If God knew we would sin, could he not have created us without free will?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1991.
Yes, God could certainly have made us human beings like machines, or like insects, without free will or free choice, had he been pleased so to do. But without free choice:
True morality is impossible. If I am forced to do something against my will and have no genuine choice whether I do it or not, then I can be neither blamed nor given credit for what I do. A bumble bee, which works simply by instinct, cannot be held to be 'guilty' of a crime!
True love is impossible. If one of these days you are sitting in your lounge and there comes in a robot, and it flings its arms round your neck and says, 'I love you, my dear', you will probably respond by kicking it in the shins and telling it not to be so silly. For you will immediately realise that a machine that has been programmed to 'love' you is not capable of genuine love. It had no choice. God wanted creatures who could genuinely love him, and hence he had to give them free will and free choice.
Yes, God could foresee that men and women would misuse their free will and rebel against him; and if they continued to rebel it would lead to disaster; but he also made provision through the death of our Lord Jesus for their forgiveness and reconciliation, and is prepared to give salvation as a free gift to everyone who will repent and believe. No one need perish. Whose fault will it be, therefore, if, in spite of this, people prefer to reject God's love and therefore perish?
God does not arbitrarily throw away human beings. In the giving of his Son for our salvation, God himself has suffered more than any of his creatures. All may be saved, if they will, through the sufferings of Christ. But if people use their free will to reject God, God will not remove their free will. He respects people too much: he will not degrade them into mere animals or machines, not even in order to save them; for if he did, what he managed to save would be less than human.
How do you feel about the question yourself? Would you prefer to be a mere biological machine rather than a human being with a free will and capable of moral choice and of true love?
No one can say both, 'I love my freedom, and because I am afraid of losing my freedom I refuse to trust and obey God'; and, 'I do not like the consequences of my freedom: God ought to have made me like a machine, so that I could not disobey God and thus perish'.
Very sincerely,
