Does it violate free will if the person was never given the desire to do something in the first place?

[Der_Trihs]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

Except the argument doesn’t really entail any empirical claims. Rather, it is about what one can can conclude from a certain empirical datum (the existence of evil). So you’re already taking aim at the wrong target, which you then proceed to miss.

@Der_Trihs

The world is, objectively, nowhere near the best possible world.

First of all, you can’t possibly know that. It could be, for instance, that this is the only possible world—the only self-consistent set of natural laws and initial conditions. Without additional assumptions, we can say very little about what worlds are possible, and what we can say then depends on the plausibility of the assumptions we make. The idea that we could just without further ado point at this world and claim anything about where it is located in the set of possible worlds is just nonsense.

But more importantly, and it’s really a mystery to me how this isn’t clear at this point, the FWD doesn’t depend on this being the best possible world.

All nonsense. With an omnipotent involved natural laws and consistency don’t matter. Nor is “the existence of evil” the issue; the existence of overwhelming amounts of evil and vast amounts of natural suffering it.

And I can tell very easily that this isn’t the "best of all possible worlds and never has been, because it can be and has been improved. That would be an impossibility in “the best of all possible worlds”, by definition.

And the “FWD” depends on using a nonsense concept to defend nonsense in nonsensical fashion. It’s gibberish that declares its own conclusion. There’s no “logic” to it, it is antithetical to logic.

It’s just an emotional appeal to the impossible concept of “free will”, to defend an impossible and evil god.