A logical defence for the co-existence of evil and the Christian God!

My original thought - God creates world to 'make worthy people?' - World endures unspeakable torment and evil while his plan of restoration via sacrifice results in a bunch of Christians winding up in heaven? To make this omelette, god grins and bears it while dancing along the broken eggshells of blood and pain that paved the way (and possibly continue to writhe in hell below).

The following is an excerpt from an interesting article that can be viewed in its entirety at The Revival Churches Discussion Forum: *I was posting comments left here at the forum but will no longer do so at the wishes of the original author.

Ian - "It's not my aim to touch on the origin of evil at this point, suffice it to say (with Thomas Aquinas), that ultimate cause rests with God. To consider this by way of propositional logic, my preferred form: (1) God is absolutely perfect; (2) God created only perfect creatures; (3) one of the perfections that God gave to some of his creatures was perfect choice; (4) some of these creatures freely chose to do evil; (5) therefore, a perfect creature caused evil. However, it's important to distinguish between the primary cause of a free action (God), and the secondary cause (a human being). Whilst God gave the power of choice, he's not responsible for the exercise of that free choice to do evil: God doesn't perform the free action for us. Also, and contrary to the position promoted by Christians having an Arminian slant, human free choice isn't a mere instrumental cause through which God necessarily works. Human beings are the efficient, albeit secondary, cause of their own free actions. God produces the fact of free choice, but each human being performs the act of free choice. Logically, then, God is responsible for the possibility of evil, but we are responsible for the actuality of it."