God. Real. Right.

Still on the second part of the overall journey engaged by this set of posts, this entry attempts to show why a sub-point of the claim that even God acts only within reason (rather than with radical freedom) results in a fallacious limitation of God’s sovereignty.
2.1.2.1.1 There is no reason to exclude contingency from descriptions of God.
As the previous post argues, there is no reason to believe God needed to choose between worlds, one of which was best or even better than the others.
But there is something else wrong with the assumption that this world is the best of all possible worlds. The rationalist’s question is why, if God knows everything about all possible worlds and has all power, it would not make sense to surmise that He has actualized the best of those worlds in submission (a term anathema to the supremacy of God) to reason. The question itself is misleading and overlooks something about what is possible to God.
There is an old paradox about God changing. If God is perfect, then He cannot change. If He changes, then He is not (or was not) perfect. A God who is static seems oddly out of character with the God of the Bible while a God who changes seems hardly transcendent to this changing world. Probably the most obvious response to that paradox is to acknowledge that God’s character (describable as, for instance, His morally significant qualities) does not change although the circumstances around Him do change and His activity regarding those circumstances (or anything else) does (or can) change. That change is a contingency about God. God does not have to answer a prayer, but He does. God does not have to save a particular person but He does. Acknowledging that God can have contingent states (even of activity) without compromising His essential qualities admits the statements which were the point of this discussion to begin with: that God’s will can be expressed contingently without impugning His sovereignty.
But that claim (that God’s sovereignty is compatible with contingency) does not square with the argument that if God must choose the best of all possible worlds then this world must (necessarily) be the best of all. After all, there is no room for contingency where necessity dictates what is actualized.
If you’ve lost track of how this fits in with the overall argument for free will, consider this: If God has a radical free will, then radical free will is not impossible as a concept. If God must create the world a certain way according to the principle of sufficient reason, then He may not have free will. So demonstrating that God does not have to create the world a certain way removes that barrier to the possibility that God has a free will, and therefore to the possibility that man has a free will. Again, none of the arguments so far addresses whether there is free will or not; only whether there could be.