Free Will + Omniscience = ?????

[ThomM]

Ok so I'm God and I'm making a person.

I have various choices to make about designing this person, e.g. their DNA, the make up of their soul etc etc.

However I can also see the future so know exactly what this person will say and do for their entire life based on these design paramaters. Of course these life choices are also made as a result of one's environment, but that is also controlled by God ultimately. The same with any other factor.

Then I send them to Hell based on their life choices.

It is all of course nonsense. I've seen the argument around freewill vs omniscience before, but never introducing the design aspect first. (It probably has been done before, most of these arguments seemed to have been done thousands of years before)

Even if you take the argument back to just the big bang, and say God had a choice about how the universe would turn out, the argument still works. After all, Christians always say "look at how the universe was perfectly designed, it must have been done by a God".

Have I made any flaws in this argument? I guess the only one is that God's omnipotence can turn off his omniscience during the design process? Or that God is not omnipotent and/or omniscient? Or that God is just a prick.



There are many of these. Including why design both diseases and an immune system? Scientists all around the world are working on eliminating disease to make the world a better place. This:
1. Is undermining God's fine work in creating disease and misery for humans.
2. Means that scientists are better creatures than God.

Scientists have all but eliminated diseases like smallpox. They're obviously not essential to have, yet God must have put them there. This one doesn't even need any mention of freewill.

Problem - if a god is Omniscient - Past, present and future - it had NO choices about how to make a human - it already knew exactly what it would do - for all time - for everything. It cannot choose anything - everything is already established for all time - and the god is powerless to change anything.

OF course - that means that it has no free will - nor can it offer free will to anyone because nothing can change what it already knows.

And that is one of the contradictions of the claims of gods that the ancient people who made them up did not think through. After all - a god cannot do anything it does not already know it will do. EVERY sentient human has that power - so we possess a power that an all knowing god can never have. And that means that the god cannot be Omnipotent - as well.