If God knows what we're going to do before we do it, do we have to do that?
"Also, if God is omniscient, it must follow that free will cannot exist, how do you view this problem?"
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On the next point, you suggest, "if God is omniscient, it must follow that free will cannot exist." You have also challenged whether He can be omnipotent. God can do anything which is a real thing. Someone has asked whether he can make a round square (or was it a square circle?). In one sense, he cannot, because that is not a real thing. The terms "square" and "circle" are our words which describe theoretical objects in two-dimensional space; they are descriptions of observed characteristics. The question becomes whether God can create an object which has four identical corners and four straight equal sides, yet has no corners and no straight sides but an edge a consistent distance from a single centerpoint. This definition is inherently self-contradictory, and thus cannot exist, impossible even for God. Besides, two-dimensional space itself is entirely theoretical. As far as we know, it doesn't exist--certainly not in this universe, and if there are any other universes in which it does exist, we know nothing about them or how they work beyond what we can extrapolate from our theories. Thus, no squares or circles exist as independent objects in any space known to us; they are themselves impossible, except as definitions of specific unreal but useful concepts. Yet on the other hand, God certainly can create a square circle; even I can do that. I call it a cylinder, and it is a very common shape--a circle in one direction, and a square in the other. (I suspect that were we able to work in four-dimensional space, we could create a triangular square circle just as easily.) Whether God can or cannot do a thing depends very much on how we interpret that thing.
But you are asking about the omnipotence of God in the face of the free will of man. The answer to that lies in the nature of God; there is one thing that God cannot do. God cannot do anything unfair or unjust or evil. Implicit in this, He cannot take back that which He has given. He gave man the ability to choose, and to choose between good and evil; if man chooses evil, God cannot override that choice without violating His own word, His gift of the freedom to choose; nor can He eliminate the consequences of that choice, as that is what we have chosen. The free will of man does not fly in the face of the omnipotence of God; all it says is that God has chosen to limit Himself and His power by giving man the right to make choices which God will not overrule. It is comparable to the present situation in the United States regarding the decentralization of welfare. The Federal government has decided to permit the states to control how the poor are to be aided. This does not mean that the Federal government is unable to aid the poor, or to decide how to do it. It only means that the Federal government has made promises to the states that it would provide money to them to assist the poor, but would not interfere with the methods of such assistance. Unlike God, the Federal government could change its mind and go back on its promise; but assuming it does not (it would be politically messy), it has intrinsically limited its own power by its own choice. It is something of an opportunity cost: to do one thing is to make another impossible, and although God is able to avoid such quandaries better than man, they still exist. God can do anything; but He chooses to do some things which prevent Him from doing others.
However, I do not see how the free will of man and presence of evil in the world in any way opposes the omniscience of God. It is still entirely possible for God to know everything that ever was or now is. If you accept that the nature of time is not as we perceive it, then His ability to know all that ever will be is simple to accept--and the notable physicist Stephen Hawking, with his question, "Why do we remember the past, but not the future," has expressed his understanding that the future exists as it will be before we reach it. But perhaps it is this which offends your sense of the free will of man: how can God know what I am going to choose?
I often refer to chess as an illustration of life. I've played chess with many who were far better than I (I am not so good), and am aware that there are chess masters and grand masters of great skill and intelligence. When these players face me across the table, they quickly know what I am likely to do next. Each move I make reveals more and more about my strategy, such that it is soon transparent. It is not a problem for them to predict where I will move next. Beyond that, for each move I make, they will move in response, and I will react to their response. Before long, they know exactly how I will react to each of their moves before they have made them, long before I know how I will react. Yet they are just men. For God to know how I will react to all that will happen to me is a simple thing; for Him further to know how everyone around me will choose to act and react is not more difficult. And all of those natural events and accidents which we consider random are really not random--they are merely complex beyond our ability to predict. We use to consider thunderstorms and hurricanes random events, but today we observe and predict their development and course. We are learning to predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, tsunamis, and many other "random" natural phenomena. The problem in these cases is that we cannot collect enough data to make accurate predictions. How could we truly know the degree of stress and friction, slippage and grip, along the entire length of the San Andreas fault? Yet if we knew every bit of data about it, we could determine when and where the next quake would occur, and what its intensity would be. God has all that data; He could know all there is to know about the next earthquake, even if the future is not yet formed. That quake will occur when the pressure exceeds the friction, and its intensity will be based on the degree of stress and distance of movement at that time. Is it so different with auto accidents? Could He not know when the woman at the stop sign would be inattentive, and would pull out into the intersection? Would He not also know that I would be entering the intersection from the cross street at that time? Could he not calculate the velocities and positions of both vehicles with pinpoint accuracy, define the points of impact, and predict the damage to the vehicles and the people? To say that God knows what will happen to me tomorrow, and how I will react to it, and how that reaction will affect others, is a small matter that does not even require that He be able to see the future, no more so than I need to be able to see the future to know that if I sit across the chess table from my friend David, he will beat me. As to the fulfillment of His plan in the earth, if He has so complete an understanding of all things, He need do very little to cause the chain of events He intends. In fact, it has been observed that given His complete knowledge of all that is or might be He could have started the universe at the beginning of all time in such a way that He need never intervene to bring it to where He wanted it to end--much as a pool shark can sink all the balls on the table with a single shot, knowing that if he hits that first ball just right, everything will move to everything else to clear the table.
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian".
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