I was reading one of William Lane Craig's peer-reviewed articles and he brings up free will and God's divine foreknowledge. I have been critical of the idea of free will and God's omniscience since eternal knowledge implies an impossibility to contradict knowledge, and therefore no free will (since free will requires the possibility of choosing different routes). 
However, Craig says otherwise, it apparently isn't that God's foreknowledge necessitates an action, but that God knows the outcome of a contingent choice.
Here is what Craig says:

Quote:In our own day, philosophers such as A. N. Prior, Richard Taylor, Steven Cahn, Nelson Pike, and Paul Helm have argued that from the temporal necessity of
1. God foreknew p.
and the logical necessity of
2. If God foreknows p, then p.
it follows, for any future-tense proposition p, that necessarily p. The majority of contemporary philosophers have, however, disputed the cogency of such reasoning. From the fact that God foreknows that I shall do x, it follows, not that I cannot do otherwise, but only that I shall not do otherwise. It remains within my power not to do x, but, given God's foreknowledge, we know that I shall not in fact exercise that power. Were I to do otherwise, then God would have known different future-tense propositions than He in fact knows. As for so-called "temporal necessity," this notion is notoriously difficult, and, if this is a legitimate kind of modality, it is not at all evident that God's foreknowledge of some future event is characterized by such necessity. This does not mean that it is within one's power to change the past. Rather it is to assert the truth of the counterfactuals:
3. If I were to do x, God would have foreknown that I would do x.
and
4. If I were not to do x, God would have foreknown that I would not do x.
From the fact that God foreknows that I shall do x, we may therefore infallibly infer that I shall do x, but it would be fallacious to infer that it is not within my power to refrain from doing x.

  Source: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/tachyons-...mniscience

There is a huge problem with what Craig states here. If person Y chooses action x and God had eternal knowledge of this, then claiming that person Y had the power to not choose action x would mean that person Y has the power to contradict foreknowledge, which is logically impossible to do. Since it is logically impossible to contradict the foreknowledge of future events, it follows that all future events are necessitated by foreknowledge. So, what Craig is saying here is that people (rational agents) have the power to do something logically impossible, which cannot be true by definition. Craig just tries to word it more convincingly by starting from what an agent chooses to do and says that whatever this agent chooses to do is already foreknew and whatever I choose with my power is already known. However, you can't start with what the agent does but with the eternal entity that knows prior to this. If you start from the eternal being with foreknowledge, you see no temporal separation of events and what already happens, which is what every agent does with no possibility of contradiction.

I don't see how omniscient foreknowledge could be consistent with free will.

In what sense is the article peer reviewed? By which I mean how could anyone possibly verify the contents, methodology and conclusions?

I agree with the OP: omniscient god and free will are incompatible.

This all stems from the incoherence of the Christian conception of free will. If you have a concept that can't be explained, practically anything can be made to seem consistent with it. The devil is in the details, which in Christian free will, there are none.

(March 21, 2017 at 4:03 am)Stimbo Wrote: In what sense is the article peer reviewed? By which I mean how could anyone possibly verify the contents, methodology and conclusions?

It was published in The Journal of Philosophy*. I don't quite know how philosophy journals verify conclusions, but I think they would just likely check for fallacies and errors in reasoning of some sort. 

*http://www.jstor.org/stable/2027068?seq=1#

(March 21, 2017 at 12:21 am)TheAtheologian Wrote: I don't see how omniscient foreknowledge could be consistent with free will.

I think that John Calvin would have agreed with you -- in advocating double predestination, Calvin said that God simply chose individuals whom He chose to be with Him in Paradise and while condemning others (including, some infants) to be in eternal Hell, hence, a soul in Hell, even while in everlasting torments, should rejoice at being part of "God's plan".

Complete BS, but it's the logical conclusion of the divine omniscience versus free will debate.  I am just surprised that there was never a Seinfeld episode about this!

(March 21, 2017 at 6:52 pm)Jehanne Wrote:

(March 21, 2017 at 12:21 am)TheAtheologian Wrote: I don't see how omniscient foreknowledge could be consistent with free will.

I think that John Calvin would have agreed with you -- in advocating double predestination, Calvin said that God simply chose individuals whom He chose to be with Him in Paradise and while condemning others (including, some infants) to be in eternal Hell, hence, a soul in Hell, even while in everlasting torments, should rejoice at being part of "God's plan".

Complete BS, but it's the logical conclusion of the divine omniscience versus free will debate.  I am just surprised that there was never a Seinfeld episode about this!

It represents a problem for Christians using free will as a defense for evil and hell.

(March 21, 2017 at 2:55 pm)TheAtheologian Wrote:

(March 21, 2017 at 4:03 am)Stimbo Wrote: In what sense is the article peer reviewed? By which I mean how could anyone possibly verify the contents, methodology and conclusions?

It was published in The Journal of Philosophy*. I don't quite know how philosophy journals verify conclusions, but I think they would just likely check for fallacies and errors in reasoning of some sort. 

*http://www.jstor.org/stable/2027068?seq=1#

So basically not at all. This is the kind of cargo cult bsstardisation of the scientific method that allows the more strident xtians to claim that WLC is a peer-reviewed expert, when the mundane reality is that his peers did little more than check his spelling.

Genuine peer review involves tearing the article apart to find errors in methodology and conclusions, replicating the experiments, procedures and results to destruction, until whatever remains actually supports the claims of the paper.

(March 22, 2017 at 5:47 am)Stimbo Wrote:

(March 21, 2017 at 2:55 pm)TheAtheologian Wrote: It was published in The Journal of Philosophy*. I don't quite know how philosophy journals verify conclusions, but I think they would just likely check for fallacies and errors in reasoning of some sort. 

*http://www.jstor.org/stable/2027068?seq=1#

So basically not at all. This is the kind of cargo cult bsstardisation of the scientific method that allows the more strident xtians to claim that WLC is a peer-reviewed expert, when the mundane reality is that his peers did little more than check his spelling.

Genuine peer review involves tearing the article apart to find errors in methodology and conclusions, replicating the experiments, procedures and results to destruction, until whatever remains actually supports the claims of the paper.

^Exactly this. 'Peer review' is an utterly meaningless concept when it comes to theology. Quite simply, there are no facts to check.

Boru

(March 22, 2017 at 6:30 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: ^Exactly this. 'Peer review' is an utterly meaningless concept when it comes to theology. Quite simply, there are no facts to check.

Boru

If there were, then theology couldn't survive.