Nations University call

[Thorne]

My understanding was not that the people were predestined to do certain things, but God already knew who would choose to sin. But, the Puritans took that idea to the extreme and believed that God chose people for condemnation at birth and there was no such thing as free will.

This still invalidates the concept of choice or free will. Whether God predestined everything or simply knew what would happen with certainty, humans have no freedom to choose anything, but will instead act in an already-certain way on a macro scale.

Say that I know you will get into a car accident tomorrow morning, and this is the path that will happen no matter what, since I've seen it with certainty from the perspective that it has already happened. Telling you not to drive tomorrow, therefore, will not have any effect on you, since you will certainly drive and certainly get into an accident tomorrow.

Is it then reasonable for me to say that you chose to drive and are responsible for your choice if you were going to drive no matter what anyone said or did? From your perspective, you would say that you chose to drive. From my perspective, as I already knew what you would do with certainty, your "choice" was predestined, even though I was not the one to define that destiny.

If God is omniscient, He possesses all knowledge. This is all-encompassing, meaning that God also knows the future*. If God knows that you will murder someone tomorrow, and knows it with certainty, then nothing He does or says to you will change the fact that you will, with certainty, murder someone tomorrow. Did you still choose to murder someone?

What if God really wanted to stop you, thereby changing the future events He already knows? If He then exercises His ability and prevents this event from occurring, He either (1) did not know with certainty that He would change the future, meaning he is not omniscient, or (2) already knew He would change the future with certainty and therefore had to change the future and could not choose otherwise, meaning he is not omnipotent.

If humans have free choice, God can not know precisely what we will do, which means that God is not omniscient. If humans do not have free choice, but only the illusion of choice from our limited perspective, and God does know precisely what we will do, then God is either (1) not omnipotent, as he was necessitated to create us by His perfect foreknowledge (see prior post) and was incapable of deciding to not create us, or (2) cruel, since he willingly created all of those who would suffer (and created a place for those to suffer in) despite knowing precisely who would suffer because of actions they were certain to take with no chance to deviate.

My attempt to reconcile this is as such:
God knows all possible permutations of every possible event that could ever happen in any timeline that is currently unfolding, has unfolded, or will unfold. He knows every choice you could possibly make, and every consequence of these choices, but does not know which choice you will make in the case until it happens. Think of it like a branching timeline. In such a case, God would be able to see every ending of every possible timeline, and can witness all possible timelines from His 'location' outside of these timelines, but you can freely choose to act of your own accord and freewill at any point without violating His knowledge.

In this sense, by standing at the end of the timeline, He would see every version of every ending as real and actualized, and is thus incapable of knowing precisely which ending will be the actual end until it happens, though he can make predictions as to what will happen (think Game Theory at a level beyond anything we can imagine) and can affect the various timelines as he wishes with supreme authority to act within a given timeline.

It is a bit wacky, and it is a completely separate argument to that posited in my first paper, but it's a working hypothesis.

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* There is one caveat here that would render my argument against omniscience moot. Omniscience literally means "all knowledge," so if the concept of knowledge itself is limited (perhaps the future cannot be precisely known, because the knowledge does not exist) then God would be omniscient by simply possessing all possible knowledge, as opposed to knowing everything. However, no one whom I have debated on this matter has yet been willing to take that position, since it seems to limit God by an external factor.