There’s a world of difference between making predictions which may fail, and having unlimited knowledge of everything, and that can’t be dismissed with ad hominem, especially such wildly wrong ad hominem. Why on earth do you think I’m a fatalist?
You are a fatalist with regard to the omniscience of God. Your position boils down to: If God is omniscient then free will is impossible.
Your way out of fatalism is to deny that God is omniscient.
Your statement "it was NOT God’s knowledge that determined the outcome, it was the outcome that was predetermined by the presumed absence of free will " is clearly wrong since any presumption we make now cannot possibly predetermine the outcome.
Your argument, basically, is that omniscience and human free will are logically incompatible. You haven’t shown why that is the case, however.
One argument you tried to use simply failed by affirming the consequent:
- If man wills, then God knows.
- God knows.
Therefore man wills.
You tried to side step the fallacy by claiming that if God knows that X will occur, X must occur, which is to claim, trivially, that if X actually does occur, then God would know it.
This does not demonstrate that God’s knowledge is incompatible with the freely determined choices of agents.
It is logically possible that God could know with certainty, from a viewpoint in eternity, all the free choices of human agents without that knowledge having any causal influence.
In other words, God, as omniscient and eternal, could know the freely made choices from eternity and those choices “could not have been otherwise” BECAUSE the free agent finally made each choice, not BECAUSE God knows the choice. The determining feature of the choice was NOT God’s knowledge, but the will of the agent, even though God knows the choice from an eternal viewpoint. The reason it “could not have been otherwise” is because the agent chose it to be so, NOT because God knows it to be so.
There is nothing that precludes that possibility.
You are trying to equate the finality of the choice made by the human agent with the knowledge of God, but that is not so. The choice was “final” because the agent made the choice, not because God knows it.
I gave the analogy of the reverse engineered machine where the certain “knowledge” of the engineer with regard to what the machine will do is not the cause of the machine’s action. Even if the engineer had perfect knowledge, that knowledge would not “determine” in any causal way what the machine will do.
If the “omniscient” knowledge of the engineer has NO causal influence even in the case of a “causally determined” entity such as the machine, why would omniscience create causal effects in the case of an autonomous agent with free will? I see no reason to think it would.
It seems you missed the point of the scenario, which is that an omniscient god knows they disobey and it cannot be otherwise. The god cannot even avoid creating them since it cannot be otherwise. Omniscience robs the god of free will.
I think you are missing the point. When you say it “cannot be otherwise” you are not adequately accounting for WHY “it cannot be otherwise.” You are insisting it “cannot be otherwise” because “an omniscient god knows,” but that is not the only recourse. It might be that it “cannot be otherwise” because the free agent made the choice and that choice is what finalized it as the one that “cannot be otherwise” that the omniscient, eternal God knows.
You are misallocating the “finality” of the choice to God’s knowledge instead of to the free agent because the two seem to occur simultaneously.
Your case is bolstered slightly by an appeal to “foreknowledge,” which places God “in time” and not eternity. However, even then, as shown by the reverse engineer example, fore knowing what will happen does not causally influence what will happen. The actions of the machine are simply not affected by the knowledge of the reverse engineer even if that engineer has “omniscient” knowledge regarding what the machine will do. Knowledge is causally inert and does not bring about the actions of the machine.
