Dr. Ehrman's second un-answered objection last Wednesday went something like this.
Christians mostly claim that suffering is the result of free will, choices that humans make to inflict pain on one another--precisely the line of reasoning Dinesh D'Souza took. But most Christians believe that they won't be robots in the after life--that there will be some degree of free will in the after life while at the same time holding that there won't be any suffering.
So why is it necessary for suffering to be true in the here in order for us to have free will while it's not necessary for suffering and free will to be coterminous in the afterlife?
In the Christian story, there were only three people ever who had genuine "free will:" Adam, Eve, and Jesus. The rest of us are all handicapped to some degree by the sin nature, passed onto us by the failure of Adam and Eve.
Jesus, on the other hand, lives in a completely different way. He only does "what I see my Father doing."
Every moment of every day, Jesus does what all of us should and would do if we had any clear sense about us: he submits his will to his Fathers will. This is what Christians mean when we say that he was sinless. He never went against the will of his Father.
To borrow from George MacDonald, the will, like the self, has been given to us that we might have something to offer back to our Father. We're like a child given money from our mother to purchase her birthday present. We have been given what we call "self" and "our will" in order that we might give it back to our Father as a present that he genuinely takes delight in.
Only Jesus has ever done this perfectly in this life. But as he is, so shall we be one day. One day, his Spirit will be fully at work in our hearts. We will have the full renovation of our hearts, the promised heart of flesh in place of the heart of stone.
And so in the new heavens and the new earth, we will do what Jesus did--in his infinite freedom he infinitely and freely and gladly submitted his will to his Father's will. We, too, one day, will offer back to our Father the gift he has given us with gladness and joy.
Put another way, we will finally live fully fulfilled lives. We will finally be free of our suicidal tendencies.
In the end, as C.S. Lewis says (riffing off of George MacDonald, as he is often wont to do), there will be two kinds of people. Those who say to God "thy will be done" and those to whom God says "thy will be done."
Hell will be populated by those bent on self-rule forever and ever.
And the new heaven and new earth will be this never-ending, never ceasing joyful community of resurrected bodies who are forever offering up "their wills" to the fully good One. And in return they will receive ever-increasing joy. It shall be a glorious reversal of the Great and Terrible Exchange that went down many thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden.
And no one will ever regret the giving over of our borrowed wills...not for one second.
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