How does one's knowledge of a future event preclude the fact that another one makes a choice? Adam and Eve still made a choice regardless of anything else you want to say. I believe in an omniscient God, but I still make choices which I am responsible for. I assume you make choices too, right? Even though God knows what you are going to choose. You still choose right? Based on your personality, education, intelligence, emotional state, circumstances, perceived consquences, you still make a choice. God did not force you to make it. He just knows you very well.
God, being omniscient and being perfect, is master of all knowledge. He knows what I ate for breakfast and he knows what I will eat for lunch. I would argue that God, to most thinking Christians, is, among other things, knowledge. It's part of what defines God. There's the rub. By defining God as omniscient - posessing all knowledge, a priori and a posteriori - we place constraints on other ideas that we hold dear. Free will, for instance. An omniscient God is incompatible with free will. The only way around this, in the end, is to argue that God isn't constrained by logical considerations and that isn't very satisfying. To accept that argument is to abandon any hope of understanding God and our relationship to Him. There's another rub - one related to the subject of this thread - if God is omniscient and omnipotent, He must be held responsible for all the evil that resulted from His creation. If you agree with this argument, and I accept that you don't, then God's omniscience means that man has no free will. With no free will man bears no responsibility for war, or cruelty, or despoilation of the world. That, instead, man is God's way of doing evil.
GT_WT, this would be a much more interesting discussion if you would discuss the issues at hand and explore the ideas presented instead of just making assertions, which though bold do not allow the discussion to develop.
Is god just along for the ride? Has he created a physics that he no longer engages? Does that physics allow free will, i.e., if he is watching it spread out in a space/time stretch, are we not just part of this stretch spread, particles, as it were, being swept along, reacting as nature commands with 'choice' being at issue only because our nature does not allow us to easily absorb and digest that we don't really choose but instead simply carry on as designed? I can see how a god might not know the future. It has not yet happened so, in a sense, there is nothing to know. But a god who knows what it happening at every moment, though detached, like Santa Claus, watching and keeping his lists but unhinged from pointing in the right direction save by admonitions of punishment based on knowledge of our wrong doing, still seems like he is watching something that is already designed. Is god in here with us? Or does he stand apart an watch his creation from some place outside? How does physics effect god? Where is his place in all of this?
Coelacanth, we have a very different approach to this question. To me, if an omniscient God knows what is to be, it will be. There is no choice in the matter. It's that simple. We don't need to explore what we mean by 'omniscient' or 'know' or 'choice'. The terms are simple and we both know what they mean. The important thing isn't defining terms. What is important are the implications of an all-knowing God. Under this God there is no free will and that God is guilty of all the sins of the world. From my point of view your arguments and questions are nothing more than an attempt to avoid the consequences of this reasoning. I understand why you need to do this. Having said this, I want to answer a few of your specific points:
GT, Yes, if God knows you will do something, you will do something, but the control of that action belongs to you. Whether you fork left, or fork right, it's your choice, God simply knows the outcome. God's knowledge isn't always the same as coercion. We could debate if Doc Brown fluxcapacitoring himself into 2015 influenced Marty McFly's career path, or if it was Marty's decision to race Needles and wreck the Rolls Royce, setting forth a domino effect of bad family decisions.
Bayerithe, It isn't a matter of God controlling my act. What constrains the act isn't God's behavior or will, but rather God's knowledge. We can leave God out of the argument if you want. If I know the nut inside the shell is rotten - know with certitude - then the nut is rotten. If it turns out not to be rotten, then I didn't 'know' in the first place. My knowledge didn't cause the rottenness, but rather left the nut with no choice to be other than what it is, rotten. Where this analogy fails the discussion is that I can't know anything not yet in evidence, but an all-knowing God can.
GT_WT, Say you walk up to a table. On it there is an apple and an orange. You think about which one you would like to eat most. Through some process you determine you would prefer the orange. What did you just do?
GT_WT, so you don't look at the apple and think "you know I have had apples all week I am kind of getting tired of them. I don't like the taste of oranges as much and they are hard to peel but I will go on ahead and eat the orange anyway?" Regardless of whether or not God did or didn't know you would choose the orange did you not in reality and consciously go through the thoughts and process of making a decision? You still exerted action. You still used your mind. You still exercised your will. Your will and God's knowledge worked together without negating His knowledge or your will. I am not a person who will argue the humans have a completely free will but they do have a will and they do make choices based on that will. Whether God know or not, you and I still choose what we want to choose. Do you not experience that in your own life. I think therefore I am? If you cannot trust your own thoughts and choices how can you believe that science is of any value? It is based on humans thoughts and choices. So if you don't trust your experience of choice, you can't trust your experience of scientific conclusion. It is the same thing.
