God has a nature, God is truth, God is Love. God cannot do the ungodlike thing. He cannot make evil that is good. God cannot create square circles etc.
If god just made you a robot, you wouldn't be a free will, son of God, potentially eternal being.
It seems like you are saying that God had no say in whether man had free will or not, and that if He could and did program your will, he couldn't get you into heaven or eternity.
Incidentally, the robot thing doesn't hold water. It assumes that if our will is determined for us, that that would make life empty, or at least less desirable. I disagree. We're already robots in the sense that we don't determine what we will want. Our urges and desires arise from neural circuitry. The next time you feel thirst, it will be your hypothalamus telling you that your blood is a little too hyperosmotic (concentrated, needing free water added to dilute it), and you will go seek a drink. That's as robotic as what I am describing - God determining what those urges will be rather than neural circuitry. It's no different to the individual - you have an urge or desire, and you fulfill it. But with expert guidance from a deity rather than internal processes, fulfilling the urge will always result in an optimal outcome.
So perhaps you're thinking that you're no slave to your urges, and that if you felt like it, you could deliberately ignore that imperative to drink from the hypothalamus, and that that extricates you from robot status.
But that idea to thwart the thirst relieving command is merely the output of a higher cortical center and its neural circuitry. You no more chose to have that thought than to be thirsty. It was given to you. The mind processes information at different levels and in different manners, often leading to conflicting desires, such as the smoker who is trying to quit experiencing an urge to smoke from lower centers, and an urge to suppress that desire coming from higher centers that understand that smoking is harmful and inform us to not indulge the lower desire and light up. We have an internal conflict, but we didn't choose either the urge or the thought about it, and we don't decide which one will prevail. It's a tug-of-war of sorts, and we don't decide its outcome. Sometimes, the understanding is stronger and prevents the urge from manifesting, and at other times, the urge overpowers the desire to quit.
That individual is no more or less robotic than somebody who receives his will from a god or a hypnotist. He had the same experience in each case - an idea pops into his head that suggests an action, and if he is not prevented from expressing it by higher cortical centers or by physical impediments, then he will act and have the experience of free will, sometimes called the illusion of free will. As long as one has a desire, no matter it's origin, if he can express it without impediment, he feels free. None of those mechanisms feels like being a robot, and if the actions informed by those desires lead to desirable outcomes more often than undesirable ones, then one has led a relatively satisfying life, even if a god was the source of that will.
The use of the word robot is intended to describe a shallow and undesirable experience of life, but there is no reason to think that if a god were able to give us proper urges only that the experience of life would be degraded by that. Au contraire, if all of the urges that led to all the mistakes that lead to pain, regret, shame, guilt, etc. were removed so that we lived our lives as well as possible, that would be a more fulfilling life, not less. A loving god that is able to do that would, just as a loving parent that could foresee and prevent bad outcomes for a child would use whatever means available to determine the child's will and behavior - be polite, control your anger, repay your debts, don't betray people, keep your promises, etc.. If we could just download those instruction into out children, we wouldn't ask them, we'd just do it just as we don't ask them if they want their childhood vaccines. We compel to behave as we instruct because we love them and won't allow their much more flawed decision making to obtain.
Anyway, I see that you continue to acknowledge much less rebut the restricted choice argument. Either you never read it, you read it but didn't understand it, or you understood it but decided it was best ignored. So, I'll make the response myself:
Yes, that was a compelling argument. Yes, I would feel very strongly that if a coin came up tails 100 times in a row, because it never did what fair coins do, namely come up heads, it is very likely that the coin can't come up heads. And I would agree that if a tax return had 20 mistakes in it and they were all in the taxpayer's favor, it is likely that the return was fraudulently prepared. And yes, if in every circumstance we can identify where things could have been different if the universe had an interventionalist god, but must be as we find it it does not, than the same reasoning applies, and the best explanation for that is that no such god exists. It's not a disproof of God, just like 100 consecutive flips of tails doesn't prove that the coin is loaded, but I'm not betting on heads or a god existing for the same reason.
In your case, I would add
I can't find a flaw in the argument or I would have mentioned it already. But I don't like what this argument suggests, so I will just say nothing, no matter how times I am encouraged to respond
Am I correct? If not, how?
You doubt what you are experiencing, and think it may be hallucination or illusion?
Technically, everything I have ever experienced could be an illusion. I can't actually prove any of it is real. The best I can do is reach the conclusion that what I am experiencing is internally self consistent. But I could, after all, be a brain in a jar hooked up to a computer that is providing me with stimulation that I interpret as existing in a body in this world. Of course, in my day-to-day life, I go with the assumption that what I perceive to be real actually is real, but...
Agreed. We can never really know what the metaphysical reality is. It is reasonable to assume that there is a material world existing outside of our minds, but we can't know that for certain as Descartes argued. We have no way of getting outside of our minds to see what's out there if anything. As has been mentioned, perhaps we are brains-in-a-vat or in a matrix-like dream state. We have no reason to believe that, but no way to rule it out, either.
But here's the interesting part, which you probably already understand: it doesn't matter. Even if we knew for a fact that our experiences were the product of Descartes demon and not the result of experiencing an objectively existing material world, we're still stuck in that world, and as long as the rules continue to work (why wouldn't they if they had before?), we go on as before, exercising our wills in a way that results in desired outcomes. It doesn't matter that that flame isn't actually there if we feel pain when we behave as if it is not. Even if we had ironclad proof that it was all a dream, if touching a dream flame leads to the pain of burning, we don't touch it. Nothing changes. And we go on acting as if there were a physical world out there, because it works even if it's wrong.
for most things, such as my belief I am currently sitting in a chair, or that I am currently in Sydney Australia, the amount of faith I require is extremely low. So low as to be irrelevant for all intents and purposes.
Agree again, but I would say that no faith is required to believe that you are sitting in a chair in Sydney if that's what your senses and intellect tell you, as long as you include philosophical doubt, which is understood and not felt, and which reduces your belief from certitude to near certitude. I only use the word faith to refer to unjustified belief. The belief that my car will start the next time I crank it like it did the last 200 times it was tested is not faith. It is a belief supported by evidence, therefore justified, therefore not faith as I define it. Others use the word faith to describe the justified belief that the car will probably start when tested next
