(December 15, 2016 at 12:45 pm)Tonus Wrote: When I was a Christian, this is how I had it worked out:
The future is not set in stone, and therefore even God cannot predict it in the way people traditionally think. But God can predict events in the future because he can influence how things will unfold. In other words, he cannot predict which tie I'll wear to work tomorrow but he can say that there will be an earthquake in a specific location because he has the power to cause it to happen. So he can predict the future, yet he does not know the future.
You can easily interpret the Bible to support this idea-- God predicts events and inspires confidence in his promises by making those events happen. We do this all the time-- we make plans and promise to carry them out. If you tell your child that you will pick them up from school at the end of the school day and you show up, you predicted the future! The confidence that God inspires is absolute, because while events might prevent you from following your plans there is nothing that can thwart God (well, aside from chariots of iron, but whatever).
Presto-- we have free will, and God can predict the future. There may be some overlap there, in that God's actions might affect our choices. But it's far more compatible than the idea that we have freedom to make choices but our choices are locked in, allowing God to see what happens before it happens. Where this went off the rails for me was in the case of Judas, whose free will would have to have been tampered with in order to turn him into a traitor for no other reason than to fulfill a prophecy. Was Judas a good man who was warped by God into becoming evil? Was he an evil man who was selected to represent Jesus for a while and preach the good news of the kingdom of God? Was he created and guided for the specific purpose of betraying Jesus? Judas doesn't fit into any of the models for free will without making God seem wicked.
According to Molinism, there are two ways in which God can make things happen: 1) Strong actualization, God brings about some effect directly by his action (direct cause-effect). 2) Weak actualization, where God places someone in a set of circumstances with the knowledge (middle knowledge from the Wiki article a couple of posts ago) that the person would freely decide to bring about the desired effect.
If God weakly actualizing the circumstances to have Judas freely betray Jesus, that is not the same as God causing someone to do evil. While the effect was willed by God, the mechanism (Judas) still had free will. If God knew Judas was not greedy and selfish enough, then someone else would have been put in those circumstances.
