FREE WILL....... or is it.

Hi all,I may be in way over my head, but here goes anything....If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he knows how any particular being he allows to be born will turn out. With this foreknowledge, the fact that he allowed a being to be born that will turn out to be a murderer, a moral person, an athiest, a Christian, etc, HAS to mean that there was no choice on the part of the created being.Taking an example like Shiloh's 132lb son that wanted to be an offensive tackle...the father in this case does not have infallible foreknowledge...he is using knowledge of the game dynamics etc, to make a very good assumption that his son will not be able to play this position (or if allowed will get hurt playing it).Let's twist this around a bit....

• say a father IS omniscient and omnipotent
• say he knows that if his wife gets pregnant the child will grow up to be a "football player"
• say he decrees that all football players are damned and go to hell and all non-players will be saved and go to heaven

Does the son have any choice (free will) in his damnation or salvation (or his football career) given that the father knows what will happen if he allows the child to be conceived and born?Does the father have any right to judge the son's football career given that "HE" stacked the deck against the son?It seems to me that omniscience and omnipotence in a creator cannot exist along side free will in the created.This also seems to beg the question of omnibenevolence. It seems to me that an omniscient/potent god allows beings to exist for the sole purpose of damnation.Someone please tell me if my simple logic is off.------------------
Asgara"An unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates via Plato

Thanks John,nice to get some confirmation that my brain DOES still work at times ------------------
Asgara"An unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates via Plato

Hi Peter,I agree with you on free will. I too, see it as more of a constrained choice. Constrained by our heredity and environment.My argument was in regards to the christian concept of free will and an omniscient, omnipotent, infallible creator. With mankind's admitedly non-omniscience, of course knowing how something will turn out does not make it pre-determined. BUT, if you throw in a creator with all the atributes claimed of the god of the bible, free will cannot exist.Yes, the computer analogy is lousy , but I'm going to continue it anyway. Say you write a program that by your conditions will always pick choice A out of several options. Say you know that the other options are moot because the way the program is written A is the only outcome. If you run the program and A is the result, you can't sit back and say that there were several options and A was chosen by the computer, it was pre-determined, by you, that A was the ONLY outcome.My argument was that omniscience in a creator and free will in the created are mutually exclusive.------------------
Asgara"An unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates via Plato