THE RELIGIOUS CLAIM THAT LOVE IS VOLUNTARY

Religion says that love is voluntary. Only a being with free will to do extreme evil can give love. So they say God gave us all this freedom we have but we abused it of our own volition and so he is not to blame for evil. This reasoning is called the free will defence or the freedom defence. It is meant to clear God of the blame for evil.

Believers say that free will and belief in logic go together. They presume you need free will before you can reason and trust what you think. But free will is full of mystery and contradictions and nobody is able to explain how it works. Nobody is able to prove it actually exists. Feeling free does not mean you really are free. One function of free will is to enable you to use your reason and logic. To many, the problem of knowing if free will is really logical hinders your use of free will. They suppose that if you have free will then it is limited by default. In fact the news is worse than that. Rather than limiting free will, it debunks it.

If we have free will and free will does not make any sense to us and seems to be full of contradictions and paradoxes then what? People believe that reason is only of any value if you believe in free will because you need free will to exercise it. In other words, what you think is doubtful if you are programmed. This overlooks the fact that a computer can replicate reason because we program it. And it could be that reality programs us. So you can use reason and commit to it and still think free will is nonsense. So you don't need to believe in free will to commit to the use of reason or vice versa. If our being programmed means our reason and logic is untrustworthy, the reason is that nobody rational programmed us. That is to say that a rational being with free will has to program us. If that view is correct, we still cannot show how free will is logical or have any reason to imagine that it is. So there is no way to be sure free will really supports reason at all. If free will is nonsense and we believe in it and claim that our reason is based on it then our reason looks like reason and acts like reason but is not reason. We are putting reason in an irrational framework. When you do that there is no reason left for there is no self-consistency. And you are left with nothing to say when somebody says a dog created the universe.

We conclude that free will is the enemy of reason.

If God gave us free will he limited our logic and therefore our free will. It makes better sense to hold that free will is nonsense and an attack on reason. Clearly if there is a God he has no right to let us create so much suffering. He cannot use respect for our free choice as an excuse.
 
Does our power to see through obvious contradictions suggest that thinking is man-made? Did we create the rule that a is a and cannot be non-a? Or did it come from a God of truth who wants us to discern? Who cares where it came from for it is obviously right. It is irrational to make out a God is necessary.