> Today, there is a lot of evil, and there are a lot of things that are just "bad" -- things we would call accidents and so forth -- that aren't *evil* so much as simply bad things that *are*. But even those can be dated back to the first sin of Adam and Eve, the first time in history that humankind exercised free will to choose something against God's command. At that moment, evil entered the universe and corrupted it; prior to that, there weren't even natural disasters or other sorts of things we would call "bad" yet aren't the purposeful result of someone's actions.

A minor dispute: I think it would be more accurate to say that at that moment, evil entered the *human* universe (or comprehension, or psyche, or whaterver you want to call it) and corrupted it.

After all, Eve wasn't the first created being to cross God... Lucifer was. And he and all the other angels, whether they followed him or God, are created beings and part of this universe. Evil aready existed (like you said, as a direct consequence of free will) and had infected the spiritual world. Eve's decision to disobey God brought the curse of evil upon the *physical* world.