Cold Case Christianity: If we can love god in heaven without freedom to sin, we don't need that ability here on earth

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace who tried to get away from the serious theological problem of why we need freewill to love god here on earth, but we won't need freewill to authentically love god after we go to heaven.

#STRask - May 22, 2017

Melinda:
First question comes from evsp123 on Twitter. "If the ability to do otherwise is a requirement of love, then given our new natures, how will we love the Lord in the new Earth?"

Jim Wallace:
So I think it all comes down to the definition of what it is to have free agency. And if we pose it this way, the ability to do otherwise, it can put us in a conundrum 

Melinda:
Exactly. 

Jim Wallace:
But if we pose it in terms of the ability to do whatever it is you want to do. If you think practically, that is what free agency is. It's my being able to go out, and look at the set of options, and pick the one I want.

So what you are really doing is denying the libertarian notion of feewill, the one which Norman Geisler and William Lane Craig use to explain the problem of evil.  They say we have to have the ability to do the contrary, otherwise, our love of God would be forced, not free.  Along comes the skeptic and says if that is how you define authentic love, then the only way we could authentically love God after we get to heaven is if we retain our ability to sin.  Feel free to deny the libertarian notion of freewill, but just recognize that the consequences of doing put you at variance with other more experienced and more educated Christian philosophers.

Pick the action I want, that I freely want. So now if that's the case, if that's the definition of free agency, well now I can kind of figure out how this might be reconciled to the sovereignty of God. If in fact, heaven is not a place where I'm limited, so I can't make options, but is instead a place where my nature has been so entirely renewed that my wants are now different, then I'm not going to sin because I no longer want that. So now I'm still freely doing whatever it is I want, what's been changed of course though is I no longer want to do what I ought not do.

If there is a form of "freewill" that allows for us to authentically love god while also preventing us from desiring to sin, why didn't God just infuse Adam and Eve with such will. Had he done so, all this mess of sin in the world would have been preempted.

So this kind of compatibilist view that kind of finds a way to find free agency in a very practical way. Because that's how we experience it, right? We just know that free agency is what we want to do. So I think what happens here, is if you change the definitions in such a way to create a conundrum, then you've got a conundrum.

Giesler and Craig are professional Christian philosophers who hold that only the libertarian notion of freewill is sufficient to explain evil (i.e., we need the ability to do the opposite of love).

But if you look at the practical definitions of free agency, and I think that really is the ability to do what it is you want to do freely. Then it's really a matter of what do I want to do?

Melinda:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jim Wallace:
And I think that's why I always say, no listen, you'll be able to do everything you want to do when you're in heaven. You won't feel restrained. Oh I can't do this, I can't ... No, you simply won't want to do wrong anymore because your nature will have been so utterly changed.

Why didn't God give Adam and Eve that superior nature in the first place, so that they could authentically love him while being yet guaranteed to never sin?