Religion often suggests that Nature has a kind of free will of its own, it works without God like we often do.  Analyse.

Christians sometimes say, "God gave us free will. We may abuse it and do great evil but it is better that than being puppets. Similarly, nature is free from God in the sense that it can go against him. Nature can make its own laws in defiance of God and makes some terrible ones. That is why we see such great natural evil such as pestilence and famine. God does not directly make those evil things."

The notion that evil is indirect does not alleviate God's responsibility for it but increases it for all things come from him. He still lets it happen. He makes the germs that kill people and makes the crops fail. An almighty God who is indirectly to blame for evil makes no sense. If I have magic powers and use them to make somebody slash an innocent person to death I am directly to blame.  If I have magical powers and I know that withholding them will cause the attack and I directly to blame.  I have used the person as my instrument as much as if I had taken the knife myself. God is closer to nature than nature is to itself if he is the one that creates it and indwells it as believers claim.

Religion just gets contrary and says God cannot do evil directly?  Really?  They look at a useless but deadly virus that torments babies to death and say it is not a direct evil but they are only guessing.  They assume God directly made the things that made it but what if he did miraculously and directly make the virus? Such bias in the face of human suffering is evil.  God would be blamed if he could materialise and knock a wall over on top of you.  But given that he is supposed to be closer to the creation than it is to itself he does not have to materialise.  He has more to do with the accident than the accident does.  So it is not an accident except in name only.

No believer can prove that evil can or should be condoned when permitted to happen by God or when God does evil. We are thinking of plagues and earthquakes etc.  God asking us to distinguish between natural evil and free will evil and treat the latter as the real evil is direct evil!!   It is evil to risk condoning what cannot in fact be condoned. If there were no natural evil there would be no moral evil either.  Moral evil is a subset of evil.  So that means natural evil is the well it springs from.  And if there is no free will in many cases, being sure I am free now does not prove that at other times some inner programming is working on me, the evil I create is itself natural evil.

We have no right to call what may be natural evil moral evil in order to get God into our worldview.

God is engaging in direct evil by asking us to believe the free will defence!  And he gets men to ask for him which makes it worse for it is too serious to take man's word for it!

It makes no sense to say that God needs evil and thus permits it to happen and then to claim that he cannot do it directly. Those who tell us God never directly hurts and that is why we love him are hypocrites. They are playing on our selfish and arrogant and hypocritical  tendency to favour the bystander over the person doing the evil directly.