What about choices that seriously infringe upon the freedom and well-being of another? Few people want to be robbed, or raped, or murdered, and their free will is seriously impaired by the actions of their attacker.
Weighing these two against each other, it seems only reasonable to restrict the free will of the culprit to protect the free will of the potential victim.
Absolutely. Unclear only if you're living in a fantasy world bearing no resemblance to the one we actually inhabit.
And the argument against it is that God is wanting people who do what is right without the need of a policeman (see Jesus on the spirit and the letter of the law) and that he all-knowingly allows suffering because it assists in identifying the people of the Spirit, from the people of the Law.
In this scenario God wants people who are loving and do right because it is in their nature. This sounds great, and I would argue that it can and does happen naturally with a healthy upbringing. But the argument of a divine global plan has many, many holes in terms of allowing for a God who is in any sense loving. The main points against it are:
1. There is absolutely no evidence that it works in any global sense. The supposed evidence is, allegedly, the Christians, who are clearly no better as a group than any other. Some might argue that there is something called a "real" christian, the "real" church (of which they are of course members). Unfortunately this "evidence" is only available to those on the inside. Or after we die. Even though there have been groups of christians, and individuals, who have had a positive impact on our world, the same can be said for many other groups and individuals.
So though there is a whole realm of evidence to show that benevolent policing, when carried out properly, does allow good behaviour and attitudes to thrive in an environment of relative freedom, as Jane has quite clearly shown, there is none to show that the other one, God's master plan, even exists, let alone is working.
2. If it
is working on any level, it is working in an invisible way, and probably only with a tiny minority of people. We are left with a God who has created a world in which many people suffer to benefit the few. Whether this suffering is temporal or eternal is almost irrelevant to this argument. Such a God cannot be described as loving in any way that humans would understand of the term...even humans like Paul who wrote 1 Corinthian 13 supposedly about the sort of Love that God had, and humans should have.
I have a lot more sympathy with people who see faith as a personal matter and the whole suffering issue as a mystery, than I do with those who try to use some sort of perverted "logic" to explain the unknowable. Maybe our universe does have some purpose that we will one day understand. In the meantime let's have the dignity and humility to be silent about what we cannot know, and the pragmatism to work with what we can.
