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

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You still made the choice. God's foreknowledge didn't effect your decision. You made that choice

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Its not a choice when you only have one option.Consider the perfect oracle who can predict everything with 100% accuracy. This oracle writes down whether you will pick one of two boxes, say A or B.As you step up to the boxes you have a free choice between either A or B, but of course the oracle has correctly predicted this every time, because as we know, the oracle is 100% accurate.Now lets say, before you pick a box, the oracle tells you that you're going to pick box A. You can't pick box B now because if you did, that would mean the oracle was wrong, and the oracle is correct 100% of the time. So you are forced to pick box A.The situation is exactly the same in practice as when you didn't know the prediction. You didn't have a choice at all.Succintly, if the oracle is 100% correct then your path is already mapped out ahead of you. You may feel you're making decisions and choices, but things could not be any other way and there is no way of acting outside that future which is already predetermined. Its not so much that you wouldn't pick box B in my example above, its that its impossible for you to pick box B.PE

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But you still make the choices you make. God doesn't affect that decision, he just knows. This does not have any impact on your ability to choose B over A, just that someone knows what you will choose.
I have nothing more to add to this discussion for the time being. I don't even understand the argument against free will, and I just keep repeating myself.

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I think the problem is (as usual) definitional. I haven't seen a concise definition of free will (maybe someone can provide one?) but my own understanding is along the lines of "the ability to have acted differently", to plagiarise Hume.Obviously, if the oracle were 100%, you'd never have had the ability to have acted differently - it was ordained in the moment the oracle wrote her prediction - so no free will.Your notion of free will seems to me to be a common sense notion of "the ability to choose between options laid out in front of me". In this sense, it seems obvious that humans and animals have free will. But thats not the point. The point is whether we can have free will if something knows everything we're going to do with perfect accuracy.Consider the magician's trick of forcing you to choose a card - did you have free will in that choice? Or did the magician force you to choose that card?If you think you exercised choice and free will in selecting the card (it just so happened that it was always the one the magician wanted you to pick), then whats the difference between this and saying that a rock dropped from a cliff has free will in deciding whether it wants to fall or not (it just so happens to decide to fall every time)?For the 100% oracle, our actions are like that of the rock dropping, completely and utterly predictable(!) - only more so.PEPS Incidentally, this argument can be applied to (an interventionist) God himself - if God is truly ominscient He "knows" what He himself will do in advance. So does God have free will?

Funkster,Having thought about Free Will vs predetermination a little bit more, I now find myself going *wobbly* . I'm not at all sure I can make any qualitative distinction between the illusion of free will and free will itself.As you point out, what difference does it make to the individual concerned if they might have chosen differently?I think some metaphysical surgery may be called for...PE

I'm starting to think that free will is not a concept that is readily defined from "the outside". I've moved from my original position that predetermination denies free will, to thinking that this is at best arguable.If a person thinks they have two choices whereas they are forced to make a particular choice, unbeknownst to them, then someone may say from the outside "Ah! They've got no free will!", while the person making the choice would say "well, I certainly felt as if I had free will".It makes more sense to me that the question of whether or not someone has free will is determined by virtue of the individual concerned and not some sort of metaphysical absolute outside position. Unfortunately one consequence of this is that "free will" becomes almost indistinguishable from "consciousness", that other slippery-to-define customer.And I wouldn't even know where to begin answering the question "Does God have free will?"PE