Free will vs Omniscience

The only flaw in your hypothetical is that *we* were not around before God nor even in the beginning with God. Here is what gets me. The basic argument, if I have it down correctly in my thinking, is that for God to be all-knowing limits our free will to His foreknowledge, thus rendering our free will moot.But I dont see how. Lets use an example:
JOE: If God *knows* what I will choose at 9 am tomorrow, I do not havee a choice in that I am bound by Gods omniscience.
FRED: How does this limit your choice? After all, you DID choose what the outcome ends up being anyway did you not?
JOE: Yes, but how could I choose any other way?
FRED: But the point is that it is irrelevant what God knows. You still made your choice.

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Is there?
I don't understand where the contradiction is.

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I did explain it.

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The point of this idea is for God to be "all knowing" (at a minimum - within our universe) and also have us retain free-will (by God 'not-knowing' the outcome of our decisions while going through the iterations of our universe depending on how many interventions He's going to make.)

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It seems to me that you proposed a scenario that avoided God knowing everything about our universe before it was created. When I pointed out that it implied that God wouldn’t know everything about our universe until some time (in God’s perspective) after it was created you proposed this new scenario - which has God knowing everything about our universe before it was created.Free will is not really an issue I argue about in this context.

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This idea that the thought experiment "isn't real" is yours and has no grounds in the idea.

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The idea that it isn’t real is inherent in the fact that it is a thought experiment rather than the creation of a universe.

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Why can't it "be real?" That is, why can't it be an exact match of what we actually would freely choose when materially created?

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I’m not using your rather idiosyncratic idea of real. I am using the fact that it is a thought experiment and the universe is only being simulated, not actually existing.If you want it to be real you have to have an actual universe instead of a thought experiment.(I will note as a side point that libertarian free will would make the thought experiment useless since people in our universe might then decide differently than the versions of them in the thought experiment. While that doesn’t affect my views there are plenty of believers who insist on libertarian free will).

At 7, God thought up the universe he was going to create at 9am.
At 7, God did not know which path would be chosen.
At 7:01, after thinking up the universe and allowing all free-willed beings within the universe to make their free-willed choices within it - God is able to review those choices "in the future of that universe" and know the answer to your question while that being still has free choice. No. The universe the god has produced is a clockwork that will perform exactly as all the free-willed decisions have been decided by the free-willed inhabitants.

Yes - but "universe being created" no longer matters in respect to free will if we move the "universe's free-willed decisions being created" to another point in God's time.Why would it?This seems to be what you're missing, and it's the point that removes the contradiction you say is there. It isn't?
Then perhaps you are talking about "a contradiction" to something that is irrelevant to the point I'm making?
Because the point I'm making is that God can create a universe, while intervening within that universe, while also allowing free will to exist within that universe.
Which inherently revolves around "arguing about free will." If the thought experiment includes the real free will decisions as decided by the real free willed inhabitants... and it's just the physical parts of the universe that aren't real yet... this, again, removes the contradiction.How could this happen?
I have no idea - but, logically, it could happen.
Let's say God's powerful enough to make it happen.Poof.Magic is fun!Of course, I'm not claiming that any of this is actually possible (I don't think it's even actually possible for God to exist... let alone have any "powers" at all...)So, as long as we're making up a God, and making up imaginary powers for Him (like "creating universes at all") - I'll just give Him one more imaginary power:
-the power to create the real free will decisions of inhabitants within a soon-to-be-real-universe within a thought-experiment universe before he actually creates the real physical universe. I understand.The point, and my question, is: Why are you insisting on this?
Why can't an imaginary God, that already has the imaginary-and-impossible-to-explain power of "creating universes" also have the imaginary-and-impossible-to-explain power of "creating a thought experiment universe that contains all real free will decisions of a soon-to-be-created physically real universe?"It's like you accept that Wile E Coyote can fall off a 1000 ft cliff and survive... but you don't want to accept that he can have dynamite explode in his face and survive.Why not? It's all made up. Nope.If you're going to insist on this - why not insist that it's all off because God isn't real in the first place?
If you're going to accept the imaginary concept of God being real and see where that leads us... then why not also accept this power-concept of God being real and see where that leads us as well?You're creating an imaginary barrier just because it's one you're not familiar with. That's the "magic" of this power of God's... the thought-experiment free will decisions ARE the "real free will decisions of the people as created in the physical universe" therefore, it's impossible for them to be different. The "real physical universe" is just a physical playing out of the people's "real free willed decisions."

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Yes - but "universe being created" no longer matters in respect to free will if we move the "universe's free-willed decisions being created" to another point in God's time.

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Why would it?

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Because God chooses to create a universe where those decisions will inevitably be made. How God happens to know doesn’t matter. God made the choice of how the actual universe would go, and bears responsibility for that decision.

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It isn't?

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Nope. Haven’t you noticed my focus on God’s responsibility?

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Then perhaps you are talking about "a contradiction" to something that is irrelevant to the point I'm making?

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The contradiction was your assertion that God would not know our decisions before we made them - despite knowing them before creating the universe. If God knows our decisions before arranging our actual existence then obviously he knows them before we make them.

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The idea that it isn’t real is inherent in the fact that it is a thought experiment rather than the creation of a universe.
If the thought experiment includes the real free will decisions as decided by the real free willed inhabitants... and it's just the physical parts of the universe that aren't real yet... this, again, removes the contradiction.

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Well, no, it doesn’t. We can’t make our decisions before we exist - the imagined entities of the thought experiment are not our actual selves (And even if you assume that identity, what would be the point of us existing again in this universe replaying the same decisions all over again?)

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Nope

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The point, and my question, is: Why are you insisting on this?

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Yes. The whole point of using a thought experiment relies on that distinction. So you are insisting on it.

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Why can't an imaginary God, that already has the imaginary-and-impossible-to-explain power of "creating universes" also have the imaginary-and-impossible-to-explain power of "creating a thought experiment universe that contains all real free will decisions of a soon-to-be-created physically real universe?"

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That is not what I am objecting to at all. I am insisting that the thought experiment universe is not the actual universe (which is part of your idea). The imagined people in it are not actual people. Therefore God knows the decisions of the actual people in the actual universe before the actual people in the actual universe make them.

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That's the "magic" of this power of God's... the thought-experiment free will decisions ARE the "real free will decisions of the people as created in the physical universe" therefore, it's impossible for them to be different. The "real physical universe" is just a physical playing out of the people's "real free willed decisions."

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How is that possible if the decision is inherently unpredictable?

But a "choice" in which one of the two options is impossible is not a choice, is it?You remind me of a card trick that uses a "force". The magician fools the subject into thinking they have the pick of any card from a deck, but, in reality, they end up with what the magician has already written on a sheet of paper tucked in a locked box that they gave an innocent member of the audience at the beginning of the performance.Just because the subject thinks there is a choice, doesn't mean there is, any more than the murderer in a paperback mystery has a choice about whether or not to commit the crime, however much they may say they agonize over the decision to do so.

That sounds like an argument that a hypothetical Satan would have used to convince God to let him have his own reality. What you are basically saying is that you want the right to make a choice that God cannot foreknow. Agree?

I see myself there, though I'm not mad at the Father. I do get a bit miffed at shoplifters that steal and feel that the need justifies the end. Why cant they play by the rules? I rebuke them in the name of Jesus if I catch them leaving with stolen items. I cant do anything to stop them but I can and will make their demons uncomfortable.

Why do you bring that up in a thread where it's completely irrelevant?Answer my post that you quoted:

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... notice that the obedient son is the one who is angry at his father, who thinks his father has handled the situation wrong, who thinks his brother should not be rewarded. Does he remind you of anybody?

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You're disagreeing with God's unconditional love.

Not at all. Personally I think that every harmful and bad habit that we have is inspired by the "other" spirit. You can laugh all you want at the existence of demons, but whether they are real or whether they are independent attitudes of rebellion, they will flee in the presence of Gods unconditional love.The reason I argue with you about this is because you seem to think we can keep "them" and that God will accept us and them back home. But it is only we who end up back home.

That's it! That's the question we have to consider, the interaction of free choice and foreknowledge. Traditional religion has treated the deity and the worshippers as parent and child. The parent sends the child out to make their way in the world, make their own choices. The parent, being wise, knows what choices the child will make but does not interfere.But in that analogy, a parent cannot be a perfect parent (in the sense of having perfect knowledge). We have to allow for the possibility that the parent might be wrong, otherwise we don't have a parent/child relationship in any meaningful sense: the child is more of an android programmed by an inventor than an autonomous being.But this results in a contradiction if you assume the deity has too much knowledge. For the ancient polytheistic deities this wasn't a problem: the gods on Olympus were merely powerful beings inhabiting a universe along with humans. There were oracles that made predictions, but there was no sense that those oracles created the human beings that were going to do what was predicted.But if a deity creates the whole universe (which, it seems, Zeus and the other Olympians didn't) and knows every detail of someone's life long before they are even born, how is that situation different from that of the inventor and the android?

But "clockwork" and "free will" are a perfect example of opposites.

If God's love is unconditional, there can not BE an "other" spirit. The prodigal son's father didn't put any limits on his son's return. There was nothing "other" that would have changed his mind. That's what the story says.

I see your point, thought I understand it by attempting to understand the Godhead in Trinitarian Monotheism. Ellis Potter got me thinking more about the Trinity when I read his book, Three Theories Of Everything/
jar teaches that the Bible tells us that God was portrayed as imperfect in the sense that early humans often corrected Him in scripture. Jesus too was portrayed as fallible in that He let His human traits out rarely but scriptural(ly).The reason that I dont agree with this basic premise is because i disagree that the Bible was human derived. I disagree that the whole story was/is mythos and human attempts at understanding ourselves, God, and the world we live in.I see the point, however. I would believe that way had I not met God and become aware of his reality.God has eternally existed. He imagined/created our reality long before we were around (through evolution or creation) and able to describe Him. Stop and think.
1) We still choose (in time) our decisions. Obviously there are some things we do not choose...they just happen to us. What I said before, however, is that if my belief paradigm is true in that there is a Creator of all seen and unseen, the question is if it is even possible to relate (commune) with such a Presence. I believe that there is a possibility in Jesus Christ. The all-consuming power that created the universe is not some Hawking math/calculus problem...it is God.Many questions follow after my line of thought. Lets address yours.I can see God being the inventor/Creator. I do not see myself as an android. Explain why I would be?

Some would consider it fair in that God would let us keep our free will and still be called sons and daughters. This gets into the idea that God (being the fair One that He is) would save everybody rather than picking and choosing. Right?I believe that God offers to save everybody but places the onus on them to accept or reject the Communion. I agree with you that His love is unconditional. He loves all people...believers, Muslims, Spaghetti Monstertarians, Atheists, and Canuckistanian Evidentialists.You claim that "the devil" or Satan is a reflection of our own inner urges. The battle is within ourselves. We become the decisions that we make. While i agree with that to an extent, I maintain that there is such a thing as a regenerated soul and a changed nature. I believe that there is a spiritual conflict. Yin and Yang co-exist yet dont get along.