No contradiction in the free will thing. I will explain it again, although I have in the past.

There is no free will from a pure science position, since everything works by cause and effect.

God, for His own purposes has held a tiny bit of free will open in people. This little piece of free will has to do with the strength of faith that a person has in God. That's it. It doesn't have anything to do with anything that we think about in life. And even this tidbit of free will is regulated by God to some extent.

God looks at the position of free will in every person. If a change in the universe and circumstances in life is dictated by the change in any person's strength of faith in God, God goes back to the Beginning, and juggles or jiggles the way He set cause and effect into motion, so that changes happen according to the free will of each and every person that uses the speck of free will that he has to make a change. Even the free will is changed in this jiggling juggling of cause and effect... change that reaches to our time, through all the ages of history.

To the person it looks like he changed his mind, or like he decided to get out of bed on the other side this morning, or like he chose apple juice rather than the regular orange juice for breakfast. Yet the person's free will didn't have anything to do with it. All the free will did was to look at God from a slightly different standpoint, even though the person didn't realize he was looking at God. Then God went back in time to the Beginning and jiggled and juggled all of cause and effect to make things happen the way He determines, based on what He sees in the splinter of free will that we have, about believing God.

The strength of God is immense, and the control that He exerts is way farther in understanding beyond us than we are beyond the microbes.