Never did I claim, or even hint at, man being free from God's influence.
I fully believe that if God "recalled his spirit" from mankind we would cease to live; that is actually irrelevant to free will though.
God fashioned creation ex nihilo...out of nothing (John 1:1ff). The origin of evil and everything else is obviously from Him. Why does that bother you? He has determined not to use it unfettered, the way you think He must if He created it.
And evil must have the good already present to exist. A lie is meaningless without the Truth; rottenness is meaningless without the fruit; a rust-hole cannot exist independent of the thing rusted.
But to say that God created evil is quite akin to the unforgivable sin: to attribute to God's Holy Spirit the work/evil of Satan.
Your claim that love “...not freely given,” (the old CS Lewis argument) is not biblically supported. You were compelled to use a computer analogy.
Because I happen to be a Computer Scientist; Jesus himself recognized we speak of the things we know.
You may have needs to be loved. God does not have that need.
I never said that God had that need; I said that our love would be utterly worthless if not given freely.
Actually God created Satan and ordained the fall of satan.. ..and He is still the God of Satan . Satan can not act outside the will of God.. ..so yes the temptation in the garden was ordained by God..as was the fall...
Certainly you did. The term "free will" has no meaning if it does not mean that man can make choices completely free from the God. Otherwise you are back to that hybrid, "limited free will" which is not free, at all.
"But to say that God created evil is quite akin to the unforgivable sin: to attribute to God's Holy Spirit the work/evil of Satan."
How is it that God possessed a "knowledge of good and evil" when He ordered Adam to not eat from that tree, if the concept did not exist until creation and someone other than God invented it? Did God "learn" something new? Gen. makes clear, God said that the man had "...become like one of Us, knowing good from evil". If we agree that the Scriptures claim God is immutable, unchanging, thus has always known what He knows, what did He know about evil if it did not exist?
If a man is going to pick red or green sox out of the drawer tomorrow at 10am, free will requires that God not know what choice He would make. Otherwise, God is seeing something which cannot possibly occur differently. If it cannot occur differently, then exactly how "free" is the man? And, if God does not know, are you claiming that God has no foreknowledge? Does He not see what will happen tomorrow? That is a pagan god, not Yahweh, the God of Heaven & Earth.
What is it about the need to be free from God that even those who call themselves believers cling to such a concept? The Scriptures plainly say He turns the hearts of Kings, He causes the dice to roll a certain number, He sics Satan on men, He controls who believes. What is it that makes this an unwelcome truth? Here is my suspicion: They possess a reward system theology, rather than grace.