Why deny such an intuitive principle instead of affirming atheism or some version of theism without hell? God is literally punishing people for what He predetermined for them to do. Why on earth would you worship a god who sets up rampant child sex abuse (in his own church), the Holocaust, famine, disease, and tortures people forever for what they couldn't help doing?
Atheism is not an option since the existence of God is proven.
Theism without hell - I don't know. But subjectively speaking, why not go with Pascal's wager? If hell doesn't exist, we suffer no harm in falsely believing that hell exists.
Why worship the puppet master? Because man owes worship to God. God's being a puppet master is irrelevant.
But as I said before, I myself am not certain that compatibilism is correct, and neither am I certain that what follows (that God is a puppet master) is correct. Compatibilism is my current opinion as a non-philosopher/non-theologian who hasn't extensively studied these things--my opinion very well may change as I receive new information: I will gladly switch back to libertarianism if the libertarianists can show that God's foreknowledge is not incompatible with libertarian free will.
Intellect: This is not good. There is a desire to do the good, but it is not emotional. It is instead love of God, even for the heathen, since God is the Form of the Good.
Emotion + Intellect: The money buys me nice things, which I want.
I don't see these conditions changing. The intellect is correct in desire 2, the money buys nice things. And the emotion doesn't change. Having the nice thing gives the person happiness.
Think of them as magnitudes. Maybe one day my desire for nice things is twice as strong as my desire to do the good, so I am willing to steal. But the next day my desire for nice things decreases and my desire to do the good increases, so I'm no longer willing to steal.
To add complexity, usually there are more contributing factors than just two. I might have a desire for nice things, a desire to do the good, a fear of going to prison if I'm caught, a fear of the dishonour it could bring me, a perceived yet false need for money, etc., all of which contribute to my desire to steal or not to steal. If any one of these contributing factors changes, and if the will is deterministic, then the choice of the will could change.
And if St. Augustine is right, the only contributing factor which is morally relevant is grace. Because again, given the correct starting conditions, determinism would say that pretty much anybody--with or without grace--can refrain from stealing. But only those with grace can make a good choice. It follows that those who lack grace, who nevertheless refrain from stealing, are not making a good choice. (Of course, to refrain from stealing is less evil than stealing, but it's only good if done with grace. To say otherwise is to suggest that some good things come from man rather than from God.)
On what basis did the will swerve towards evil over good? Just saying "free will" doesn't answer it, since I'm asking why the free will did what it did. That's just saying "he chose A because he chose A," but what was the explanation?
The will moves based on what the intellect perceives as being valuable or desirable in some sense. To be free, it seems like you'd have to choose what you desire, and that choice itself would be baseless or based on a 2nd-order desire. If there is no second-order desire to act on desire A rather than B, then it seems like a roll of the die which one wins out. The agent-self, in a state above its two initial desires, suddenly lands on one rather than the other, because...zilch.
The will (according to libertarianism) is
self-moving. Desires draw the will, but the will alone is what makes the decision.
If you think that this is a problem, I'll point out that determinism isn't any better off:
If the will's choice follows deterministically from desires, then this begs the question, What accounts for the desires?
If you're not a theistic compatibilist, you'll end up in an infinite regress.
If you're a theistic compatibilist, you'll arrive at God as the first cause, which begs the further question, Why does God cause desires?