at the incarnation rather than reaching for another argument.

John 1:14KJVAnd the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Shared ground, and where traditions differ

All Christians hold

All the traditions hold that creation was free and unnecessary — God gained nothing by it — and that human beings are genuinely responsible for their response.

Roman Catholic

Holds that God wills all to be saved and that grace is genuinely resistible, while maintaining that no one is saved apart from grace.

Eastern Orthodox

Strongly emphasises human freedom and cooperation with grace, and resists any account in which God determines who refuses.

Protestant

Divided: Reformed accounts hold that God sovereignly chooses, Arminian ones that he foreknows genuinely free responses. The disagreement is sharpest exactly here.