"Well, someone has to spy on the beachcombers..."

Last night, the bugbear that stalks me reappeared: the question of free will. I did get a nice, concise explanation of "Arminianism," which is very good to have (also, some Thai food, which is also good to have, but is probably unrelated to the question of free will); but the question of grace and our relationship with God is only a small part of free will.
As it so happens, Tony Campolo has recently written a short essay about free will. I won't go into a full-fledged dissection of this piece, but I want to bring attention to a common error Tony commits here.
He starts by saying that God is self-limiting in order to give us free will: just as a parent must allow a child the freedom to make mistakes in order to mature, God has granted us an even greater freedom in order to achieve spiritual maturity. The problem comes in the next move: Tony switches from human freedom--and thus, sin and suffering borne out of that freedom--to cancer, hurricanes and tsunamis. Some people argue that those things (sometimes called "natural evils") are the product of human sin, but Tony (thank goodness!) doesn't make this argument (at least not in this article). But he doesn't offer an alternative connection between human freedom and natural evil, which is necessary in order to connect them at all. Can we imagine a world that had no hurricanes or tsunamis, and little girls didn't die of brain tumors? This doesn't have anything to do with free will at all: it's a question of theodicy. Despite centuries of trying to explain the latter in terms of the former, it still doesn't work.
I had hoped that Tony would offer something more satisfying... oh well.
Back to beachcombing.