An individual's perpetual awareness of God, as punisher of evil, can overwhelmingly motivate an agent to refrain from doing evil. This is relevant because in the absence of a comparable felt incentive to do wrong, the motivation would be coercive (inhibiting free will choice).1
But wait…
•…God can postpone the punishment.2(Response included)
•…awareness of God has not coerced Satan, Adam & Eve, nor many believers3(Response included)
As one prominent philosopher put it: >• Immanuel Kant: “…instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. ... Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.” [Critique of Practical Reason (Macmillan, 1956), 152-153.] Similarly:
• Michael Rea: “I have kids, and they each in their own ways sometimes try to manipulate and bully the other one. I want them to freely choose not to do this—which means I often don’t appear in the doorway when I hear that the conditions for manipulation and bullying are growing ripe. If I appear in the doorway, they’ll be on their guard; their freedom to grow will be, in a certain way, undermined.” [“Divine Hiddenness and Divine Silence,” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology 6th ed, eds. L. Pojman & M. Rea (Wadsworth, 2012), 271.]
• Travis Dumsday: “It is difficult to exercise one's free-will to do or not do some act with an Almighty Judge literally looking over one's shoulder. And since moral autonomy is necessary for the development of genuine virtue, and God wants us to become genuinely virtuous, God has good reason not to reveal Himself in the manner Schellenberg suggests.” [“Divine Hiddnness as Divine Mercy,” Religious Studies 48 (2012): 185.]
As one critic notes: >• J. L. Schellenberg: “it is only if an individual believes that God's policy on punishment implies that a failure to do good actions will in the here and now result in bodily harm or loss of life … [that is] correlated with each bad action… that the motivating effect of his belief can be plausibly viewed as great” [Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Cornell, 1993), 124.] By way of response, however, even if postponing punishments would result in fewer individuals losing freedom, how much fewer would it result in? Knowledge of postponed consequences would/could still be severely coercive. >• Robert McKim: “Being thoroughly immediate and being linked clearly to particular actions, and being thought of as such, are not necessary for being a significant disincentive to wrongdoing and for having a powerful inhibitory influence on agents, even if diminished immediacy (etc.) would diminish the deterrent effects.” [Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (2001), 43.]