God. Real. Right.

Two previous posts identify the most difficult philosophical obstacle and most obvious practical objection to believing in a radical free will.
The post on free will before this one identifies the key theological problem of rejecting the possibility of radical free will. This post adds to that one another example of how rejecting free will goes hand in hand with diminishing respect for God’s sovereignty.
Subsequent posts will identify the key moral (or practical) problem of denying the reality of radical free will.
2.1.2 Attempting to explain God’s activity questions His sovereignty.
2.1.2.1 Claiming this world is necessarily the best of all possible worlds is an example of inappropriately explaining God’s activity.
Back to the nature of God’s freedom, which is important as a conceptual framework within which human freedom can then be described: To describe free will as logically absurd diminishes a person’s understanding of God. Why? Here’s a question that narrows the discussion a bit: is it better to describe God as free or rational? (Remember the first problem faced by those who believe in free will.) Obviously the position of this argument is that the best way to express God’s omnipotence and primacy is with His free will. Consider one philosophical system in which reason takes God’s place.
Leibniz’s argument about God’s rational behavior is built on his assumption that everything can be explained in terms of the principle of sufficient reason. (More specifically, the two fundamental principles are of non-contradiction and of sufficient reason. According to Leibniz, God first decrees to act in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason. The rest follows logically.) The principle of sufficient reason asserts simply enough that when intelligence acts it must always act in accordance with the best reason available—for God, obviously, the best reason period. So Leibniz is able to handle the problem of evil easily. The problem of evil is about why evil exists in a world created by an omnipotent and just God. In his system the answer is that this world is the best of all possible worlds. How can anyone make that claim? If God knows all the possible worlds and chooses freely among them all for the one He will actualize, then the principle of sufficient reason makes it necessary that He choose the best one to actualize. Common sense agrees. If God could create any world He wanted and chose to create this one, He must have done it for some good reason. And whatever that reason is must be sufficient to explain that this world is better than any other world He could have created, otherwise He would have created the other one. The only other option is that God acted irrationally by creating this inferior world.
However, for Leibniz to claim that this world is necessarily the best of all possible worlds is for him to place God in a position inappropriate to His supreme nature. Applying the principle of sufficient reason to God does nothing more than make God subservient to a tool He gave for evaluating and relating means and ends in the creation, not in the Creator. Applying the principle of sufficient reason to God makes no sense in the light of passages like Isaiah 40:28, where there is no searching of His understanding. There is no large leap between so dismissing the principle of sufficient reason regarding God and acknowledging that He has acted and acts now in complete freedom.
Perhaps a determinist would claim that God acts based on prior sufficient causes which happen to remain unknown to humanity. Two responses need attention. First, such a claim seems meaningless. Claiming that God’s actions are indeed explicable while at the same time claiming that the explanation eludes human comprehension is futile at best and deliberately obscure at worst—an inexplicable explanation! But second, that there is some (even logically rather than chronologically) prior sufficient cause to explain God’s actions leaves a very difficult question regarding the primacy of God. Just exactly how supreme is a God who must act in accordance with any standard whatsoever? The standard seems newly supreme.
God does not do anything of necessity. The only necessities which could be ascribed by humans to God (wrongly, of course) are those derived from standards known by humans only through God’s revelation. Here, of course, some theologians demand a distinction between general and special revelation. But that distinction misses the point. The message of general revelation is only meaningful within the context of God’s very specific activity (of creation, for instance.) To think that any conclusion or process derived from that revelation (general or special) has some kind of authority over God is senseless for the theist. It is not just arrogant for people to hold God to such a standard, it is logically indefensible. There is nothing people can know about God beyond what God has made possible for them to know. It is neither reasonable nor consistent with revelation to believe that people have the knowledge, understanding, or wisdom to assert that there is a cause for what God does, much less what that cause might be. To make this point very clear: why bog God down in either the infinite regress of epistemology or the vicious circularity of reason? Saying God acts in accordance with reason puts God’s activity into the same rationally unjustified realm as reason’s foundation (the law of non-contradiction). While the law of non-contradiction is an obvious foundation on which to build reason’s structures, it is itself unjustified by any other rational argument. God is the answer to epistemology’s catastrophe. To ask ultimate questions regarding why God does this or that is to ask the child’s question of who made God, only in a slightly different domain.
The problem with the position that this world is the best of all possible worlds is pretty clear in the context of just a couple of specific necessities. To put it rhetorically but not unfairly, to claim that God could choose to actualize none other world than this one is to claim that He could choose none other than to sacrifice Christ or, even more uncomfortably, that He could choose none other than to redeem some particular person among the elect. Such a limitation on God’s freedom seems inappropriate at best, downright heretical at worst. For a more loaded example, it makes evil necessary. While there is not enough justification to weigh in thoroughly on this topic here, a couple of brief comments can make the point. Consider it in these terms, claiming that the world could not have been otherwise is either to claim that a reason superior to God necessitated an evil which God did not choose freely or that God’s very nature necessitates the existence of evil. (As a brief aside: the better option is the one afforded by libertarianism, that this particular world—the one with evil in it—is not the necessary result of anything, but the contingent result of God’s free creation of a world with freedom in which He expresses sovereignty over His creatures’ possession of free will and the consequences–even immediate–of their choices.) Such a statement is extensionally equivalent to the claim that God could not exist without evil. Such a claim is unacceptable to anyone who holds God both supreme and good.