Free To

I was talking with Christian that I'd encountered while standing in a line, and I made the mistake of letting them know that I didn't believe in deities, spirits et cetera. This started the usual questions. Eventually, we wound up on the subject of Free Will, and this gave me a chance to ask a question that I'd been looking for an answer to. From the Christian perspective, I asked, what was Free Will for? What purpose does it serve? Disappointingly, it turned into a stumper, with my interlocutor unable to articulate any real answer other than, "God wanted it that way."

Now, to be sure, I don't know if I actually believe in Free Will. I tend more towards a belief in a deterministic universe, where things only appear to be random. Instead they simply governed by rules that are too complicated to work out in real time, and so while we can often simulate things (albeit sometimes at a slower pace than the real thing), we can't look at the world and understand from that how things are going to unfold. There are simply too many factors to be taken into consideration.

But I've come to find the concept of Free Will in Judeo/Christian/Moslem thought interesting. Because it doesn't seem to serve anyone's purposes. There's never a time when disobedience to divine will is shown to be the correct course of action. It only leads to suffering. So why have it in the first place? And with an omnipotent and omniscient deity, there's no need for anything else to have the power to make decisions. What possible choice can a person make that it wouldn't occur to the Abrahamic god to implement? There's no need to "crowdsource" decision-making. And in this sense, Free Will seems like a trap; any use of it ends poorly.

I suspect that sooner or later, I'll meet someone who can give me a perspective that I hadn't considered that will demonstrate a logic to it. I'm curious to see what that perspective is.