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:
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.
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 ofSource: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/tachyons-...mniscience
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.
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.
Hail Satan! 
