Even when morally perfect, Adam and Eve had no freedom to choose to fly or to make themselves taller or shorter. God alone is infinite and has completely free will that permits Him to do whatever He wants (always in keeping with His flawless character). In a world of cause and effect, even our small choices are influenced by people, circumstances, and events.

Seventy-six-year-old Liviu Librescu taught aerospace engineering at Virginia Tech. On April 16, 2007, when a homicidal gunman tried to enter his classroom, Librescu barricaded the door, giving all but one of his twenty students time to escape out the window. The killer shot Librescu five times. The final shot to his head killed him.

A Holocaust survivor, Librescu chose to stand between his students and a mass murderer, giving his life for them on, of all days, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Librescu made a free and meaningful choice that saved his students’ lives.

God gave humanity a choice even though He knew what their choice would be.

Choice is a function of someone’s will. God has a will, and so do we. Satan also has a will, one opposed to God’s (see 2 Timothy 2:26). A will is the property of any intelligent being, and the ability to choose is a central aspect of personhood.

From the beginning, God knew what choices both angels and humans would make under what circumstances, and while He could have intervened to stop them from sinning, He wanted them to choose freely.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote,

Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. …Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Lewis added this important point:

Of course God knew what would happen… apparently, He thought it worth the risk.… If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will…making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it [that] it is worth paying.

Adam and Eve freely chose to sin.

Genesis 2:16–17 tells us, “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’”

We should take God’s words at face value. Perhaps hundreds of trees filled Eden, but God forbade eating from only one. The biblical narrative would be nonsensical if God required Adam and Eve to make a sinful choice. God, in His sovereignty, could have chosen to forbid nothing. He could have made the fruit unattractive, kept the snake out of the garden, kept temptation away and kept them from falling. But He didn’t.

God said to Eve, “What is this you have done?” (Genesis 3:13), not, “What did Satan make you do?” or “What did I cause you to do?” Adam, Eve, and Satan all made real choices—and God judged them accordingly. His creatures chose freely to sin, yet God didn’t surrender His sovereignty for a moment.

The term free will is potentially misleading.

I don’t like the term free will because it can convey an inaccurate impression. Our free will is limited because we’re finite.

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