There are two basic possibilities as to why such God created the Devil: 1) God is not as good and pure as we might have thought he was or, 2) God is not the omniscient and omnipotent guy the priests would have us believe he is.

According to possibility No.1, God created the Devil because he’s a part-time sadist. He often enjoys torturing people, making us suffer. But he’s sort of like the CIA used to be in Central America and other parts of the world during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. He doesn’t like to get his own hands dirty, so he tortures people by proxy. “Ah!” he said to himself one day, “Being the omnipotent guy that I am, I’m going to create my own personal Gestapo Chief and will send him down to Earth to do all the dirty work for me.”

So he created Satan, who in turn created his own cohorts of lesser Devils to help him do the job (like the lesser Devils Jesus exorcised from people and threw into pigs). Smart dude the Jesuits’ God. In his scheme of things, he would get the credit for all the good things in creation while the other guy, Lucifer, would get the blame for all the bad ones, even though it was Him who created him for that purpose.

Now, possibility No.1 may sound quite plausible to many people, but not to everyone. So if you think that this possibility is a little bit hard on Mr. God and you think that sheer sadism could have never been the reason that he created Satan, then why did he do it? Why did He create him?

Maybe he did it because of possibility No.2. This possibility gives Mr. God a little more credit on the moral side, but takes credit away from him on the question of omniscience and omnipotence. This is the possibility that the Jesuits constantly talked to me about during my childhood. According to this, God created Lucifer believing he would be like a brilliant and loyal Secretary of State for His eternal administration or something.

But Lucifer was way too beautiful and proud to take any orders from God, so one day he tried to oust Him in a coup d'état, but failed. As a result, Lucifer was supposed to have been ostracized for eternity to the rectum of the Universe, but the cunning scoundrel broke loose and keeps coming back to Earth to haunt us all.

So, if the paragraph above is true, what would it tell us about God’s power to know everything that was, is and will ever come to be? A lot. For if God is really the all-knowing entity that the preachers would have us think he is, how come he didn’t know from the beginning that Lucifer would one day turn into the evil Satan?

Any B student of omniscience knows that you don’t go around creating splendorous beings that will later turn bad and will end up giving you and the rest of your creation lots of headaches and disappointments. Then why would God, who is supposed to be the A-1 guy, the cream of the crop when it comes to omniscience, create a jerk like Lucifer who was destined to turn against Him sometime in the future?

There are basically two immediate answers to this question: A) Either God did not know that Lucifer would turn evil sometime later or, B) He did know, but He still went ahead and created him.