problem of gratuitous evil

Counters: "an omnibenevolent god is, in fact, obliged to save us. if he did not try, then he would not be all loving nor all good. of course, this specific god is also forbidden from altering our free will so there is a limit to how much he can help us, but if he is all loving (as the bible says he is) then he would be obliged by that trait to attempt to assist us. the only reason we are 'all sinners' is because god has made us that way. he has either made the moral law such that we all inevitably break it or has made us with a fallen nature. " Remember that it was not god who gave us our fallen nature, but Adam and Eva. You may god should have stopped them or created them differently, but that would be interfering with free will. In round 3 I gave the analogy of the governor and the criminal. Remember, compared to god, we're all moral abominations, since he is per definition the highest moral being. God is no more "obliged" to save us than the governor is obliged to save Ted Bundy. Human nature brought us here, god did not, thus he is not obliged to save us. "every action we humans make morally will not ever be fully informed. our limited knowledge leads us to make mistakes that given more knowledge many of us would not make. if god supplied us with the knowledge of what is morally wrong or morally right, then he would be doing something more good that he would otherwise. similarly, the immediate knowledge of god would make it easier for us to get into a relationship with god. god may not be able to force us into a relationship, but he can make it easier for us to enter one. ". Again my opponent merely speculates that in another world, there might be a better way for us to know god. He says that if he worked more on spreading knowledge about himself more would get to know him, but it may be so that less people would be interested in having a relationship with a god who constantly advertises himself. But don't forgot that it is only speculation, if my opponent does not take every single little factor into account he cannot prove that there exists a world in which more people would get into a relationship with god, and thus his argument fails. "if god is compelled to not inform us because of hell, then god should not have created hell in the first place as he is putting moral restrictions on himself, making it harder for him to make it easier for us to enter a relationship with him." One thing to remember, not all Christians view hell as a place with literal fire and gnashing of teeth. Many believe that is more so a metaphor simply for the agony of living without god, therefore hell is not as much a punishment as a consequence of our inherited sin. -- Closing: To those interested in a further discussion about the theistic arguments/counterarguments, I'd recommend the book God?(Which I'm myself currently reading), it's a written debate between two excellent philosophers, William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott Armstrong, I myself used a lot of Craigs defenses in this debate, but Armstrong also comes with some excellent counters. I would like to thank my opponent too for a very interesting and challenging entrance to the debate.org community. I would just like to mention that I am myself an Atheist/Agnostic, but I would still like to stress that in order to keep our integrity, it's important for us to sharpen and question our argument.