This thread made me recall this old favorite:
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Hi @AlanFox ,
But then how do you resolve God’s omniscience with free will?
Short answer: seeing the future doesn’t mean determining it. If God is timeless, then He can see what we have done, are doing, or are going to do.
Hi @Rumraket ,
Loved the cartoon. It made my day. Cheers.
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If there’s going to be a longer answer I’ll hang on for it. But there’s a flaw in the short answer. Timelessness eliminates tense. There can no longer be a future or there can no longer be choice. Or both. Or I’m wrong, which has happened.
ETA @vjtorley
ETA2 seven hours in moderation? I know there’s a time difference but come on!
ETA3 8hrs
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There is a possible scenario to explain this from a human perspective.
Imagine characters in a game simulation you designed with free will to create and contribute to the game being played out. The game played is part of what we experience but our current consciousness may be just experiencing an historical replay of all the decisions we made in the past.
We’re ants on the sidewalk, Bill.
Conscious ants, Alan. 
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As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods?
It’s been a heck of a busy week for me, so I apologize for the long delay. Thank you for the discussion! I think I have a much better idea and a lot more appreciation for where you’re coming from. Oh, also, I forgot to congratulate you on your latest addition to your family!
Hi, Vincent. The only Boethian stuff I’ve been familiar with up til now has been from here. From what I understand of your explanation of it, the temporal part of God’s experience makes much more sense with regard to the free will aspect of things. I didn’t pose the God part of the hypothetical as a way to talk about God’s relationship to time, though, but as an attempt to bypass as much antecedent rejecting as possible. That obviously didn’t work. The purpose of that question was to find out which situation someone valued most.
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Hi Alan. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I usually get home around 10 or 11 p.m., and I rarely get more than five or six hours’ sleep a night. To answer your question: I see no contradiction between asserting that the future is real from a human perspective (as we have to make life-changing decisions in real time) but that from a Divine perspective, it is possible to view past, present and future together. Putting it in philosophical jargon: an A-theory of time is correct for creatures, but a B-theory of time is right for God. Even from a Divine perspective, however, the future is logically (and ontologically) subsequent to the past and present (but not temporally subsequent, of course).
If you want to read more on the Boethian solution to the problem of Divine foreknowledge, you might like to have a look at this online essay I wrote here, back in 2009.
If you don’t like the Boethian solution, another possibility is that God knows our future choices simply because it is His nature to be able to see the past, present and future.
Like the Boethian position, this position makes God’s knowledge of our choices dependent on those choices occurring. However, unlike the Boethian position, this position is not tied to any particular account of God’s timelessness. One could, if one wished, say that God is four-dimensional instead of atemporal. That is the position taken by Robert P. Taylor, in his paper, Is human free will compatible with divine omniscience?. Or one could suppose that God is omnitemporal, just as he is omnipresent: he is at all points in space and all points in time, simultaneously. One could then deny the necessity of the past and present as well as the future, and argue that it is simply God’s nature to know past, present and future events alike, and leave it at that. This is what David Misialowski does in his article, Theological Fatalism Part 1, Part 2. What makes these articles especially is that they are written by a self-described “agnostic atheist”. Even though he is a skeptic, Misialowki believes he can show that “no theist need fear the argument, heard so often from atheists intent on discrediting religious belief, that an omniscient God cancels human free will and moral responsibility.”
I hope that helps. Apologies for my late reply. Cheers.
Hi Vincent. No worries. I know what a busy life you lead. Plenty to chew on. I only hope developments in Ukraine don’t impinge on our consideration of the long-term.
ETA I’ll follow your links and see where that takes me.
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