We do not have free will.
A simple and undeniable explanation for Christians.
We do not truly have free will. Will yourself to fly unaided, and you will find you cannot. Your “free” will is limited by reality. And a limited free will isn’t free at all; it is a limited will.
This illustrates a larger truth: your will is constrained by your body, your mind, your upbringing, your conscience, and your circumstances. Sure, you get to make decisions, but only from a restricted pool of options. Your will is limited by a million things entirely beyond your control.
Which begs the question: if god saw fit to limit our ability to fly, to photosynthesize, or to communicate through telekinesis, why didn’t he also limit our ability to enact cruelty on each other? We would still have the “free will” to do everything else our abilities currently allow, exactly like now, just kinder.
It suggests a questionable ordering of priorities in god’s design of humanity. We are physically barred from flying unaided because we lack wings, which is a harmless, if chaotic, fantasy, yet the option to inflict unimaginable suffering on a fellow human being was left entirely unrestricted. The creator god, it seems, was an authoritarian when setting boundaries on our physical capabilities, but uncharacteristically libertarian when it came to our capacity for malice.
Tellingly, I find no mention of free will in either the New or Old Testaments. It seems to me that the concept of free will in Christianity is entirely a construct built by later theologians wrestling with god’s apparent, appalling behavior in allowing, and even instructing, murder, rape, genocide, stoning, and all manner of horrors.
Furthermore, the free will argument is often used in areas where it simply fails as an excuse. I have often wondered how an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful god could give babies cancer, or create a system that does. Free will? A baby does not yet have a notion of free will, and so certainly hasn’t chosen to get cancer. I am sure the baby, if able, would freely choose not to die, and I am sure the parents would choose likewise. If there is an underlying lesson behind the death of an infant, sacrificing a baby’s life as a pawn in that lesson is an undeniable act of cruelty and not a respect for free will.
If a god exists and created both physical and mental limits for humans, then we don’t have free will, but rather a will strictly limited to god’s design. “Free” means without constraint, and god constrained us.
MQT
I actually wrote an article about this, which has commonalities and differences too: https://robzagey.substack.com/p/somewhere-between-autonomy-and-autopilot. The essence of it was this: Maybe freedom isn’t total, but it's real enough to matter.
I always appreciate your sensitivity to the cruelty that exists in the world MQT. It’s not something that should ever be flattened into comfortable explanations or easy philosophical answers.
Sorry, but I still don’t understand why people claim free will has to be unlimited in order to be considered free will. Of course one can make only choices from what reality offers. That doesn’t mean free will is diminished in any way. It goes without saying that you can have free will only with what is.