You did not take the word: “ultimately” into consideration. If you prefer, we can use a slightly different wording: “Ultimately God is responsible for everything, the good, the bad and the ugly”. As I said before: if God has a desk, it MUST bear the sign: “The buck stops here!”.
If someone commits a despicable act, then he was able to do it, because God knew that he will do it, God had the freedom NOT to create him and yet he did. Someone may complain that foreknowledge does not equal causation. But we talk about foreknowledge + creation; and that does equal to causation.
You still haven’t sufficiently demonstrated fault. God created humanity, true. God gave humanity free will, true. God knew that this free will would be misused, true.
Why does that make it his fault we misused it?
I can have a child, and I can know that my child will make bad decisions (because pretty much all children do.) Does that make me, the parent, responsible for their actions?
In order for God to be faulted for our actions, he would have to have willed our actions. He did not; he willed that we reaming perfect and in communion with him. You simply cannot rationally blame him for our misdeeds, regardless of how much foreknowledge is involved.
Do you extend this same “courtesy” to all the good that has been done? By your same logic, every last kind and positive action that has ever occurred is also God’s “fault,” because He knew about it and chose to create us. If the good acts are his active will, the things which he desires in our creation; why should the existence of negative outcomes prevent him from allowing the positive outcomes to come to fruition?
Now, I imagine you might follow up with something along the lines of “He shouldn’t allow those negative acts to happen.” (Not a specific statement about your argument, simply the most common next step in the line of logic based on my personal experiences. I apologize if I am misrepresenting what how you would reply.)
To put it simply, this would negate the good which he desires. We don’t call a computer simulation “good” when it does what we program it to do, we don’t call a defibrillator “good” because its current starts a heart beating, and we don’t call an animal “good” for doing what we tell it to. (At least, not in the sense of “good” that we’re discussing here. I call my dog good girl all the time
) We do, however, call human actions good or bad, according to their nature. The reason we call a human saving someone’s life good, and not a machine saving someone’s life, is that ultimately the human has a choice, and the machine does not. If God were to make it so that we could not commit an evil act then we would lack the free will required to chose the good, therefore rendering the good ultimately meaningless.
As such, it would be inconsistent with God’s desire for the good to create us without the capacity to
choose the good. With the capacity to choose the good, there must naturally exist the potential to choose against it, which is what we call sin.
