'Perk' of growing up in a fundie household.

Don't bother thinking this will work as a gotcha against fundies though.

Basically, their apologetics boil down to:

1. Elsewhere in the Bible it says that God is perfectly good and just.

But also somehow the Bible is inerrant and non contradictory

2. What this verse actually means is that God indirectly allows for evil to happen by creating a world with free will, therefore evil can happen, but God only created the circumstances that allow for evil.

There are many, many instances in the Bible where God directly maims, tortures, kills, mind controls people into doing evil things... and this is obviously an explanation come up with hundreds or a thousand + years after Isaiah was written and relies on a ton of extra Biblical writings... free will is not really a concept the Bible directly mentions or discusses: you can interperet the Bible through the lense of 'free will', but the concept itself, that we now have, is not defined or deliberated on.

3. Actually the word 'evil' is better translated as terrific calamity or disaster, if you go by the original Hebrew.

Ok, even if that is true, then God is still claiming reaponsibility for natural disasters and grand scale human atrocities such as war, genocide, etc.