Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-9801519-20130614044126/@comment-4295646-20130614164216

When it comes to the "free will - determinism - omniscience" conflict, let's remember the considerable efforts made by theists to produce a working theodicy that allows for both predestination and free will. (This also links to the question of why a benevolent God would permit natural and moral evil to exist where it could easily have been prevented.) What is the quality of being "all-knowing"? Is the nature of time - or the nature of God - such that perhaps there are no truths about the future that can be foreknown?

Boethius discussed an interpretation of God that places Him outside standard conceptions of time, something like the Tralfamadorians from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five". Instead of seeing time with distinct past and future moments, as we do, perhaps He sees all of eternity at once. This may solve the problem, as a God whose point of view transcends linear time may have no foreknowledge (since, to Him, every moment is the present moment) and yet be all-knowing. Aristotle was doubtful that most future statements (specifically, contingent statements) could even be true or false. And if foreknowledge consists in knowing the truth value of a statement about the future, that rules out foreknowledge.

The problem with attempting to understand God's motives in "making his followers play jigsaw puzzles all day" - insulting phrasing, even if you meant it not to be - is that clarity has never been a touted feature of His plans. Very few theists claim to have more than a broad sense of His goals and desires for us (in the form of moral guidance) plus a few explicit examples from scripture. So, by claiming that it's unlikely that God would do X, what are you basing this assumption on? Your only basis for an inductive argument is the observed actions and motives of other humans, and God is stated to be unlike humans in many ways. So reading into His actions doesn't mean a whole lot.