God. Real. Right.

The reality of free will.
In modern culture either psychology or physics explains everything. So there is no room for real freedom. In many forms of orthodox, contemporary religion there is the belief that God chooses evil in order that good may come and that sin happens to be one form of that evil. So there is no room left for real freedom. Having real freedom is having the actual power to make self-denying choices. The issue is important because God has made that kind of real freedom both necessary and essential to real discipleship.
Then why do so many faithful and intelligent Christians define freedom as nothing more than the ability to do what a person wants to do? Or, supposing real freedom is actual, how could God be sovereign while human beings decide what becomes real?
Whether a free will is even possible or not is one question. Whether it ought to be taken as actual or not is another. Both questions ought to be resolved in a domain both philosophical and theological. I presume theism in the line of reasoning which leads me to believe in free will. So this argument is transparently, presumptuously, and deliberately theistic. In fact, it is most specifically Christian. But for the Christian what is important is not just what might be or what must be, but also what is (metaphysics), what ought to be (ethics), and what ought to be believed (epistemology and faith)–all in disciplines transformed completely either by belief in God or by the rejection of that belief.
The first post is below.
The conclusion of the opinion of the many posts upcoming (perhaps weekly) on this subject is this: the existence of a sovereign God implies the possibility of radically free will, and the possibility of such a will implies that it ought to be part of a Christian Worldview.
The argument toward that conclusion has four main components:

1. the difficulties of believing in free will
2. the difficulties of denying free will
3. the possibility of there being free will
4. the advantage of believing in free will

Each of those components has several, sometimes quite a few, sub-parts associated with it. So it will take some time for the whole argument to come together.
The first part of the first component is here:
1.1 A dilemma makes free will seem impossible.
The metaphysical problem with free will can be put forward fairly simply. It comes down to a dilemma horned on one side by a will with no freedom and on the other side by a freedom which has nothing to do with will.
As the argument goes (and it is a good one) nothing which can appropriately be called will can be without cause—and not just any cause, but one which must ultimately be both prior and sufficient. Everyone who thinks about it knows that there are things which happen prior to the will’s activity and are a part of bringing about what the will does. For instance, no one would pretend that any human’s will emerges untouched and unshaped by the influence of his parents or, on the other hand, by the influence of their absence. But the kind of cause required to explain why a will does what it does is not one that just influences the will, but one that is both prior to the will and sufficient to produce what the will does as well. Why does it need to be prior? Every other way of speaking of causes and effects involves the cause being prior to the effect. But when it comes to the human will, those who fancy human freedom like to speak of the will being explicable in terms of future purposes, rather than prior causes. That distinction is an element of what some have pejoratively called “folk psychology.” It is very odd indeed to say that something which is not yet actual (the result of a purpose) brings about an effect which is actual (the choice.) Joe might explain why he eats a grape by referring to its taste. Some might describe the taste he desires as the cause of his choice, but since the taste is not prior to the effect (the choice) it does not seem right to call it the cause of the choice he made. (Obviously, Aristotle’s way of describing causes takes this kind of “causation” into account. But that language is no longer suited to the way people describe the world, as the rest of this argument contends.) No, in fact (so the argument goes) that future experience could not have been the cause of his choice. Rather, his desire for that taste was the cause of his choice. And his desire is conveniently prior to his choice. Equally important, though, is that his desire (along with other prior causes) is sufficient to explain his activity.
Why does the prior cause of his choice need to be sufficient? Well, to put it bluntly, if any causal explanation is not sufficient to bring about the effect being studied, then there really has not been any explanation at all. Joe eats the grape. He says he ate the grape because he chose to. Under scrutiny, however, the freedom assumed in that statement of choice begins to falter. Under scrutiny, Joe admits that he chose to eat it because he desired its taste. And the further the inquiry goes, the less freedom appears to have been part of the picture from the outset. Why did he desire the taste? Because as a child his mother fed him grapes when he was lonely, and he was comforted. Whatever the answer, the point is that there is always an explanation for why a choice was made, a desire had, a psychological need or system of stimuli and responses established. Even when the explanation is unknown or misunderstood by either (or both) the actor and any investigator (such as a therapist) it still seems only reasonable to assert that there is an explanation, just that more experimentation or investigation is needed in order to find it.
To make the same point from a slightly different perspective: it may appear that Joe chose to eat the grape, and that the choice is free. But since he chose to eat the grape because of his desire for its taste, but did not choose to desire the taste, then his action really is not the result of his choice, but the result of whatever determined the psychology he has which desires that taste. Since the desire dictated his choice, whatever determined his desire is the real cause of his choice. And there is what the determinist sought—that which frustrates the intent of freedom. Whatever determined his desire is the prior, sufficient cause of his behavior. Any reference to choice or freedom is superfluous to what really happened. (By the way, this fact is what makes compatiblism useless. Compatiblism accomplishes nothing more than to allow a determinist to use the vocabulary of freedom and will—and to use it in the very domain where Occam’s razor would dictate that it be eliminated.) To close up the point: suppose someone admits Joe’s choice was dictated by prior, sufficient causes, but then asserts that he still could have done otherwise. Was he not still free to refrain from eating the grape? Suppose he did refrain. Surely the same line of explanation presented above would still apply. Joe desires the taste, but refrains from eating the grape. Then anyone investigating the question would have to assume that there is some explanation for why Joe did not eat the grape. Perhaps as a teenager he was rewarded in some other way for avoiding palatable treats. Regardless of the explanation, the assumption that with enough work and information, there is always an explanation (in terms of cause) for why people make their choices is an assumption that the will is determined rather than free.
So pervasive and powerful is the assumption that every event in the universe is explainable in terms of prior, sufficient causes that it seems only someone completely ignorant of basic physics could deny it. That being the case, why even present a dilemma? There is no potential for freedom at all. But quantum physicists and their often sycophantic followers assert that it may not be that simple. They point to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and quantum foam as evidence and they use probability theory to describe what they take as the fact that some physical events in the universe may be spontaneous—actually without prior sufficient cause. Subatomic particles swerve without explanation. Indeed, quantum matter appears to come into and out of existence with no explanation whatsoever. All of this indeterminacy in the physical world has led defenders of libertarian will finally to throw in their “aha!” “Aha!” they say. “There is room for something to act without prior sufficient cause.” But right there is where the other side of the dilemma strikes them.
Suppose libertarians somehow identify freedom of the will with indeterminacy in the physical universe. What good does it do them? It leaves them not with freedom, but randomness. This side of the original dilemma facing free will is that any indeterminate freedom appears to have nothing to do with will. If a person with a tic is asked why his mouth twitches, it is not surprising that he has no answer—or at least that any answer he gives has as little to do with freedom as it does with the will. In fact, his tic is more like motion than action, lacking the will which is characteristic of human action. But suppose Joe eats the grape (a legitimate action) and then honestly asserts that he had absolutely no reason for doing so. Assuming for the moment that he is not simply out of touch with his feelings, has he described the free act of a human will? No, he has not. Instead, he has described his activity as purposeless, meaningless, and inexplicable. The point here is not that a good therapist could help Joe understand why he ate the grape, (although one probably could, which explanation would then dictate that his choice was not free after all,) but rather that if there really is no explanation at all for why he ate the grape, then his behavior (which is free only in the loosest possible sense) cannot in any way be related to the will. It was a motion, a tic, a convulsion, or an accident. But it was not an act of the will. Worse still, the more random and inexplicable the act is in terms of determinate psychological or other causes, the more likely it seems that the act was caused directly by physico-chemical processes (hence the contemporary explanation of seizures) and even less free than an unrestricted yet determined will. The dilemma seems complete then at two levels. On the first level, either the will is not free or freedom has nothing to do with the will. And on the second level, the greater the freedom from any psychological determination, the more direct the determination by physico-chemical processes. Simply put, there is no room for a free will in the contemporary worldview. It just does not make sense. Notice, though, that it is this particular worldview which is incompatible with free will, not some absolute manifestation of reason or truth itself.
Still, if the above dilemma succeeds, and it certainly appears to do so, then either free will is not what it was cracked up to be, or the worldview in which it is excluded is wrong. However, if the idea of free will is then absurd right out of the blocks, what of God? Are his actions then necessarily either inexplicably random or explicably caused? For instance, is there a prior sufficient cause for God creating this world. Of course, there is no force or activity prerequisite to His creation. But was creation a requirement of, say, His character, or of reason? If so, it seems really difficult to maintain a consistent view of Him as God. After all, the very concept of God requires ultimate-ness in every way. If it is correct to assert that God acts both with radical freedom and deliberate will, then it also seems correct either then to impose the same dilemma for free will mentioned above (since it claims that such a free will is incoherent) or to admit that such a concept of free will is even if inexplicable not incoherent at all. After all, something inexplicable in terms of a particular worldview does not have to be incoherent jabber—it could simply be the case that what is phenomenologically obvious is paradigmatically obscure—that is, it appears to be a certain way, but in that way does not fit the current paradigm of explanation. But before that issue (God’s freedom) can be addressed, it is important to put a couple of practical considerations about free will on the table—considerations which make it unpalatable to many.