God cannot be all-knowing if there is free will?

Question

If God knew the future, then He must have knew what each individual would do.

Say that He knew that a man would murder, as accordance to free will, so He knew that the man would murder others in the future (and does not even try to stop, so much more all-righteous). So he is all-knowing and can see the future.

But if the man suddenly changes his mind (maybe it's not worth the effort, maybe he's afraid of getting caught while almost killing someone), then the future changes, and God's knowledge will change. But, being all-knowing, He shouldn't have need to change his knowledge, His knowledge is perfect.

So, what do you think? God cannot be all-Knowing If there is Free Will. Do you agree? Please state why. Do you disagree? Please state why...

Answer 1

In this case there is a solution: He can see the future but does not necessarily control all aspects of it.  It's like if you see a rerun on TV.  You know what's going to happen, but you're not making the characters act against their will.

And yes we can change our minds, but in the end, we travel down one road and not the other.  So there is only one future to know.

The real paradox is how Christians can attribute some of their own actions to God and not themselves.  For example, their steps toward salvation.  Were they not acting on free will even then?

Answer 2

At the quantum level, we can know a particle's position, or its velocity.  We cannot know both.  Seems like the very nature of the universe is keyed up for freewill.  Perhaps God doesn't know THE futures, but from each juncture, he knows all possible futures.  There's the one where the murder occurs, which through a long chain of events ends up saving more people in the long run (The murdered woman was carrier of a mutated virus that would have decimated the population of the planet.), then there is the future where the murder doesn't occurr, and billions die.  Then there's an infinite number of various scenerios inbetween.  If he knows all, he knows all possibilites, but by eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we've taken on responsibility for our own action, and we are allowed to choose, which keeps the possible number of outcomes of the human interactions as an ever growing infinitude.

Eek, it's getting late.  I'm going to take a pill, so that of the infinitude of possible outcomes of my life will be reduced into the one future where I get a good night's sleep before facing the students once again on the first day of school.

Answer 3

God knows everything...past and future. Its just our mind that tells us he couldnt know. If you fake like your going right but you go left, he will have already known that.

Its the simpleness of our minds that keep us from thinking outside the box....in those words if you know what I mean

Answer 4

Exactly.  Their god, by it's own words, sets them all up for failure.

Answer 5

ahh! logic!  keep it away! keep it away!

Answer 6

I agree.  And also if God knows beforehand that someone is going to die in sin from the time they're born then why would God even bother to deal with that person to get them saved.  Would seem like a waste of time and effort to me.

Answer 7

This is one of the great paradoxes in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim belief system.

The idea is that God is 'eternal', meaning not just that he lasts forever, but that he is not stuck in time as we are.  We have to live one minute at a time and then go on to the next minute.  But to God, all times are the same time. He can see your whole life in one view, or for that matter the whole development of the human race.

I'm not sure I believe this, or even that I understand it, but that's the idea.

Of course that means that God knows what you will decide before you decide it.  In fact he knows it before you are born.  Some great Christian thinkers took the logical extension of this to guess that even before he created the world, God knew who would be saved and who not.  That's the Doctrine of Predestination.

It seems pretty clear to me that God KNEW Adam and Eve would eat that fruit, that he designed them deliberately to have both the curiosity and the adventurous, rebellious nature.  He wanted Man to be curious, to observe and experiment to learn about the world around him, and to make his own decisions about Good and Evil, so he put the temptation in their path, the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  It was like leaving a 4 year old alone in a room with a wedding cake.  He KNEW what would happen.

And that is why Adam and Eve ate the fruit.  And that is why Sarah Palin's daughter is pregnant.

Answer 8

God has no equal , he is all knowing what ever the condition.

Answer 9

see one cancels the other one out

if god is all knowing then what is the purpose of living

if god is not all knowing then he is not the ultimate supreme being maybe there are more  

Answer 10

God knows the future of what the free will creatures choose. Free will does not stop becoming free because God knows what will happen. For example, I know that my child will choose to eat chocolate cake over a bowl full of stinking dead mice. If I were to set them both before my child, it is safe to say she will not eat the dead mice.  Knowing this is not taking away the freedom of my child since she is freely choosing one over the other.  Likewise, for God to know what a person will choose does not mean that the person has no freedom to make the choice. It simply means that God knows what the person will choose. This is necessarily so since God knows all things (1 Joh 3:20).  

     Furthermore, if God knows all things and knows what we are going to choose, then by definition, we are still making the choice; after all, the argument says that God knows what "we are going to choose."  If we are going to choose" something, then we really are making the choice -- otherwise it wouldn't be logical to assert that God knows what we are going to choose.  Choice implies the ability to decide between different options.  Again, by definition if God is knowing what we are going to choose, then He knows what we are going to choose between options...otherwise we are not choosing anything and the statement is illogical.

You are still making a choice....according to what YOU want!

Answer 11

I disagree. God's knowledge is not changing. He always knows what is  to be held at last. wanted to murder someone is only a feeling generated inside a person's mind. murder will take place or not its the future. it is decided. and it may be stopped even if he wont change his plans.  

Answer 12

You assume God knows the future, but I think you are misguided.  You create your own future and God isthere withyou when you do.  So there is nothing written in stone.  Yet God, knows the ultimate outcome, which simply is, we all return back to The One.  How you get to that final endpoint is of no ultimate concern.  The future as it develops has not yet been lived and does not really exist as the future.

So you see, your entire logic is meaningless, your supposition or argument, is meaningless.  

And, free will has nothing to do with it.

Answer 13

Yes, God is all-knowing and free-will exists, for one reason that God has free-will and is all-knowing and so satisfies both with his own existence. For separate beings of free-will, God's knowledge of their ultimate choice would by definition mandate the existence of their ability to choose at some point. Thus his knowledge would be the result of what they would choose, instead of their choice being the result of his knowledge.

Answer 14

A man changing his mind has no affect on God's knowledge ..

And how boring it would be here on answers if we all agreed ~

Answer 15

i think he is all knowing but he let's events turn out how they do because it was what was  suppposed to happen. if u believe in god then i think u believe he has a plan for everything and it is all just falling into place.