Decent people are always careful to ensure that their beliefs serve them and
help them serve others. They recognise that nobody has the right to hurt a hair
on the head of another person - even if miracles and prophets and resurrected saviours tell them to do so. They have no right to insult decency by honouring
dodgy prophets and saviours who implied that violence is sacred.
At the core of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is a doctrine that refuses respect for people and which feeds on the suffering they endure to create the theology of a God who is not to blame for it. Namely the doctrine of free will - it is said that we are to blame for evil and suffering and not God.
The free will defence needs to be true and established beyond reasonable doubt.
Why?
1 For we cannot be blamed for evil without that accusation being justified.
2 Our suffering cannot be justified as being necessary for we have free will.
3 We claim the right to bring suffering on bad persons in the name of justice.
4 It is indecent to tell a world dictator who oppresses billions that God gave him free will so he could choose to do that if he so decided. That is plainly insulting and is going to make him even more arrogant. It borders on turning into a placebo where you are immune to being troubled by the suffering of others.
5 It is strange to say creatures risk suffering by using free will - that does not account for animal suffering.
There is no evidence or proof from logic how we could be free and if we are. A feeling proves nothing. The cat feels like she has free will and no believer in free will says she has. Having free will only means we have free will - not that we should build a defence for God on it.
For believers, if there were no free agents but a universe of cats and dogs and rabbits and they were still suffering terribly, this suffering would hypothetically not disprove the goodness of God! This is really just pretending that divine evil is actually good and is to be condoned. It feels better to condone it than to be repelled by it.
If God were literally goodness and justice you might understand him claiming the right to give free will and tolerate suffering. Does he ground objective moral goodness? When people conclude that he does, that morality must be grounded in God’s nature, they typically arrive there by eliminating other possible foundations, not by understanding what it actually means for God’s nature to generate or justify moral truths. A process of elimination tells us only what morality is not based on; it gives us no insight into how God’s nature could function as a moral source. The truth is there is no reason to think God does ground morality.
Logic shows that if he did, you only get a yes or no. Nothing says how good life-saving is or how bad murder is. That weighing comes from our psychology.
The free will argument is tied to love the sinner and hate the sin. It treats the other person as divided against themselves - so it is abuse. The sinner in a sense is the sin.
We conclude that the free will defence is arrogant, lying about how God's goodness is understood and prone to hate speech in the guise of love. It must be thrown out.