What if God foreknew human reactions?

Simple foreknowledge is not enough to completely deny free will (although it DOES deny any form of free will that demands that future is not fixed and unchangeable).However if you add in the idea that God created the universe things become more problematic. Given that God decided to create this universe everything that happens in it follows from that choice. Thus in a very real sense God decided all your choices in advance. That doesn't sit well with any idea of free will - and negates any apologtix use of free will as something beyond God's control.s

It is not a qustion of what we demand. Some concepts of free will deny that it is possible if the furture is fixed. These concepts, then, demand that teh future is changeable in the sense that they cannot exist UNLESS the future is not yet determined.How this can possibly suggest that I am confusng my mind with God's is beyond me. It takes a strange sort of mind to produce such a blatant non-sequitur.

No. I reason that the future is only knowable if it is fixed. i.e. foreknowledge s impossible unless there is only one possible future that will inevitably occur.So I then examine the implications of assuming that the future is fixed - which is that some concepts of free will are impossible, and that an omniscient creator necessarily chooses the entire history of the universe - every event within it - at the point of creation.e

The characters in a book DON'T have free will. They have to do what the author decides for them.

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I suppose that we DO have free will to believe or disbelieve this theory....and if the theory is true regardless, then what can we do? Do we have a choice to complain? Deny? Go with the flow?

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Well if God decided to create the Universe where you will believe it then you don't have any other option - you will beleive it because god decided that you would. And if the reasoning is sound then you have to accept that - as I said in my first post - apologetic appeals to free will as something outside God's control are completely negated. For instance you lose a popular response to the Problem of Evil (albeit one with other problems).l

I'm not talking about causation within the universe (i.e. we're talking more about Fatalism than Determinism). The point is that the creation of that particular Universe makes these events - however they are caused - inevitable.Or to put it another way, if you drop a rock on someone's head then gravity may be the cause of the actual injury. But you set up the situation where gravity would inevitably cause that injury and thus the responsiblility is yours.

But God CAN'T see our future choices unless they are fixed and inevitable. And that amounts to determinism or fatalism. If the future is not fixed it is unknowable in principle.If I look away after dropping a rock on someone's head I am still responsible for my action and the entirely forseeable consequences - even if I choose not to watch the inevitable consequences play themselves out.

There's no problem here. We each follow an absolutely fixed path, which was laid out at the moment of creation. There is no contradiction between what you are saying and my point.It is a matter of logical necessity that the future can only be known if it is fixed.

Well I don't know how you'd describe a situation where the entirity of history is decided and fixed at the very start other than fatalism.And since it is God's decision which path history follows and we have no say in that, our part in the working out is to just do what it was decided we would do. To say otherwise is to deny that even God has a real choice.And finally my point is not dependant on any particular view of time. Rather it is based on the fact that a question cannot have a single definite answer and multiple possible answers. Different views of time could assert that the future is or is not knowable but they cannot assert that it is both entirely knowable and even partially unknowable.t

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But allow me to get too unscientific on you and say that even when the future is open, god can know it and still allow it to be open.

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That's not just unscientific - it's self contradictory. It can't be true.

If the future is fixed and inevitable it must be fixed from the very start of time.In the view we are looking at God decides to create a specific universe with full knowledge of everything that will happen. In choosing that universe rather than some other (and an omnipotent God should be capable of creating ANY logically possible universe) God necessarily chooses every event that occurs in that universe.If you have a time machine then you are not placed in the position of God becaue you did not create the universe (I don't see how you can have missed the fact that I continually refer to this point). However your time machine can only work as you describe if the future is fixed.

For the purposes of the argument the start of time is "special" in that all other points in time are in the future.So far as I can tell the whole "our time vs God's time" issue is an irrelevant distraction. Indeed sicne I hae't referred to or used the "God's time" concpet in any way other than assuming that God exists in some sense prior to our universe I don't see how the said confusion even COULD exist.I also don't see what's so complicated by the concept of logically possible universes. Given that this includes anything which could a) reasonably be called a universe and b) does not embody a contradiction there doesn't seem to be any relevant issues other than the fact that an omnipotent GOd would have a vast array of options.

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No, I don't see why you should hold to this. I can think of solving an elliptic stochastic equation across some space. I set the boundary conditions, I see the whole solution, yet I did not create the interior solution.

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A better analogy would be if you were to choose the equation and the conditions, knowing in advance what the solution would be (this is necessary to provide an analogy to omniscience). Having chosen this particular setup you have knowingly dictated the solution (in your version you still dictated the solution, but did not do so in the knowledge of what it would be).

A math problem as such could not solve itself - a math problem is a static description, and the act of finding the solution is dynamic.An algorithmic system (e.g. a computer program) could possibly analyse itself in some respects that might be close to what you describe (e.g. a computer program could treat itself as data).Now my argument is not the free will is removed only that the situation as described makes it impossible that we have the sort of free will tat apologetics requires. The grounds are simple.
Because the future of the Universe must be fixed for omniscience to be possible the entire future is determined by God's decision to create a particular universe. If God is truly omniscient then knowledge of the future is available to Him prior to the creation - thus he decided literally everything that happens. (Also if God is omnipotent it follows that this is the best possible Universe - from God's point of view.)t

If our Universe is eternal than it has no beginning and no creator.The idea of God existing in some sense prior to our iinverse is also necessary to the idea that God created it. For God to create our universe there must have been a state where God existed and the universe did not.By the way you must be a solipsist since you clearly don't beleive that any universes exist. I say that we know that this universe exists and that we can easily imagine variations in it which do not obviously create contradictions.I would add that claiming that I am "confusing" issues when you cannot explain this supposed "confusion" - and where, at best, it relies on unstated ideas about the nature of God's knowledge does not constitute constructive discussion. If you wish to introduce your ideas you could at least have the honesty not to assert that they are fact or that I am confused if I do not assume them h

Let me explain your error. I am NOT assuming any particular theory of time. I don't need to dispute GR or to assume it. Therefore your claim of confusion is based on a wholly false assumption. Moreover since you simply place the priority of G over H in Tg it fulfills my minimum requirement of "prior in some sense"What you should have said is that you are explaining your unspoken assumptions. However they fail to answer the real issues, because they do not provide an adequate reason why God should be unable to know the consequenes of his actions.Firstly if God's timeline works like ours it is fixed and therefore knowable and therefore an omniscient God must know it.Secondly if there are no special points in time the creative act equally creates ALL of them and all configurations the universe has adopted throughout its history - not just an initial configuration. It woulsd seem therefore that from this persepctive the whole history is chosen, again negating your argument.Thirdly, if we assume that God's timeline is different and unknowable AND that God DID simply create the initial configuration, the timeline which will inevitably unfold from that configuration is fixed and therefore knowable prior (in God's timeline) to the actual decision to create that universe. Therefore an omniscient God must know it.Fourthly you are proposing a fallible God who sometimes works through trial and error. This may represent your personal belief but it is hardly part of normal Christianity.One final point. It is hard to see how, when the focus is on time and on human action, you would assume that I was speaking of different physical laws rather than a different history - and especially a different history for humanity. a

I'm afraid that just making assertions isn't going to cut it. It doens't change the central problem. We still make the decisions GOd created us to make. God therefore has the primary responsibility - if God chooses to make a universe where many people will inevitably reject Him then that is His decisions which He is responsible for. Humans act in the way God has chosen them to act and cannot act any differently.