Free will vs Omniscience

That is indeed my point!However, I see no reason to postulate a creator, whether all-knowing or not, so I certainly wouldn't live my life as if people weren't responsible for their actions!

That link isn't a transcript. Do you have a link to the transcript?

Personally, I have to say I disagree with the "message" of religion as a whole. One can pick and choose part of the message ("Thou shalt not commit murder" is one example) but taken as a whole it does more harm than good.

Thanks, I finally got the browser to show the transcript.Sadly, there's nothing in it that's new to me.

You are recording after the fact an event that happened involving something that you did not construct.The idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful creator deity requires that the universe the deity is created is a clockwork, something where all the atoms, every neutron, proton and electron, every erg of energy, every photon and graviton behaves exactly as the deity set it to behave from the "creation" up to now and on into the future.

What is "free will" then? If I build a cuckoo clock and watch it sound the hour at 1:00 and make a video of that action, have I "recorded" the bird's exercise of its free will?

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A cuckoo clock is a device built that is unable to make it's own decisions - it does exactly what the creator made it do.

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What would you say if I claimed that the cuckoo in the clock, despite being built by its creator who controlled the arrangement of every tiny piece in its construction, still has free will?Of course you would say that, because the creater of the cuckoo controlled every little piece of wood and metal, every wire and cogwheel in the mechanism, the cuckoo had no choice but to crow at the appointed time. The creator could paste a sticker on the bird reading "This bird chooses when to crow!" The creator could even build a recording into the mechanism that recited, "I have decided to crow because it is 1:00!" But you would not say the bird has free will, because the creator designed the mechanism. You would not say, "Even though we predicted the crowing of the bird, it still has free will to do so or not."It is the same with an all-knowing, all-powerful creator of an entire universe. You seem to think of the creator as a farmer raising chickens, with a rooster that may crow whenever it decides to. But that farmer isn't all-knowing or all-powerful.

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If the cuckoo is choosing to crow, from free will, on each and every hour and acts exactly the same as a non-free-willed-normal-cuckoo-clock... it would still have free will. We just might not be able to test/know/verify it.

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Why wouldn't it?

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Are you seriously suggesting that the wood and springs contraption that pops out of the cuckoo clock might have free will?

Interesting! A god of the classical sort, a powerful being but not the decider of destiny.

Interesting idea. But suppose you didn't feel that you had free will. A dog, for example, wouldn't even understand (or so we believe) the concept of free will. But the dog could certainly make choices. Could you have free will even if you didn't think you did?

On the other hand, you might think you have free will when you really didn't. People have all kinds of feelings that do not match reality.

I really couldn't say much as to the different views of free will in the Christian church.In fact, I still wonder what "free will" really means. We are all matter and energy, which follows certain natural laws as to motion, reactions, change etc. So in the same sense that the Moon will circle the Earth in a predictable orbit, it seems that humans have no free choice, but are merely mechanisms that will follow predictable paths, should anyone have the computational power to predict the motions of their atoms. On the other hand, there are some events, such as the decay of an atomic nucleus, that seem entirely random, meaning there is no prediction possible and perhaps, by extension, our own actions are not determined and may not be subject to free will either, but are merely random.And then, on the third hand as it were, there's Chaos theory, which tells us even if our physical bodies are deterministic, that makes no nevermind anyway!

I don't know whether or not we have free will. Some things appear to be true (the Earth looks flat from where we stand on it) but turn out not to be true.

But the earth is either flat or it isn't. Whether or not we know that fact is irrelevant. The same goes for free will. Either we have it or we don't. Whether or not we know that fact changes nothing.

How would one determine if someone or something has free will? If you drop a rock it will fall. It doesn't seem to have a choice, no matter how many times you drop it, it does the same thing. On the other hand, a coin may come up heads or tails when we flip it. There doesn't seem to be any pattern in the sequence of heads and tails if we repeat the experiment. Is the coin choosing what to do? Salmon return to the same spot to spawn. Do they have a choice? A person seems to make a choice, but if we had a supercomputer with enough power and enough data about the chemical composition of that person's brain would we be able to predict what each choice is?