Well said and excellent point.
You mean like Satan?
Oops; once the great rebellion was suppressed, I didn’t think the fallen were called “angels” any longer. What is the prevailing terminology? Is Satan an angel? I thought he had another name.
(Heck, he’s got hundreds…)
Of course, the next question is, can Satan exercise his free will? Is he imprisoned, or is he an active agent. Some theologians say one thing…and others say other things.
I kind of like Dante’s vision: Satan is trapped, helpless, able to do little more than curse and gnaw. Judas, Cassius, and Brutus are his eternal chaw of baccy. Leaving out the fine details, this vision leaves human sin to human agency. The devil didn’t make you do it; your own sinful nature did.
But others say the devil is right out there, in the world, in San Francisco, say, having sex with gay men and everything. Really active, the author of our misfortunes. I don’t admire this idea as much, as it undermines our own free will. It allows us to put the blame on him, rather than accept it as the burden of our own responsibility.
The Sufi poet/mystic Rumi said, “If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self”.
I take that to indicate Rumi thought what we consider as evil can and does originate in each of us.
I’m with Rumi on that. Separating “evil” from ourselves and having it embodied in a separate entity like Satan might be a useful metaphor when discussing evil in a broad, philosophical sense, but taking it literally, like some people do, denies reality (though it does conveniently absolve us of blame when we do wrong).
And at the risk of going off the rails here, regardless of whether or not angels have free will, why is there a need for angels in the first place? Are we not completely comfortable with a single, monolithic God taking care of everything and still need lesser beings like angels and saints to get the job done?
Angels are like “exchange particles” in quantum physics. God says, “Let there be light,” and a thousand angels spring to attention and glow.
I never realized that, so how did Satan come about according to the canon?
Now that you mention it, angels look nothing like humans.
Ezekiel 1:16
Ezekiel 10:14
You might want to check out post #110:
Your post #110 cleared up a lot of misconceptions(I hope). The only objection I ever had was to information about angels that had no scholarly cites whatsoever. If the topic was hobbits, anything from the works of Tolkien would be acceptable, as probably would any reference works on mythology he used to formulate his ideas. What I wouldn’t find acceptable would be fan fiction.
Lovely quip about fan fiction… But… Okay, Milton and Dante are right out. And the Book of Daniel, really, is also “fan fiction.” But… Paul’s letters? The Revelation? The Gospels? How do you draw the line? The Nicene Council did draw a line, but it’s a bit arbitrary…
(We need a big theological push to get Dante’s Divine Comedy recognized as “Revealed Truth.” But Milton still doesn’t make the cut.)
(re Tolkien, what about stuff by Christopher Tolkien? Is he “canonical” or not? Or, to put it another way, is the son of the Prophet the heir to the Prophecy? Didn’t Sunni and Shia get into a wrangle over that?)
Christopher Tolkien is much more an analogue of a Biblical scholar (of the modern textual criticism variety) or a museum curator. He hasn’t written anything (to my knowledge) in the legendarium himself. He’s only edited and presented his father’s writings, including the writings that didn’t make the final cut, to the public. That’s as opposed to Brian Herbert, who metaphorically set up a circus tent on top of his father’s grave, with lights powered by Frank’s spinning corpse.
Not really, (on both counts).
The Council of Nicaea made few statements regarding Scripture, none of them addressing a canon. The Councils that wrestled with defining a canon occurred over fifty years later, including the Council of Rome, (382), and the Third Council of Carthage, (397).
As to the “bit arbitrary” claim: it may be argued that the church, collectively, was arbitrary in its selection of a canon, but the councils tended to simply confirm the selection process that had already begun among the various churches 150 years earlier, not really adding or eliminating any books that were not already in use. There are references to lists of accepted books dating back to the Muratorian Canon from around 170 and those promoted by Origen, around 200, that are very close to the lists that currently comprise the Christian canon.
Their ancient and precious law strictly forbids them from interfering in mortal world.
Well, depending on which angels you’re talking about. If I recall correctly their descriptions range from “roughly humanoid” to “Lovecraft’s nightmares.”
Cite?
That settles the question of free will, then. 
The original question now has a rider: do particles and/or angels have free will?
I love the way Raymond M. Smullyan deals with the topic of human free will:
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
This is a very entertaining read, somewhat on topic, and well worth the time.
Here’s the bind that the Catholic Church was in, and why they have to say that angels have free will: If satan rebelled, but did not have free will, then god was the author of the rebellion. And that blows the whole omnibenevolent thing right out of the water. It’s a game changer. So that meant that the angels had to have free will. But god, being omniscient, knew it was coming and did nothing about it, which means that god is not truly omnibenevolent but only indifferent… if you believe in all that sort of thing anyway.
This thread subject also brings to mind:
’Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’–Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17