CHRISTIANS CHEAT BY CHANGING THE DEFINITION OF FREE WILL WHEN IT COMES TO GOD
Why is there so much interest in a God who does not really love? And when we define love as freely being good when you could be bad? Religion says God cannot do wrong. This God is not relevant to the truly good person. Christians tell you about God's freedom and his love and say it inspires you to be free and loving like him for you are his image. In fact they use the fallacy of false equivalence. They change the meaning of the words when it comes to God to trick you.
DIVINE CHARACTER: THE PHILOSOPHERS SAY
God is pure actuality. In other words he is act or action or will.
He has no character but his will is his own doing. Character is passive in the sense that you cannot make yourself have a good character but have to take the right and relevant steps to let it appear by itself. If it were not then something better than him is doing it.
Religion says, "God does good of his own will and without being compelled to. In that sense God has free will." But it says God cannot change his nature or control it meaning he cannot control his will for it is part of his nature or more correctly what his nature is all about.
Worse, even if God is not forced to be what he is that still does not mean he has free will. A dog is not forced to be what it is but it has no free will. And God does not have a moral type free will where he can choose to be good or evil. He does not have a free will that counts as real free will. You can freely act without it being a moral concern and much of what we will is like that.
GOD KNOWS THE FUTURE SO HE CANNOT CHOOSE
God decides that there will be one sun for a solar system. He sees that this will happen and be done. How can he have free will for once he foresees what he will do he cannot avoid doing it? If your prediction or clairvoyance will come true then you cannot make a choice that will avert it.
Religion will answer that there is no "will be" for God. He makes all decisions at once and this once has no past or future. God is outside time.
That is actually a distraction. The problem is God can't choose when he is 100% certain what he would do. It does not matter if God is in or out of time.
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG SAYS
Theologian William Lane Craig tries to give us answers in relation to how an unchanging totally perfect God can be free. He surprisingly says that this notion of free will is wrong:
"Free will is all about being able to do something and its opposite and it could be one way as well as the other."
If so, God can be good and deserve praise for being good even though he has no ability to be bad or sin and has not chosen to be good.
For Craig, it is enough that you are freely able to do Good A or Good B. All you need is the choice to be up to you - for you to own the choice. To own it you don't have to be able to do the opposite of Good A or the opposite of Good B.
This allows him to explain how Jesus could be really tempted but not be able to sin. It was a real temptation. Craig is a libertarian about free will but not the kind of libertarian where it has to be all about doing good or its reverse. The latter is based on what he calls the Principle of Alternative Possibilities.
Craig says that we can ask why God did not make us all sinless. He says he could not for then we would be as worthy of worship then as God. He is worshipped then for how he uses his free will only for good though he cannot do evil and we would be the same.
This is a shockingly bad argument. Is God that self-obsessed? Who cares if we end up as good as him!
It is obvious that even if we are good for the reason God is good, that still does not make us the owners and rulers and makers of the universe. We would not deserve the same worship.
You could say that God could have done this but it is his choice not to and we just have to respect that. But that takes us back to where we started, he did not have a real choice anyway.
Craig denies compatibilism which says that outside forces can set or fix what you choose and you can call that a choice. "My choice is causally determined but nonetheless free. I deny that, holding that a free choice cannot be causally determined by external factors." He is right there. Plus if the factors are "internal" they are still external if you didn't put them there! A person may never feel freer than when they are full of mind altering drugs but that only shows how sensing you are free is not a reliable test.
While a cause may or may not be force, it could be so compatibilism gives us no assurance that our choices are really voluntary. The opportunity to steal is one cause in you stealing but does not let you say it forced you.
We have learned then that if God has a compatibilist free will then maybe he is not really free! And we have learned that not all accounts of free will think that free will is just about working with opposites - choosing good or evil. But it does not change the fact that only a being that has that type can be truly good.
Being a who chooses only different types of good is not as good as being b who chooses good though he has the power to choose its opposite just as easily or far more easily.
DESIRE
People may preach about free will but what they mean is that free will matters and desire matters too. They want the two to go together. In fact the desire side is what they put the most weight on not free will. A God with no desire like we have is irrelevant. Only they know why they want such an uninspiring God. The reason is they want to do the inspiring for God. It makes them feel they are better than God. Their humility is not real.
God is the being who can make himself perfectly happy. To see God as a being with desires is wrong. If he desires something then he is lacking and he is not God. In the Bible, God's desires are a metaphor.
FINALLY
To say God is pure freedom and God brings us into that freedom by bringing us to eternal life with him in Heaven is a simple lie. People want us to be free so that they can hold us to account for what we do. It is about responsibility more than anything else. Free will used as an excuse for validating that. In fact, you can drink drive but nobody hates you or what you do until you accidentally kill somebody. If you drink and drive regularly you get no real condemnation until you accidentally kill someone. You are condemned as if you set up the accident to happen, as if it were not an accident. It is as if you are not really that bad or not that accountable until something out of your control happens. It comes close to saying you are not as much to blame if it is a dog you kill not a person. What you kill then is supposed to show what kind of person you are. This makes no sense.
