I find your position quite odd actually. You accept that neither God's omniscience nor his creatorship is problematic as such in terms of free will, but suddenly a combination of the two eliminates free choice.Boosh wrote:What I read in Goat's post was that because God is omniscient and created you free will is impossible. That's one of the first things he said when I was quoted. My position has always been that God as the omniscient creator contradicts free will. I don't remember ever stating different. Maybe it came out that way at some point but it was never my intent.instantc wrote: Goat originally suggested that there would be a contradiction between free will and God's omniscience, but now you seem to be suggesting that what excludes free will is not God's knowledge but the fact that he created us.
You seem to accept that time travelling doesn't exclude free will. Consequently, the fact that a person knows the outcome of your future choice for certainty doesn't exclude the freedom of that choice. In other words, an omniscient person could coexist with free will.
For clarification, are you saying that if person A created person B, then the choices of person B are not freely made, or is that the case only if person A created person B and had complete knowledge of his future actions?
An omniscient person could coexist with free will. If God is not real then people are not created to follow any unchangeable path. Life is what someone makes of it, not what God planned for them the instant the universe began. You could be omniscient and know what Bob is about to do, but you didn't create him to do it. Whatever choice Bob makes is still his. I think you may have an objection to this line of reasoning, I'll wait and see what you say before expounding on this paragraph.
You suggest that your choices are not yours if everything goes down in accordance with God's plan, but isn't it possible that God planned the future in accordance with your free choices? Consider the time travelling example again. When I come back to present moment knowing what you are going to do the following day, I can plan the whole day in accordance with your choices. Everything will go down as I planned, but they are still your free choices. In that scenario your choices come logically prior to my plan, while my plan precedes your choices in time.
Now, you may object here on grounds that by making you the way you are God determined all your choices for you. But, that's not an argument against free will, as it already presupposes that there is no such thing as free will. If the way you are necessarily determines your future choices, then free will cannot exist in any scenario.
My best guess is that you reject free will for the same logical reasons that I do, but it only becomes apparent to you when you think of scenarios like God creating us, and consequently you make a false connection between the lack of free will and God's knowledge/creatorship.
