The New Wineskin
As some of you may already know, I enjoy playing devil's advocate when I see arguments from those debating Christians that I feel are lacking. When confronted with the problem of evil, I often present the idea of free will. However, I was given a very strange counter-argument to this rebuttal that I thought was very interesting. Simply put, the person who responded to me stated that free will contradicts the idea of omniscience. Most people would point out that knowing what will come does not mean that that person did not choose freely. However, he rebutted this by saying that, if one is certain something can happened, than that person cannot freely choose the other option, as he is "destined" (if you will) to choose one over the other.
What are you thoughts on this argument?
Do you think he is right? Wrong?
Do you have any rebuttals to this idea?
I've honestly never considered free-will a particularly good argument against the problem of evil. There are countless ways a God could prevent evil without impeaching on free-will. Unless free-will means; freedom form ANY godly intervention, which I don't consider it to.
As for the matter you present; If a god, or anyone for that matter, knows exactly how everything is going to play out, and is correct in that knowledge, then we do not truly have free will, only the illusion of it.
If however, we take omniscience to mean the knowledge of every possible way things
could play out, but not the knowledge of which one
will, then yes, I believe free will could work within that context.
In the case of the latter, omniscience is not a particularly godly trait, as we could, theoretically, build a super-computer to do just that. We could do it ourselves, but as there are infinite possibilities for every situation, we'd have to be immortal and dedicate eternity to writing them all down.
So. as far as I'm concerned, It's either everything we do is part of God's plan OR God gave us free will. Pick one and stick with it.