See Q

"if it is such a good thing for a creature to have free will, why did God make so many creatures that lack free will?"
van Inwagen does not address this issue, at least as far as i have read (which is most of the way through the book) -- but he does suggest that what creatures have free will is not easily decided.  But I think that he can easily make some points concerning the limits on what creatures have free will.  I would expect that free will, whatever it is, must have a set of preconditions so to speak, i.e. and e.g., reason.  Entities which are not reasoning and rational probably are without free will.  Whether that is so will require reading another and a different book; pretty standard conditions, however.

I am disinclined in that direction -- because it is does nothing to help explain how free will gets into the causal chain, or to explain how free will is free from causation.  But those are separate debates.

It is a mistake to think of what van Inwagen is up to is theodicy; that is my fault I think.  I have not explained the project well.  van Inwagen has set his work up in a way which lays the burden of argument (persuasion) on the atheist.  His aim is not to show that we should believe in God, but that the problems of evil do not provide sufficient argument to show that there is no God -- or that it is not unreasonable to believe in God.  Even that may be misleading.  To be discussed in a bit is that van Inwagen thinks that, for all we know, the Eden story could be true -- it is not precluded by archeology and paleontology and biology.  I had to stop reading for a bit at that point.  I do not understand what he means by saying that Eden could have been true for all we know.  But whatever it is, that is the standard here for the theist.  If you can swallow that, then the arguments do what van Inwagen wants. 

I will need to hunt up a different approach to the topics are van Inwagen, something that sets the bar a bit higher.

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[Q the Enchanter]

Well T, now you've made me famous.