GOD LOVES WITHOUT FREE WILL

SO WHAT DO WE HAVE IT FOR WITH

ALL THE TROUBLE IT HAS CAUSED?

We will learn that Christians say God has to let us do evil for if he forces us to be good we cannot really love.  But then it offers a God who does not have free will himself and who supposedly loves!

Christians do not believe God can sin if he wants to. They adore this God as the only being that matters. He can't be a role model. A creature who can sin but who does not but who is perfect in virtue is a proper role model. If such creatures exist then our devotion to God insults them. It also insults us for we need a role model. It is somewhat to blame for the evil we do. So why is God given such unfair and extreme importance? It can only be because of his infinite and almighty power. Believers want his power and they want it on their side. Even if they feel they have to be subject to this power, this is only because if you can't get your own way, you have to feel you have your own way by accepting God's will.
 
The Christians will answer that God matters for he is the source of all good and all existence. But if he has no free will he may be perfect and be able to implement perfect good but he is not good in the way a being who can be evil but who refuses to be is. His goodness is functional. He is good in the way a cake is good.
 
A God without free will is not really a person or anything you can have a true relationship with. Believers feel a relationship but that is the same as the relationship the pagans felt with their gods of stone and wood and metal. The idolaters prove that our feelings of a relationship do not mean a real relationship is happening. All the Christian God is good for is being the source of good. If God is only important as a representation of good then it follows that it is okay if you see your gnome statue in the garden as a representation of goodness.
 
Christians who believe in an immutable God that is a God who is totally perfect and so cannot change and who is outside time still claim that he is perfect love. But this God cannot sin for he is good now and cannot change. This ruins their doctrine that we cannot love unless we can sin. It is a contradiction to say that a loving God who cannot sin gave us free will so that we could love too. When God can love without being able to sin so can we. Peter Abelard argued against this that our power to do evil instead of good is not a blessing but an infirmity. But this is really a renunciation of the freedom defence which says that God is not to blame for evil but we are. If free will is not a gift then God is evil.  Religion says free will is a gift but the fact that it can be a gift does not mean that it is.  Abelard's view is just as good as its view. 

Only an evil God could give us freedom to sin if that freedom is not good.

Compatibilism is the idea that though we don't have free will in the sense that we can go against the way we are programmed, if we do what we are programmed to do we are free and that is free will. They are just changing the meaning of the phrase free will.

Some will defend this compatibilism and say that God is determined to be good and is good without compulsion which is enough to mean that he has free will. But compatibilism really destroys theism for if we could be programmed to be freely good then God should not let us sin. If we sin it is his fault.  Whatever set God to be the way he is would be greater than God.

Sin is defined as an ending of a relationship with God so God cannot sin for he cannot end a relationship with himself (page 116, The Puzzle of God by Peter Vardy). How strange.  He can have a relationship with himself in many ways.

Sin is defined not as a thing but as the absence of good or a good that mistakenly falls short of real good.  That is religion teaches.  Since God is all-powerful and knows all it follows that God cannot sin for he is too powerful and intelligent to fall short. If he had made us more powerful and smarter we would not sin or at least not as much. He has not given us the power to make ourselves good in any great measure. For example, we have to struggle hard to be good and don't have the miraculous power to make it easier and yet power and intelligence are the reasons why he is good. God does not want us to be holy or good.

The Catholic book, Why Does God? (page 30), says that God is total and absolute perfection and he is more free than anybody on earth because the law he keeps is his nature and he is what he wants to be. It is identical with him. So God could have made us the same way but did not and that makes him evil. Abelard is vindicated by this doctrine.
 
For this doctrine that God is free though unable to do wrong to be right, it would be necessary for God to make himself before he comes into existence which is an absurdity. I mean if you can’t help your nature (that what makes you the kind of being you are) and it makes you want to live the way it makes you live then you are hardly free are you? If your nature makes you steal then are you to blame for stealing? No way unless you have made your nature yourself which you cannot do! But you might object that there are people who change their nature. But they would not be doing that unless their nature wanted them to do it so that is us back to square one.

Does the kind of God there is matter to religion more than how he came to be?  Yes, that is to say that religion worries most about his love and perfection.  It may secretly mean that God makes himself as he is for without that he cannot have free will in any meaningful sense.  It may be stupid but it does not mean that it is not what religion secretly believes. All beliefs hide stuff.
 
The view of St Thomas Aquinas was that all sin is caused by an error existing in the reason and that God cannot sin for God cannot err (Summa Book 1, Chapter 95). To have free will means you have defects that enable you to err. Even if you will never use these defects, they still need to be there so that you have the option of sin. So if God cannot err he does not have free will. God then is to blame for our sins for he made us a bit blind. He could have made us smarter when we are about to make choices. That way we will see the right course and ineluctably follow it. We that we will not err for error is necessarily involuntary. So we will not sin. God has left things so that we would sin and yet he says that sin is that which should not exist!

The only solution that is offered to the contradiction between a God who cannot sin and the free will defence is that God has no choice but to do good but he can be creative and decide between different kinds of good which one he wants to do (page 98, Unblind Faith, SCM Press). This solution does not work at all but shows that the contradiction is beyond solving for that kind of freedom would have sufficed for us. And even more so when God is supposed to be perfect so perfection is in not having free will to sin. And the "solution" denies that you need to be able to do evil to be free which contradicts the free will defence totally. So we are left with a God who does not love and yet his love is the alleged justification for his giving us free will and it turns out this free will, as in being able to do evil rather than good, is not needed at all if God is love.

Free will depends on not knowing the future for sure. If you could see what you would do in the future you wouldn't really be free any more. You might see what you will do but we are talking about actually seeing what you will do so that you are totally certain you will do it. God who knows the future cannot have free will.

To have a nature is to have limits. Yet being all good, God cannot have any limits to his goodness for if he had he would not be all good. But it is better for God to be happy and make a person to be happy than for him not to make a person at all. Believers deny this and say that God does not have to make anything which is plainly wrong. So unless God makes an infinity of happy persons which he has not done he is not all good. The only solution to this is to deny either that God wants people to be happy or that happy people should be made for the more happiness the better which amounts to saying the same thing. He only cares for himself so how can he have free will for he can't be any different?

Islam and Christianity hold that God made all things out of nothing and the creation is not made from God. But to put something where there is nothing requires infinite power. God is his power for God is an immaterial reality. He is one entity without parts. But God must have made all things from himself for there is no power outside his power. So God and the creation must be the same thing. When we are God then when we sin, the free will defence cannot be true for God sins. Also, if we are God then God is not a person for he is all creation and must be a force. That would mean, as Spinoza argued, that there is no free will for the will is made of a force that makes it go after what it goes after and it cannot go any other way though it feels it can. The concept of God requires free will and yet it contradicts it meaning that God is an incoherent concept and should be abolished.

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