Assuming the existance of such a being as God and the free will - He gave us free will because then we wouldn't be nothing more than a machine following algorithms. We will be living beings with whom God can converse and inspire. With our free will comes the ability to chose and be, at the end of the day, free. Freedom is far more worth while than shackles!

God is a God of relationships. You cannot have a relationship with an unquestioning machine. It was a risk to give us free will, but God saw it as preferable to the alternative.

I think the question is: why do we assume God has given us free will? this could mean two things: either our lives are planned out, or there is no God. Because I don't want to offend anyone, I'll keep my choice to myself.

My will is my own. It wasn't "given" to me by anyone, or anything. That is why I, and I alone, am responsible for my own actions, both good, and bad. There is no mythological superhuman to thank, or to blame, for human strength and weakness.

Because without the free will factor xtains can't explain the actions or inactions of God. So, they had to make up the free will factor. Most explanations still don't make sense, but at least they can make an attempt.

To choose.

Because He had loads of it Himself

..because its a huge part of what it means for anything to mean something and life to be considered life. Its "partially everything." It gives us the opportunity to be who we are. ~It is sooo important in my eyes.

Where is the joy in being loved by those who MUST love you and have no other option? But if someone chooses to love you, and loves you freely and without obligation... that would be why God gave us our own wills.

Like the free vote it puts us in the driving seat, to an extent. If we use our free vote to put in power people that will ruin our economy, embroil us in hard-to-justify wars far away from our shores, support very oppressive regimes then we will have only ourselves to blame. We cannot cry foul. The same goes for free will if you make choices that will produce problem individuals, problems in societies and in the Great Beyond find yourself in the wrong place you will have only yourself to blame. You cannot cry foul. The more of the following freedoms you have the less of an excuse you will have A ample options to choose from B rationality with which to evaluate the options and make your choices C sufficient capabilities to implement your choices D freedom from external restrictions stopping you from carrying out your choices You cannot then say you were just following the crowd (doing what your parents did). The response will be “What! Even though I bring you better guidance than that ye found your fathers following?” (HQ 43:24) You cannot say you were under a dictatorship that restricted freedoms. The angels “will say: Was not God's earth spacious that ye could have migrated therein?” (HQ 4:97) You cannot say the obligations of the correct choices were too burdensome for you. The response will be “On no soul doth God place a burden greater than it can bear.” (HQ 2:286)

He Has not given us free will, if I think I understand the terminology of your question. Yes, we all have a will, and that will IS free to choose what it wants to do. By its nature, without God's intervention, though, our "free will" will only choose evil. Give a person two (or more) choices, the person will always pick what they prefer. (We all like sheep have gone astray ... Isaiah 53.) Only when God changes the heart -- regeneration -- does our will suddenly desire to serve God. To us as the observer, it may seem like free will, that we had always had and could have made that choice to serve God, but the change really came about because God worked in the heart, gave us a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26-27) that would desire Him.

I think he wanted us to be able to choose him, or to deny him.

It's called "delegating authority". Who has time to endlessly contend with a bunch of whiny children.

He's only given some people free will. Others are screwed. Ask any drug addict if he has "free will". Some people are stuck deep and when you are stuck deep there is no such thing as free will.

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It is because he wants his children to have the ability to choose which path they want to follow He could have just as easily forced everyone to do right only but then how would we learn and grow if every choice was already made for us and if there was no free agency it would not have been necessary for his son to come down and die on the cross so we would have a way to be forgiven of our poor choice and to those who don't believe in God or the Christian teaching of God just think without free agency you would not have the ability to not believe in him

To test our faith.

God gives us free will because he wants to have a genuine relationship with us. If we had no free will, in relation to God we would be like robots, and there is nothing very interesting about relating to a robot. The drawback (for God) is that this also means we have the free will to reject him. With genuine loving relationships rejection is always a risk. Speaking for myself though, it is worth the risk. Apparently God thinks so too.

For the same reason answerbag lets us award points - to potentiate evolution! Or as we like to think, to make a difference.

Lets see. You are lonely, and you want to make a people to love you and you to love them. Are you gonna make some robots who just bow down and say "we love god, we love god, we love god"? No. You will want someone who aculy loves you, not some stupid robot.

An excerpt from A Higher Good: "...As Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it: “The education of our will is the object of our existence.” Free will is our double-edged tool of balance: it is our grandest gift and our grandiose curse. The ultimate gift of God’s love and respect is free will, and our path toward spiritual enlightenment is the continuing process of trying to give it back to Him, a little at a time, until our will conforms to the principles of universal and unconditional Love, or as the title of this book says: a Higher Good.”..."

Parable of the Little Soul http://jenptrsn.freeshell.net/healinglight.html

The question should be "Why does God punish us for using our free will?" Now if you can understand that one, then please tell me.

so you can choose to do and ask stupid questions

So that we would choose God freely, out of love for Him instead of Him making us robots.

It is a gift from our grand Creator. When God created the first human, he produced more than just a body with a brain. Further, God did not create Adam and Eve to be mindless robots. He implanted in them the faculty of free will. And that was a fine gift, for “God saw everything he had made and, look! it was very good.” ( see Genesis 1:31) Yes, “perfect is his activity.” (Deuteronomy 32:4) All of us appreciate this gift of free will because we do not want all our thoughts and actions dictated to us without ever having a choice in anything. However, was the fine gift of free will to be used without limits? In directions given to early Christians, God’s Word answers: “Be as free people, and yet holding your freedom, not as a blind for badness, but as slaves of God.” (1 Peter 2:16) For the common good, there must be boundaries. Hence, free will was to be regulated by the rule of law. Otherwise, anarchy would result. So we might ask, whose law was to determine the proper limits of freedom? The answer to this question has to do with the fundamental reason why God has permitted suffering. Since God created humans, he knows best what laws they need to obey for their own good and for the good of others. The Bible puts it this way: “I, Jehovah, am your God, the One teaching you to benefit yourself, the One causing you to tread in the way in which you should walk.”—Isaiah 48:17. Clearly, a vital point is this: Humans were not created to be independent of God. He made them in such a way that their success and happiness depend on obedience to his righteous laws. God’s prophet Jeremiah said: “I well know, O Jehovah, that to earthling man his way does not belong. It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.”—Jeremiah 10:23. God made mankind subject to his physical laws, such as the law of gravity. Similarly, he made humans to be subject to his moral laws, which are designed to result in a harmonious society. For good reason, then, God’s Word urges: “Trust in Jehovah with all your heart and do not lean upon your own understanding.”—Proverbs 3:5. So, the human family could never be successful in regulating itself without God’s rulership. Trying to be independent from him, people would devise social, economic, political, and religious systems that would conflict with one another, and ‘man would dominate man to his injury.’—Ecclesiastes 8:9. It was not God's desire to create a race of "robots" to be His worshipers. We were made in "His image", with a free will. This is indeed, a gift from God.

It's more fun this way.

To experience what & who is around us.

It's part of Her Divine Plan.

Maybe because he wants us to LEARN from making mistakes ... and to see if we continue to make the same mistakes ..

Because if he didn't give us free will, we wouldn't make mistakes. And if we didn't make mistakes, he wouldn't have the fun of torturing us for eternity in the searing, sulfurous flames of hell!

If “free will” can mean that God gives humans the opportunity to make choices that genuinely affect their destiny, then, yes, human beings do have a free will. The world’s sin status is directly associated with choices made by Adam and Eve. All accounts of the fall of mankind indicate it was as the result of a wrong choice. From that point on, individuals have had the opportunity to choose to follow God or to experience the consequences for not making that choice. Hashem God gave us "free will" so that we could choose to follow Him out of love, respect, and reverence and not because He made us do it. If God made you follow Him, you would learn to hate Him for that action. The same thing applies to your children. You would much rather have them obey you out of love and respect not because you beat them senseless and they obey out of fear.

Put it this way, would you rather be in a marriage with someone who was forced into marrying you against their will, because you could, or someone who freely loved you and wanted to be with you, because they could? That is our relationship with God. According to the Bible, the church is to be the bride of Christ. He wants us to be with Him because we want to and we have freely chosen to not because He forced us to be. Some people opt out, and unfortunately, that is the source of much of the pain in this world. The sort of people who don't want to love a just and loving God are apt to be unjust and cruel. I know I can't use the Bible as a reference with people who don't accept the Bible, so I'll use another. If you read or saw The Lord of the Rings, you might remember what Aragorn said of Galadriel and Lothlorien. Speak no evil of the Lady Galadriel!” said Aragorn sternly. “You know not what you say. There is in her and in this land no evil, unless a man bring it hither himself." So it is with the world God created. There is no evil in this world except what Satan and those whom he can deceive or conquer bring hither himself or herself. God doesn't want it. God doesn't want pain and suffering. God doesn't want hell. But He is willing to let it happen that we might be free to choose.

Because he is just.

An attempt at an answer: Free will was bestowed upon us so that our response to God would not be coerced, for a coerced response would be meaningless to God as we understand His will; our response to God must arise from within us to have value to God as we perceive his ways. Free will does, however, have its limitations. I have read somewhere (I forget the modern philosopher's name just now) that it is like a game of chess, where there are very strict rules governing how moves may be made (for example, the physical laws of the universe), but within those constraints one is free to make whatever moves one wishes. The concept of free will is a great stumbling block to those Christian denominations that believe in predestination. I hope that the reasoning here is clear and helpful.

He does not want puppets!

The term "free will" isn't found in Scripture but we still have it in the sense that God has given each person a measure of faith to believe but it's up to us to choose what we do with that faith. Romans 12:3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think [of himself] more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. (KJV) or "a measure of faith." (NKJV) Many people cannot understand why God gives us "free will to either choose or reject Him, then turns around and casts into hell those who don't choose Him. If you look at it in light of what Scripture tells us (Romans 12:3, Romans 1:18-20) it's understandable why God does what He does. We are simply without excuse because He has given us all sufficient evidence of His existence coupled with a measure of faith to believe it. He has also revealed himself many times throughout history as well as performing miracles that boggle the mind, yet, even with all of that, most of mankind will still reject God. Because He loves us all and doesn't want to cause us to be mindless robots that obey every command, He allows us to either respond (free will) to the measure of faith He has given us or not to respond to it. He calls us but we need to act upon it. God gives us free will to believe in Him and love Him because we want to not because we have too. He will never force himself on anyone. He has given us the Bible, miracles, a measure of faith, free will, has revealed himself through all that is made in this universe and most importantly He has given us His Son to give us eternal life. What more can He do?

So we could learn to love God.

Coz he has his own free will to give us free will...Ha! :P

if we were not given the freedom to choose for ourselves, then we would not learn and grow. This life is a prosess of learning, experiencing, and growing. If we were not free to choose right from wrong,we would not learn be experience and therefore we could not progress to become wise refined individuals.No one can tell you or do for you fully what life experience gives you.God wants us to experience happiness in our lives and so he gave us the gift of free will.Imagine what life would be like without it.

So we can hang ourselves with it.

he hasn't, now get back to work on your destiny.

Why did God give us free will. Wouldn't it have been easier and nicer to create mankind as inherently good. Well, God's purpose with mankind is to have eternal fellowship with those who truly love Him. Therefore, to create us as inherently good robots, without the potential for the opposite character, evil, would not allow for true love. For only love that comes from a free choice of the will is TRUE LOVE. Voluntary choice is the key - love isn't genuine if there's no other option.

It is where our TRIAL here on earth starts with. If there was no free will and we all had to love him...it would be too easy. But becuase of free will it creates a choice to be made if you WANT to love him...or if you DO NOT want to love him. But for the wrong actions there will be consiquences...always. But in the end those who CHOSE to love him will resume on with eternal life. Everyone has the same trials and tribulations...no one person worse or less than. But its how we CHOOSE to handle that that determines where we are and where we are going. Remember that... FOR EVERYTHING there is a choice.

to make you feel like you've got stuff under control

God gave us free will because He is free. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three "personas" in one Being and yet they are free and in perfect harmony. His creating us in His image includes free will, otherwise it contradicts Him. And our free will is given so that we would freely choose to love and obey Him, rather than by compulsion!