The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

Then, you can't plausibly say we have free will since there are countless ways in which one will find that the universe prohibits the expression of free will.

The universe is a bunch of planets, stars, suns moons etc. How are these responsible for influencing the decisions of man?

Just off the top of my head: "What? I can't dig to the core of the Earth? I'll die long before I do?! That's bullshit, my free will is being impinged upon!"

Or, hey: "I can't just float up in defiance of gravity and then breathe in space?! What the hell, god? Why you keep limiting my free will?"

Or, also: "How am I not able to just grow a third arm? God, where's my free will?"

This is sort of the problem I have with the theistic conception of free will in general, which I think conflates "will," with "ability to carry out that will." Free will is a property of the mind, an ability to make choices and goals for oneself, but it doesn't necessitate that you be successful at those goals, or productive in those choices. If I decide that I want to go to the beach tomorrow to get a tan, but it rains so I can't, has my free will been denied? Or have circumstances just occurred that prevent me from performing my freely chosen action? What if I decide to go to the beach, but owing to my living in a landlocked state, I can't: has my free will been impinged now?

To be clear, this is the only form of free will that you can be talking about without defeating your own argument, because if your definition of free will includes success in freely chosen actions necessarily, then free will is impinged upon every day simply by dint of our own physical limitations. If free will demands that I not only choose an action, but be successful in it, then the fact that I cannot fly under my own power due to physics that god put into place means that god is already limiting my free will. If free will doesn't necessitate that I be successful, then there's no reason at all for god to allow any form of human-imposed suffering, because that suffering could be freely chosen by those who wish to inflict it, without resulting in a successful end result for those people. In every case in which the free will argument is used as a defense, there is no definition of free will that would actually make it a cogent argument, which is where the problem lies. It's effectively useless as a concept when we're talking about a being like god.