God and Evil

In the Augustinian tradition, the attribution of 'free will' to humans is a response to the concern that the existence of Evil disproves the existence of God.  However, in a different, perhaps longer, tradition, the existence of a deity is, to the contrary, derived from the existence of evil.  In that tradition, 'evil' is misfortune, which humans, naturally, seek to eliminate, the process of which entails the positing of a cause of the misfortune, the elimination of which requires some efficacious procedure.  In many societies, that cause is personified as a deity, and the corrective procedure is some ritual of appeasement of the deity.  So, in such cases, the positing of the existence of the deity is derived from the existence of evil.  Now, despite the efforts of  theologians to treat the Abrahamic deity as ontologically primordial, it is not clear that they have decisively distinguished their case from those others, i. e. that the Abrahamic religions are not, at bottom, too, programs of appeasement of a derivative deity.