Too many folk educated in the classic tradition vehemently spout
and defend the stock position that foreknowledge cannot exist alongside freewill (which is all this thread is about anyway). I used to be one of those people.
Then I realized that pitting foreknowledge and freewill against eachother was unnecessary. Neither one precludes the other; never has and never will. As PD said, we can predict what other people will do, and when those predictions come to pass, we never declare an absence of freewill. Why can God not do the same? Why can a prophet not do the same?
God's foreknowledge breaks down to being nothing more than the foreknowledge of any given humanHe considers current conditions and formulates hypotheses regarding future events which are then tested for accuracy when the future event occurs or should have occurred. In this way, His predictions can never be accurateor inaccurateat the time that they are made. Their accuracy is only determined once the events they are meant to predict come (or don't come) to pass.
Thus, at t
1, God's predictions are neither right nor wrong, and so the future is not bound to happen as God has predicted it, and free will remains.
Jon
Love your enemies!