Free will vs Omniscience

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No it does not need to be the same event. God hardened Pharoah's heart and Pharoah hardened his own heart. Same thing.

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Then please explain your reasoning. How does the fact that at one or two points in the story the Pharoah hardened his own heart instead of God hardening it, as in the other cases, show that they are the same thing?

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im not looking at the story right now, but common sense tells me that Pharoah resisted God and thus hardened his own heart.

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What you think the story ought to say and what it does say are two different things. As I pointed out to Faith the story explicitly claims that God said he would harden the Pharaoh’s heart and explicitly says that he did so on most of the occasions.

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God caused it to be hardened in response to Pharoahs free-willed resistance to Gods influence. Does that make any sense in context?

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No. The point is the reason for the Pharaoh’s decisions - God wanted the Pharaoh to refuse to let the Israelites go (because then he had a pretext for sending the next Plague). If the Pharaoh hardens his own heart sufficiently to push the decision the way God wants then there is no need for God to actively intervene.

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Its what usually happens to people...

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God manipulating them into doing bad things so he can punish them ? That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that most Christians would consider normal. It’s not the sort of thing that any rational person considers to be good.

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Nothing to show, we know it because we understand how scripture is to be read.

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In other words you get to rewrite the Bible whenever you want so long as you lit to cover it up. And they don’t even have to be good lies. Just another example of Biblical Inerrancy in action.

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But isn't that a bit how the dogma and mythos was initially presented? Was there not a war in heaven? Did not 1/3 of the angels get cast out, led by Satan? (arguably taught in much of Christian mythos) Granted God created them and thus God knew they would rebel. In essence, this action was the original evil. The evil was in shunning God. We humans cannot fathom the consequences of such an action because we have never experienced that freedom at that level

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That depends on what you mean by initially. The war in heaven appears in Revelation as part of that book’s End Times prophecies.But to go on to your point, where is the freedom in following a course laid down from you from your creation ?

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Hypothetically, imagine that the mythos was true. Imagine that you were being booted out of the club simply for desiring autonomy and independence. Imagine that you were a bit envious that the Creator ran the whole show and could create living things that had a capacity to love Him exclusively...sorta like how our kids supposedly love us more than they do the neighbors. Would you complain if God foreknew that you would become a rebel?

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If the envy and the rebellion were God’s choice more than mine I think I could validly complain about being blamed for it - and God could not justly punish me for it. But that is not solely because of foreknowledge, it’s because of God’s foreknowledge combined with his role as creator. If all of Creation must inevitably follow a course chosen by it’s Creator then the Creator has full responsibility for everything that happens.

First I suggest that you correctly attribute NoNukes words to him, and not to me.And there really isn’t anything in your answer to me.1) If God has absolute knowledge of the future then such knowledge is possible. (Where absolute knowledge means complete and perfectly accurate knowledge)2) If absolute knowledge of the future is possible then the future is fixed. Whatever happens must inevitably happen.3) if God exists and God created everything else then God has complete control over the initial state of everything else.Therefore if God exists and has absolute knowledge of the future the future was chosen by God.

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My hypothetical scenario is that we humans can freely decide on our chosen course of action based on the choices available to us on any given day of our lives.

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If we can freely decide to do what God has decided we are going to do (and only that) then it seems to me that God has a good deal more responsibility than we do for our decisions.If you argue that God isn’t going to accept responsibility and is going to put all the blame on us anyway because nobody can make him do otherwise - then I’ll just point out that you are denying that God is good.

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This smacks of determinism

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It’s actually completely independent of determinism, unless you wish to argue that God’s foreknowledge relies on determinism.

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We can freely choose to do whatever there is available for us to do

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And if God is the omniscient, omnipotent creator of all, God decreed those choices in advance and you cannot do anything else - because God cannot be wrong and God set everything up.

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According to apologetic logic, God allowed an adversary to exist

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Unless you are going to assume limits on God, God chose that an adversary would exist and all that adversary’s actions. Which means that it isn’t God’s adversary, but might be ours.

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I don't think God is blaming humans

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There’s a lot of talk about sin and punishment and the necessity of atonement in the Bible. Which is all a bit of a sham if humans aren’t to blame.

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He knew that part of the reality of our creation and survival would involve free choice and a spiritual struggle. He allowed the struggle because, as far as I can reason, he had to allow the possibility of autonomy (and rebellion) against Him to exist. It had to be a definite choice

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But if our choices are all decided in advance it isn’t really rebellion or autonomy. We’re still puppets on unbreakable strings.

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Nobody said that God was the "victim" of unforeseen circumstances. Do you honestly think that Jesus was Plan B? Jesus was Plan A from the beginning.

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Then the Fall was also part of Plan A from the beginning. Calvinists believe that, but a lot of other Christians insist otherwise,

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To me it makes logical sense that the "Fall" was originally anticipated.

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OK, so the Fall was part of the plan all along. It does make sense but many Christians don’t want to accept that God wanted it and intended it. Even the Bible usually blames Adam and/or Eve.

That seems a bit schizophrenic.You need the lack of restraint to label the evil inclination evil, but if you include it the case for it’s necessity goes.Does God have the evil inclination? If you go with the stronger arguments for it’s necessity then the answer must be yes. But does God have the sex instinct or physical appetites in general, aggressive emotions, and unbridled ambition?Another point of course, is if the evil inclination is only necessary in the world as it is now, why do we have the world as it is? That’s God’s choice, surely. If a better world is possible, why didn’t God make that one?

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God not because they don't believe He exists, but rather because they believe that He is cruel and evil, demanding obedience to his tyrannical project.

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That isn’t me. I’m quite prepared to accept that if there is a God, he isn’t the monster that - for instance - the Calvinists depict. I’m more likely to reject the depiction.

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It was my understanding that though God is aware of these traits, all of them being present in a rebellious nature, God does not "have them" in that God does not use them or need them.

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Yet the Bible depicts God feeling violent emotion. The evil intent is said to be necessary for even building a house. Even if you deny the necessity the first point stands.

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God is simply aware of evil. He allowed that "spirits" possibility in order to provide a fully free-willed decision process to those beings of His creation who did not fully trust Him and wanted to *know* more. Confusing?

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More evasive than anything, you don’t explain which if the differing views of the evil intent you endorse (if any) or answer my earlier points.

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The better world is already made and only awaits those who trust the authority and realize that a better world cannot exist for them through their own autonomy

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In other words we’re down to the evil intent only being necessary because God wanted it to be. Which sabotages that part of the argument quite nicely.

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Could it be that on a personal level God is always fair and relational, considering your own motives and challenging you to question yourself. On a national level or even a global level, however...God can be quite autocratic

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There are all sorts of possibilities but I have no way to know if any are true. So far as I can tell, there is no God and certainly no sign of any attempt at a relationship with me.

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Quite frankly I think that God allows the people--all of them--an opportunity to get to know Him and themselves through prayer and communion.

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That is not very good at all. Let’s have the relationship before to indoctrination.

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If the people individually reject this offer, they will be judged collectively. We will be judged collectively anyway, but the believers will suffer along with the masses yet live to see another day (or even another reality)

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It’s not really an offer. Some people say such things - but there is no way to know if it is true or not. And it looks pretty suspicious to me.

I’d suggest that all-knowing with regard to this universe after creating it is a qualification to all-knowing, and one that would not generally be accepted.Also, we have the question of interventions. If this all-knowing being intervenes in this universe when does it know the situation with regard to it’s decision, when does it know what that decision will be and when does it know the consequences. It can’t be all-knowing even with regard to this universe until it knows all three - for every intervention it will ever make in this universe.

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I would suggest that it would easily be accepted by anyone who wants God's "all-knowing-ness" to be logically possible.

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No, because that is not an issue. There is no logical impossibility in knowing what our decisions would be if God chose to create a particular universe. From a logical perspective it’s not really different from knowing our decisions immediately after creating a particular universe. The differences would come in the details of how things worked, which is more akin to physical possibility.So the issue is really whether it is preferable to assume limitations on God or accept beliefs which make God responsible for our decisions. Calvinists explicitly choose the latter and many more are uncomfortable with the former.

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Such conundrums exist for any imaginary idea around the issues of "knowing the future" or "time-travel."
-what are the limits?
-is any of it really possible?

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But these are specific issues with your scenario. It seems that God cannot be all-knowing with respect to our universe in your scenario until God has finished intervening in our universe (and knows as much). Once you assume that God is unable to fully foresee the consequences of his actions - which is fundamental to your scenario - the limitation that follows is even greater than you suggested.

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However, if we're going to have a thought-exercise around the idea that God could have the power to "see the future" and then ask if this means it takes away our "free choice" (which also has it's own scientific-sense issues...) then the above conclusion is reasonable based within that framework.

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Or you could propose a non-interventionist God who did not create our universe.I’ll also repeat my view that libertarian free will does not merely have scientific problems - it is a logical impossibility.

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I don't care what it's called. I just want to point out that it's logically possible.

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Logical possibility is a really - really - low bar. The issue of diminishing the power attributed to God is a bigger problem.

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So - maybe God is "finished intervening in our universe" at the moment of creation of our universe.
Or maybe God can foresee all the results of his future-intervening, and our free-willed-changing-of-our-decisions-because-of-it all when He creates the universe.

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I don’t think that can work from God’s perspective, unless you go for a God who doesn’t intervene - or at least whose interventions are not in anyway predicated on what humans decide to do. If God doesn’t know our decisions until the universe is created he can’t react to them until he’s created the universe.And if he can know what changes his interventions will produce before making them - including human decisions - then you are getting awfully close to the view your are trying to counter.

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If God can create universes and choose (by momentarily limiting his own future-knowing-power) to allow free-will - why can't He also be capable of doing this in recursive iterations?

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I don’t think allowing free will is the issue, it’s evading responsibility,
But the recursive iterations was my point - God can’t be all knowing with regard to this universe until all the recursive iterations are done and God knows he isn’t going to make any more changes. From God’s perspective that would be after creating our universe.

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But, I can say this:
I don't see how choosing pink lemonade over white lemonade - in a "the decision emanated from my human body/brain, and not by another being controlling me" sort of way would be logically impossible, though.

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And I don’t argue that it isn’t. But if your human body/brain operated deterministically a lot of people would argue that you didn’t have free will, and even adding a random element wouldn’t do either.