Free Will

Here is the theological argument mentioned in the previous post.

"'God has to leave us free, Nat. Would you rather be an efficient, will-less puppet?'"

- Poul Anderson, "Sister Planet," IN Anderson, Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985, pp. 81-135 AT p. 97.

I am will-less if I have no will of my own but not if what I will has been causally determined.

Anderson's character, Jevons, articulates the common free will reply to the Problem of Evil. The reply assumes an analogy between the creator-creature relationship and a parent-child or ruler-subject relationship. If a child is about to touch a hot object, then a parent can either negate the child's freedom by pulling him away or grant his freedom by telling him not to touch it but leaving it to him to decide whether to obey or disobey. Also, an absolute monarch can restrict or concede his subjects' freedom of movement.

However, the parent and ruler are more powerful but nevertheless finite beings sharing with their children or subjects a common environment governed by laws that none of them has created whereas the creator is believed to be the omnipotent creator of everything other than himself. I think that this idea is incoherent because the creator before the creation would be a self without other which is like a square without sides but let us consider the implications of the idea.

The creator has created, not from any recalcitrant material but literally from nothing:

heat;
its effects on organisms;
hot objects;
this hot object;
the object's attractiveness to the child;
all the determinants of the child's decision to obey or disobey -

One child's character is such that he immediately obeys. The creator has created this character.
Another child's character is the opposite. The creator has created it.
In a third child, a tendency to disobey is counteracted by fear of the consequences of disobedience. The creator has created the tendency, the fear and their relative strengths. Thus, he has determined which choice the child will make without reducing the child to a mere will-less puppet.

We confidently predict that an aggressive drunk will instantly kick a dog that bites him whereas a pacifist saint will not, yet we do not say that God has made either of them a will-less puppet.

Theists say further that God did not merely create the universe at its earliest moment, if it had one, but that he sustains it in existence at every moment. Indeed, the initial creation, if any, and the perennial preservation are an indistinguishable eternal divine act. Thus, how can we avoid saying that God creates one child obeying and another disobeying? Much monotheism, Mosaic, Pauline, Calvinist, Lutheran, is, consistently, predestinationist. Pharaoh did not defy God by his free will. God hardened Pharaoh's heart in order to have an opportunity to display his power.