Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?

[henryp]

Let's say someone offers my kid a choice between Cake or Baked beans.  I know with as close to 100% certainty as possible, she's going to choose the Cake.  My knowledge of her future choice in cake in no way affects her freedom to choose.

So, hypothetically, if I have an omnipotent level of knowledge about her instead,  I'd likely know every choice she were about to make.  Again, my knowledge of her future choices wouldn't have anything to do with her choosing.  Her free will would remain perfectly in tact.

Your ability to predict the future choices of your daughter is unlike God's omniscience in important ways, but let's run with it.  In order to have true libertarian free will, the conditions prior to your making a choice cannot 100% determine the choice you will make.  If they do, then you don't have libertarian free will.  She had no possibility of "having done otherwise" because her response was completely determined.  So, no, her free will does not remain intact.  If you actually know which choice she will make in more than a probabilistic way, then there is no possibility for her to do otherwise than you predict.  She literally has no choice.

 I don't think free will exists with or without God, so it's a tough conversation for me to have.  

However, playing devil's advocate, I think most people religious and non, seem to think there is some special sauce that comes from the individual that is being injected into the decision making.  And that that special sauce is what makes the person an individual vs. just a flesh robot.

So it's not the conditions alone that determine your behavior, it's the conditions plus the special free will sauce.  My understanding someone's free will sauce doesn't change that that part of the decision is their's rather than just circumstances.  Because theoretically, the free will sauce is ... I don't know, some mystical something or other that they can control that comes from a magical place in their spirit, or whatever. .  

It's BS, but the BS, I think, is in believing in the free will sauce.  I guess we could argue over the nature of the free will sauce, and whether or not my knowing how someone's free will sauce works affects the free will'ness of the free will sauce, but honestly, it's a make believe idea.  It's like arguing over how fast a unicorn can fly.  

They've already got an omnipotent all powerful God existing in some other reality.  So a precedent for such a thing doesn't seem outlandish.  Not sure what the non-religious have come up with for an explanation.