The free will argument demonstrates that christians don't understand free will.

[Clueless Morgan]

I don't really understand this whole free will thing either. I recently talking to a new poster about it, asking if we have free will in heaven, despite that we can't sin. Apparently we still do, but we just choose not to. Still, I don't understand why that can't happen down here too.

If free will exists in heaven without any pain or suffering or evil then that same set of circumstances could exist in this world right now, but it doesn't. Why?

If you have to understand or experience hate or evil or pain in order to understand love and happiness, then love and happiness would be meaningless in heaven because there is no evil or hate to contrast it against.

If you have to have free will in order to choose between love and hate, good and evil, then free will wouldn't exist in heaven because because everyone is loving and happy and there is no pain or suffering. It's simply not probably that every single entrant into heaven EVER always only ever chooses the good, happy, loving option; someone would eventually come along that would game the system.

If everyone in heaven always only ever chooses the happy, loving, good option, then a hell of a lot of people in heaven would have to undergo personality transplants or lobotomies or something in order to fundamentally change the way they operate and interact with the world around them; no one always only ever chooses the good, happy, loving option. And if you do undergo a personality shift upon entering heaven, are you really still You, or are you then someone different?

Yeah, the "best" answer I've heard regarding that is "it's a bad translation, and God wasn't affecting anyone's free will, because I believe God would never do that".

God always agrees with whatever the believer believes, even if the individual believers disagree.

It has been argued that there is no free will, just the illusion. It is impossible to prove whether it exists or not. Just like god.
Personally, I don't believe in either.

That's my problem with invoking the Free Will argument for God: no one ever even bothers to demonstrate that free will even exists, they just start with the presupposition that it does and argues from that point.

But what if it doesn't exist?

What if we are all psychic puppets of some mystic psychic puppet master who makes us believe that we all individually have free will but this puppet master is actually controlling every single thing we do or think?

What if the universe is some kind of predestined wind-up clock with every action everyone would ever take being predetermined in some mechanistic, chemical way and if we only understood the chemistry, physics and biology of every individual personality more fully we could actually determine every action that person would take in their whole lifetime?


I've found that demanding evidence that we have free will is a fantastic conversation stopper if every you want to end a conversation with a theist who is harping on about free will and trying to get somewhere with it.