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270 c h a p t e r 1 2 The Free-Will Offense In the last two sections of the previous chapter I (at most points) went along with the common assumption that for finite personal creatures to achieve their deepest good in relation to God, they must be given incompatibilist free will. Here I challenge that assumption. Indeed, I argue that, correctly construed, free will is a problem for theism—the basis, if it exists and is distributed and exercised in the ways it appears to be, for a distinctive argument (or set of arguments) against the existence of God. And thus we are taken from the free-will defense to the free-will offense.1 This sort of move is of course going to seem initially controversial: few of those who have views on such things would be prepared to deny that the deepest good of personal beings in some way depends on free will. The drama regularly rehearsed in the literature, involving the progress toward deeper perfection (or recovery from deep imperfection) of creatures who are the ultimate source of their own actions, has caught the imagination of pretty much everyone, and philosophers have little inclination to consider alternatives to this picture when thinking about what sort of world a perfectly good creator would actualize. But here again we must beware of the Familiarity Fallacy. While there is no doubt that these familiar commodities , and a relationship with God mediated by them, would be great goods for personal beings, why suppose that a relationship with God mediated 1 Now, of course, perhaps it will turn out that none of us actually possesses free will. But most of us believe and consider it to be a justified belief that we do possess it, and so I shall take it as appropriate to use this assumption in the arguments against theism developed in this chapter. In any case, if free will does not exist, then free-will theodicies and defenses cannot get off the ground for that reason, and a problem quite similar to one of the problems developed here is faced by theism anyway. The Free-Will Offense 271 in any number of other ways would be inferior? The fact that this question has to date hardly been so much as raised in philosophy suggests that the aforementioned consensus is cause for suspicion. Complacency or acquiescence in cultural or religious prejudice may as well be the source of it as genuine and indisputable insight. After our discussion here, such suspicion should appear the more justified. In this chapter’s first section I examine some possibilities of personal development compatible with an absence of free will. My conclusion is that God can do quite as much to forward the good of persons in a world in which free will is absent as in one in which it is present. Then, in the second section, I argue that certain strides the famous free-will defense against the argument from evil may have appeared to make in the absence of awareness of this fact are to be viewed as ill-gotten gains. What careful reflection actually shows is that the consensus view (that God would decide in favor of free will) is false, and that belief in free will serves the atheist’s purposes rather better than the theist’s. Finally, in section 3, I reveal another side to the free-will offense, to wit the argument that if an all-wise God were going to grant us free will, the pattern of opportunities for its exercise would be rather different than in fact it is. 1. A World without Free Will I propose to begin by going directly to what many would consider the heart of the issue: the question how anyone without free will can enjoy authentic personal relationship with the Divine of a sort that, as I myself have emphasized, would be greatly valued by a creator whose relationalpersonal love was the most perfect possible. A common argument here, associated with the work of John Hick,2 is that if finite persons lacked free will, their responses to God would be “fixed” in advance and thus mechanical and lacking in spontaneity. Indeed, the relationship between themselves and God would be like that between a hypnotized patient and the hypnotist , or between a puppet and the puppeteer, or between a robot and its designer—which is to say grounded in one-sided manipulation and control...

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