Is God the Author of Evil?

I would caution—there is a sense in which God is responsible for evil in that he is the authority which allowed its existence.

What you see, and you should have compassion on false doctrines even though they are wrongly motivated, for we all have these tendencies—is a desire to resolve the offense of something God has allowed in some way.

Where we differentiate is in primary and secondary desires, and a real distinction between them, such that we never make evil a primary desire for God, in that free will was the stronger desire in which evil could potentially exist.

I form light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster,
I am the LORD, who do all these things / Isaiah 45:7

That verse sure makes it sound like He is. I was wondering what some other posters here views on this may be. A lot of texts flat-out declare that God is not, and could not be, the author of evil. Like, Deuteronomy 32:4 declares that “his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. [He is] a faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.” And Psalm 5:4 notes, “You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil.” So as we read the deeper into Bible it would seem that God is without evil or any pretense of evil.

I learned as I was studying this out that Isaiah 45:7 refers to physical evil. As does Lamentations 3:38 "Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?", this verse contrasts prosperity and adversity. So the good is physical goodness and happiness, while the evil is physical distress, misfortune, calamity and natural evil, such as storms, earthquakes and other disasters.

Even though a lot of the physical evil in the world often comes through the hand of wicked men and women, ultimately God permits it. Like we see in Genesis 50:20 "As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good, in order to accomplish a day like this— to preserve the lives of many people". 

If the evil of the Holocaust had not happened, then the miracle of the Jewish people’s return to Israel in 1948 would not have happened.

What we can be sure of, however, is the fact that God is never, ever, the originator and author of evil. It would be contrary to his whole nature and being as consistently revealed in Scripture.

Christianity has more than answered the problem of the presence of evil (that's the message of the cross) and the problem of the outcome of evil (for Christ’s resurrection demonstrates that God can beat out even the last enemy and greatest evil, death itself). But Christianity’s most difficult question is the origin of evil. Why did God ever allow “this evil stuff” in the first place? To me this is the most interesting question to try to answer on this topic. 

Next question is as we look around the world today why is there so much evil? It's in the Bible.