Free Will

[dialee16]

God knows everything and the outcome is already known to him, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. He knows what choices we will make with our free will. I don't understand how just becuase he knows what choices we will make, doesn't mean we can't actually make choices.

 

[smog]

But the earliest point is at the start of time (for want of a meaningful concept) and God's knowledge would already be in place, since God always has knowledge.

We could assume that our choices "always" existed as well

An omniscient God implies that God sees the universe "all at once" so to speak, and that time is therefore a function of the observer. Hence we are simply like a video player seeing one frame at a time, God just reads the entire tape at once.
Whether this is the case, or your backwards time is, God knows what's happening throughout all of our experiences. Whenever we can be said to have made the decision (even if that is before the time we apply the decision, as you put it), God, before that time, knew we would make it already.

True.

I have just read this article about free will which I encourage everyone reading to read and think about.
Especially the question, "what is free will?" The researchers claim that free will is a combination of randomness and determinism.

Everything can be interpreted to be a combination of randomness and determinism so that is... kinda vague They argue that totally random behavior and totally deterministic behavior both lead to a situation where the person cannot be held responsible for their action. Well, I don't know, but when I mix two zeros I still get a zero.

Furthermore, any combination of randomness and determinism is equivalent to a fully deterministic process holding a bag of pre-processed random numbers.

So in purely technical terms, their assertion leads absolutely nowhere. I figure they mean free willed agents must display a certain amount of apparently random, or chaotic behavior. Obviously, that isn't the only criterion, or I'm claiming the free will of the logistic map.

My interpretation is that they are just taking advantage of the buzzword, or that they have been momentarily taken by it.

If this is correct then if we hooked up something that looked for quantum events (say, radioactive decays) which are (as far as we know) random to a computer and combined it with some logic so we ended up with "part random, part determined" action - would it have free will?
If that is not free will, what is free will, and how do we test whether humans, animals or computers have it?

Free will is a manmade concept. The most accurate definition of free will I can come up with is that an entity has free will if it is a black box which acts in a way that a human being can relate to. In a way, it is disappointingly anthropomorphical, but let's be honest there: what else can you possibly expect from a concept whose main purpose is to make humanity feel good about itself?

I'm afraid free will has to be defined in relation to human attributes. Not because we are special but simply because we made the concept to work that way and that any entity we would naturally claim to have free will would be entities we can relate to. Free will doesn't have a formal definition. It never had and it was never meant to have one. It is based on emotional, psychological premises human beings have about themselves: that our minds are private; that our behavior cannot be predicted; that physical processes as well as any "equationable" process cannot correspond to us; that we can choose who we are. The "problem" of free will isn't as much about the concept as it is about the intuitions we have about ourselves being steamrolled by simple logic. The screaming evidence for this, in my opinion, is how every single discussion of free will fails to properly define the self. It's stupefying. No wonder free will won't fit in any niche if nobody has any idea what kind of thing they're trying to apply it to. Good luck putting that dress on a ghost. To clarify, what I mean is that we, as humans, instinctively attribute our self to a disincarnate entity. We do that without thinking, without realizing, even when we don't agree this is the case. When one says things are out of our control in deterministic settings, the implicit assumption is that "we" do not belong to those deterministic settings. Indeed, if we did, we would control our actions, at least in part! But what are we if we don't? Something disincarnate, evidently, but what? Why? And more importantly, am I the only one to ever ask myself that question?

 

[phsyxx]

So.. the way I see this is, in eternity past God knew man would fall, this was part of his plan, which coincides with what I understand as the Angelic conflict, and he knew he would send his Son, which I understand as Satans defeat in the Angelic Conflict, and salvation for all of mankind, however this is now being acted out in time, God has devised a plan for every single person in the human race, each person has their own perfect plan devised by God made in Eternity past

So, what if God's plan was that "Mr.Fred Bloggs" commits suicide at the age of 28?
That a perfectly devised plan?

And, as you say - God is omnipotent, one of his '10 essences' then it is not possible for this person to do anything other than what God wants, because God is omnipotent.
So, this person WILL commit suicide.

Is that
a)Freedom
and
b) A good God?

 

[FishFace]

God knows everything and the outcome is already known to him, but that doesn't mean we don't have free will. He knows what choices we will make with our free will. I don't understand how just becuase he knows what choices we will make, doesn't mean we can't actually make choices.

Because it means that, when it comes to making the choice, we cannot choose not to do what God knows we will do.

 

[phsyxx]

Quote:
Originally Posted by elman

What caused my choice is the only thing that is relevant in this issue.

Now think it through. God only knows I will chose X if in fact I(not God, but me) will chose X.



But it is your example that is not sound if it has God making a mistake about what I am going to chose.

Ok- three things:
1) You spelt CHOOSE wrong. You used past tense, which was incorrect in the context of your sentence.
2.) Ok, you go ahead and "choose" X. Ha! knew you were going to do that! I even wrote it down on a piece of card. How did I know that you were going to choose X?
What? You want to do the thing again?
Ha! Knew you said you were going to choose X but in actual fact you chose Y, and again I have it written down on a piece of card!
What's that? Again?
Well, why don't you just admit that whatever option you want to choose, alpha through omega, 1 through infinity, that God knows which one it's going to be?

3.)His example IS sound, BECAUSE God is NOT making a mistake.
I would like to say that it is your argument which is not sound, but then I can't say that because knows I'm going to say that, so I freely choose to do what God knows I'm going to not going to do.

See, you're not the only one that can annoy people with laboured word-play.

 

[FishFace]

We could assume that our choices "always" existed as well

Indeed, and God would always have known what they were. In which case our "decisions" were never made, so to speak - they have always been in the state of already being made. Hence we never choose.

Everything can be interpreted to be a combination of randomness and determinism so that is... kinda vague They argue that totally random behavior and totally deterministic behavior both lead to a situation where the person cannot be held responsible for their action. Well, I don't know, but when I mix two zeros I still get a zero.

Furthermore, any combination of randomness and determinism is equivalent to a fully deterministic process holding a bag of pre-processed random numbers.

So in purely technical terms, their assertion leads absolutely nowhere. I figure they mean free willed agents must display a certain amount of apparently random, or chaotic behavior. Obviously, that isn't the only criterion, or I'm claiming the free will of the logistic map.

My interpretation is that they are just taking advantage of the buzzword, or that they have been momentarily taken by it.

My interpretation is that they're taking the only sensible definition there can be, since anything other than random, determined or a combination is not known to exist, and neither of the two ends of the spectrum describe what we think of as free will.

Free will is a manmade concept. The most accurate definition of free will I can come up with is that an entity has free will if it is a black box which acts in a way that a human being can relate to. In a way, it is disappointingly anthropomorphical, but let's be honest there: what else can you possibly expect from a concept whose main purpose is to make humanity feel good about itself?

It may be anthropomorphic, but at least it's meaningful. Whenever someone tries to reduce the definition to something more objective it either seems to become something else, or become meaningless.

I'm afraid free will has to be defined in relation to human attributes. Not because we are special but simply because we made the concept to work that way and that any entity we would naturally claim to have free will would be entities we can relate to. Free will doesn't have a formal definition. It never had and it was never meant to have one. It is based on emotional, psychological premises human beings have about themselves: that our minds are private; that our behavior cannot be predicted; that physical processes as well as any "equationable" process cannot correspond to us; that we can choose who we are. The "problem" of free will isn't as much about the concept as it is about the intuitions we have about ourselves being steamrolled by simple logic. The screaming evidence for this, in my opinion, is how every single discussion of free will fails to properly define the self. It's stupefying. No wonder free will won't fit in any niche if nobody has any idea what kind of thing they're trying to apply it to. Good luck putting that dress on a ghost. To clarify, what I mean is that we, as humans, instinctively attribute our self to a disincarnate entity. We do that without thinking, without realizing, even when we don't agree this is the case. When one says things are out of our control in deterministic settings, the implicit assumption is that "we" do not belong to those deterministic settings. Indeed, if we did, we would control our actions, at least in part! But what are we if we don't? Something disincarnate, evidently, but what? Why? And more importantly, am I the only one to ever ask myself that question? [/quote]

Indeed. Free will seems to be an instinctive, comforting vestige, somewhat similar to religion in that respect. Not a particularly useful concept unless we can decide what does or doesn't have free will.
Any definition seems to upset the people who really want free will to be meaningful (namely, religious folks) because all the acceptable definitions seem to include robots who have been sufficiently well programmed by human beings.

 

[MARK777]

So, what if God's plan was that "Mr.Fred Bloggs" commits suicide at the age of 28?
That a perfectly devised plan?

And, as you say - God is omnipotent, one of his '10 essences' then it is not possible for this person to do anything other than what God wants, because God is omnipotent.
So, this person WILL commit suicide.

Is that
a)Freedom
and
b) A good God?

You missunderstand, I said God has devised a perfect plan for every person in the human race, however our volition and freewill chooses to live in this plan, we can walk in and out at any time.

Why would a perfect God make a person commiting suicide part of his perfect plan, that is a persons will overriding the will of God for there life.

Look at it this way, God knew every decision a person could make in life, when we are born a line begins which marks the start of our life here, when we come to a decision in life the line can break off in 2 or 3 other directions, and from this comes consiquences based on the decision, we can make negative decisions and go one way, or positive and go another, the place where we end up in the end depends on what decisions we make in life.

In Gods perfect plan the line is straight, when we live in this plan we can receive all the things which God has set up for us to receive in time, as this is the plan that God drew up for us in eternity past, this is what I understand as true north, we as beleivers make decisions based on Gods word, when we do we stay locked onto true north.

Gods word is our navigation system to stay in his plan, however we can stray and do stray, and when we do we are outside of this plan, but he sets up ways to get us back in.

 

[phsyxx]

You missunderstand, I said God has devised a perfect plan for every person in the human race, however our volition and freewill chooses to live in this plan, we can walk in and out at any time.

You see, I thought I'd pre-empted this reply, by saying that
"God is OMNIPOTENT"
Now, perhaps we should discuss a few things first.
Firstly, the definition of omnipotence, as known to many is: all-powerful.

Now, God is all-powerful.

Secondly, the statement you make "however our volition and freewill chooses to live in this plan, we can walk in and out at any time." Makes entirely no sense when applied in conjunction with "God is omnipotent"
Which infact, you stated yourself, as one of the '10 essences of God'.

Because - (here's why) - if God is omnipotent, which you said he is, (so he is, let's assume) then he has the power to do anything.
If he has a perfect plan, then you must follow it because he is omnipotent.
If you do not follow it, you are indeed not doing what an omnipotent being doesn't want you to do.

You see the fallacy and the flaw in the above statement?
A finitely powerful being can choose not to do the will of an infinitely powerful being.
NO.

To resolve this we must:
EITHER

State that God is not omnipotent

or

State that whatever you do, you are still following God's almighty plan, because he is omnipotent, and therefore either MAKES us do whatever he wants, or ALLOWS us to do what we want, which is still effectively what he wants - because he allows us to do it, therefore you cannot deny God's will if he is omnipotent whatsoever.

Is my misunderstanding clear now?

 

[MARK777]

You see, I thought I'd pre-empted this reply, by saying that
"God is OMNIPOTENT"
Now, perhaps we should discuss a few things first.
Firstly, the definition of omnipotence, as known to many is: all-powerful.

Now, God is all-powerful.

Secondly, the statement you make "however our volition and freewill chooses to live in this plan, we can walk in and out at any time." Makes entirely no sense when applied in conjunction with "God is omnipotent"
Which infact, you stated yourself, as one of the '10 essences of God'.

Because - (here's why) - if God is omnipotent, which you said he is, (so he is, let's assume) then he has the power to do anything.
If he has a perfect plan, then you must follow it because he is omnipotent.
If you do not follow it, you are indeed not doing what an omnipotent being doesn't want you to do.

You see the fallacy and the flaw in the above statement?
A finitely powerful being can choose not to do the will of an infinitely powerful being.
NO.

To resolve this we must:
EITHER

State that God is not omnipotent

or

State that whatever you do, you are still following God's almighty plan, because he is omnipotent, and therefore either MAKES us do whatever he wants, or ALLOWS us to do what we want, which is still effectively what he wants - because he allows us to do it, therefore you cannot deny God's will if he is omnipotent whatsoever.

Is my misunderstanding clear now?

This goes right back to the essence of God, I think the only way to really get our teeth into this is to first understand why God, according to the bible created mankind.

Gods will for mankind is for us, by the use of our own freewill and volition, come to him, this is the reason God gave mankind freewill, we have the freedom to be for him or against him, we can choose to either love him or hate him, why he did this is beyond the scope of this thread, but according to the bible it states clearly that man has freewill and from the use of this we are either with him or without him, its our choice, this is our freedom to willfully choose.

Now if God has given mankind this ability, yet it states that God is all powerful, he could have made all of us just be of him and in him, but heres the problem, if he did do this we wouldnt be free, because Gods power would override our freedom, and if we have the ability to think freely then enevitably there would be some creatures that would think against God, even tho he is perfect, and want to exercise there own freewill for themselves.

Look at Gods essense and you will see that their are things which God possess' which if worked together would work against each other, if God is 100% rightiousness, then he can only do what is right, and if God is all powerful, yet his rightiousness can only do the right thing, then what is the right thing to do with all power ? use it all of the time on creatures that have freewill, then where is there freedom? if he did use his all powerful nature all of the time then where would his rightiousness be?

And if our freewill is used to choose not to be of God, yet he is all powerful, what is the right thing to do? use his overruling power and will against a creature that wants to do its own thing or leave them be but give them ways to come back to him should they desire.

This is what he did with his Son, he has given us a way to come to him should we desire accoding to our freewill, his justice has been satisfied with his Son and can deal with mankind without compramising his perfect essense, you see because our own freewill walked away from God and became corrupt, he wont take that away from us if we want to live like that its our choice, our freewill, but what greater manifestation of love then God, being perfect in essence, chosing by his own freewill, to save a race that for no apparent reason, seems to hate him, and finding a way to redeam all of the human race and bring us all back to him, and at the same time remaining perfect, then after saving us, because of the work of his Son, he is also free to bless us and work in our lives by entering us into his perfect plan, I really cant see a problem with that.

 

[elman]

Quote:
Originally Posted by elman

What caused my choice is the only thing that is relevant in this issue.

Now think it through. God only knows I will choose X if in fact I(not God, but me) will choose X.
But it is your example that is not sound if it has God making a mistake about what I am going to choose.

Ok- three things:
1) You spelt CHOOSE wrong. You used past tense, which was incorrect in the context of your sentence.
2.) Ok, you go ahead and "choose" X. Ha! knew you were going to do that! I even wrote it down on a piece of card. How did I know that you were going to choose X?
What? You want to do the thing again?
Ha! Knew you said you were going to choose X but in actual fact you chose Y, and again I have it written down on a piece of card!
What's that? Again?
Well, why don't you just admit that whatever option you want to choose, alpha through omega, 1 through infinity, that God knows which one it's going to be?

3.)His example IS sound, BECAUSE God is NOT making a mistake.
I would like to say that it is your argument which is not sound, but then I can't say that because knows I'm going to say that, so I freely choose to do what God knows I'm going to not going to do.

See, you're not the only one that can annoy people with laboured word-play.

You have not responded to what I said, and calling what I said laboured word play is not an adequate response. Try reading what I said and pointing out where I am incorrect.

 

[smog]

Indeed, and God would always have known what they were. In which case our "decisions" were never made, so to speak - they have always been in the state of already being made. Hence we never choose.

I guess not. In practice, it's not clear what the difference is, though.

My interpretation is that they're taking the only sensible definition there can be, since anything other than random, determined or a combination is not known to exist, and neither of the two ends of the spectrum describe what we think of as free will.

But even those two "ends" of the spectrum are interchangeable. Any finite use of randomness can be replaced by a finite tape of random data, which makes everything deterministic. On the other hand, any deterministic process can be summarized by a program acting upon some data and if you take the maximal compression of that information, you end up with what is essentially a random string in process-space. In other words, it's not clear there is actually a spectrum at all: if we imagine the possibility to peek and seek a random tape, random events become deterministic; on the other hand, if we trace back the basics the universe, we will always end up tracing it back to a random tape because randomness is maximal information compression (and all theories about the universe are necessarily shorter than the universe itself, and the shorter the better , so compression is really what we're trying to do when we explain the universe). So everything can be traced back to randomness and everything random can be made deterministic. So much for a spectrum...

It may be anthropomorphic, but at least it's meaningful. Whenever someone tries to reduce the definition to something more objective it either seems to become something else, or become meaningless.

Yup. The usual attempt at something objective goes this way:

1) Attempt at a simple, objective definition.
2) Example of something simple which fits the definition.
3) Embarrassment because it just doesn't feel right that the aforementioned thing has free will.

Like in the article you linked to, there are people who look forward to giving free will to machines, but I think it might be magical thinking of their part. They do not know how to do it and they imagine it is subtle, complex and clever. But what if we could reproduce human behavior with extremely simple algorithms? From the look of things, it seems increasingly likely that human-level AI, if it is ever produced, will have to be trained or evolved, via neural nets, genetic algorithms or whatever their successors will be. Unfortunately, that means we won't understand how they work any more than we know how our brain works...

There are also people who think free will is something biological. Perhaps because biological structures are somehow mysterious?

Indeed. Free will seems to be an instinctive, comforting vestige, somewhat similar to religion in that respect. Not a particularly useful concept unless we can decide what does or doesn't have free will.
Any definition seems to upset the people who really want free will to be meaningful (namely, religious folks) because all the acceptable definitions seem to include robots who have been sufficiently well programmed by human beings.

I find the idea that we somehow have any inherent advantage over machines kinda ridiculous. If there is some quantum aspect to our brains that give us an edge, it will disappear as soon as quantum computing matures. If there is anything else about us that gives us an edge, it's a pretty safe bet to say it will stem from peculiarities of physics we were not aware of before and that we will figure out how to make machines use it.

Anyhow, I think machines will eventually "catch up" to us and that it is unavoidable. I say "catch up" because (despite what the article you linked to said) there is absolutely no reason to give machines "free will" for them to do what we want them to do, much to the contrary. I predict there will be "free willed" machines, but only as an experiment or a proof of concept.

I do wonder what the free will discussions will look like at that point.

 

[elman]

Anyhow, I think machines will eventually "catch up" to us and that it is unavoidable. I say "catch up" because (despite what the article you linked to said) there is absolutely no reason to give machines "free will" for them to do what we want them to do, much to the contrary. I predict there will be "free willed" machines, but only as an experiment or a proof of concept.

I do wonder what the free will discussions will look like at that point.

Perhaps when you have a computer that can love you or hurt you and the choice is the computer's and not its progaming, you will have caught up with humans. Until you do that and I suspect you never will, you have not caught up with humans.

 

[FishFace]

I find the idea that we somehow have any inherent advantage over machines kinda ridiculous. If there is some quantum aspect to our brains that give us an edge, it will disappear as soon as quantum computing matures. If there is anything else about us that gives us an edge, it's a pretty safe bet to say it will stem from peculiarities of physics we were not aware of before and that we will figure out how to make machines use it.

Well, the crazies (j/k) will tell you it's part of the soul, but that's equally undefinable, so we've not got any further.

Anyhow, I think machines will eventually "catch up" to us and that it is unavoidable. I say "catch up" because (despite what the article you linked to said) there is absolutely no reason to give machines "free will" for them to do what we want them to do, much to the contrary. I predict there will be "free willed" machines, but only as an experiment or a proof of concept.

It depends. There perhaps exist certain tasks (such as image recognition) that can only be successfully accomplished with something approximating free will.
However, if free will has a true random element to it, I can't see the actual advantage that brings. Determined machines would be preferable, because if they go wrong, they will always go wrong in a given situation, and can be fixed.

 

[FishFace]

Perhaps when you have a computer that can love you or hurt you and the choice is the computer's and not its progaming, you will have caught up with humans. Until you do that and I suspect you never will, you have not caught up with humans.

If you can define love and how you can tell whether or not a computer has that quality, then fine. Otherwise, your criterion is meaningless and, as a result, useless.

Are you going to respond to my post, by the way, elman?

 

[elman]

If you can define love and how you can tell whether or not a computer has that quality, then fine. Otherwise, your criterion is meaningless and, as a result, useless.

Are you going to respond to my post, by the way, elman?

Love is helping someone in need. See the parable of the good samaritan. Also see the description in Matt 25:31 and following. I can tell a computer responds to its programming and cannot decide to love me as in help me or hurt me as in harm me. Are you unable to tell a computer is not able to make any decision but simply responds to programming? Which post?

 

[smog]

Perhaps when you have a computer that can love you or hurt you and the choice is the computer's and not its progaming, you will have caught up with humans. Until you do that and I suspect you never will, you have not caught up with humans.

I'm not sure what you mean by programming. To me at least, it is very clear that it is impossible for us to manually program an AI of that caliber. That is why we're hard at work at engineering algorithms that automatically create programs that do what we want them to. In a nutshell, we're trying to reproduce natural processes where our manual engineering skills fail utterly to provide sensible results. Is it really "programming" when the complexity of a machine rises to a level where we can't figure out how it works anymore?

Well, the crazies (j/k) will tell you it's part of the soul, but that's equally undefinable, so we've not got any further.

Indeed. If it was definable, we could imagine ripping souls out of people's brains and interfacing them with machines. There's really no escape. You either keep the concept of soul purposely vague or you give it substance. But if you give it substance, all sorts of thought experiments you didn't foresee will pretty much rip apart your naive construction, so you are stuck either admitting that the soul isn't what you thought it was or contriving your construction to the point of ridicule.

It depends. There perhaps exist certain tasks (such as image recognition) that can only be successfully accomplished with something approximating free will.

I'm not sure I see what you mean. You can imagine that a good algorithm to recognize images would train itself by choosing what pictures it wants you to identify, i.e. the pictures it has the most trouble with (if you want to perfect your ability to tell a man from a woman, pictures of women with strong curves or of bearded men won't be very useful - you would rather focus on pictures of thin and effeminate men, women with manly traits, crossdressers, etc. - if you know what you have trouble with and you can choose what pictures you want help with (remember that help is costly!), you'll learn much faster). But is that free will? And is it required?

However, if free will has a true random element to it, I can't see the actual advantage that brings. Determined machines would be preferable, because if they go wrong, they will always go wrong in a given situation, and can be fixed.

Depends. You have to realize that for most of those tasks (such as image recognition), it's pretty much impossible to make a solution by hand. If you have an algorithm to solve any of those tasks, there won't be any source code to play with. The way you'll solve them is that you will give the machine, say, a bunch of images and what they represent and you'll tell it "you have the data, now generalize". There already exist many general-purpose algorithms that can do that kind of thing (though not always very well, of course): neural nets, svms, boltzmann machines, etc. A lot of them use quite a lot of random numbers and there are many reasons why they do. For example, you can explore solutions by jumping to random solutions close to the one you are looking at. Several proofs of convergence rely on the assumption that good random numbers are used. Random numbers are unbiased. Etc. This doesn't mean that the final result will use randomness, but because of the choice of the (usually very incomplete) training examples you give to the machine and the random aspect of training (if there is one), there will be random inaccuracies.

In a nutshell, what I'm saying is that algorithms to solve complex tasks such as general image recognition will never be programmed by hand, that they are not subject to "fixing" in the way you suggest it and that the use of randomness is actually very useful.

Love is helping someone in need. See the parable of the good samaritan. Also see the description in Matt 25:31 and following. I can tell a computer responds to its programming and cannot decide to love me as in help me or hurt me as in harm me. Are you unable to tell a computer is not able to make any decision but simply responds to programming? Which post?

But what is the difference with a human? You can consider that a human being's brain is his "programming". What is the difference then? If there is any part of our brain that is "special" and gives rise to that difference, what would happen if we cut a human brain open, extracted the special part and connected it to a machine?

 

[FishFace]

Love is helping someone in need. See the parable of the good samaritan. Also see the description in Matt 25:31 and following. I can tell a computer responds to its programming and cannot decide to love me as in help me or hurt me as in harm me. Are you unable to tell a computer is not able to make any decision but simply responds to programming? Which post?

So now you've moved the criteria back to a decision. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but you've not answered the question, since you still haven't told us how we can tell whether a computer (or a human) is being loving or not. What you now need to tell us is how you tell whether a human, cat or computer is deciding something, or is just "responding to programming."

As a way of giving us the criteria, you might want to consider what's the most decision-like thing that isn't a decision under this definition you're giving us, and what's the least decision-like thing that is a decision.

 

[phsyxx]

Quote:
Originally Posted by elman

You have not responded to what I said, and calling what I said laboured word play is not an adequate response. Try reading what I said and pointing out where I am incorrect.

I have responded to what you said, allbeit sarcastically.


Ok.....I tried reading, but unfortunately it didn't make any sense.....


Whatever causes you to make choice "X" could be any number of things, but as long as the outcome is known, the action is determined.
SIMPLE.
Stop trying to appeal to the "but I could do this instead", it's a flawed argument as you assume that God's knowledge is dependent on your actions.

Look at your life like a videotape, if that helps.
God sees the video, like he's watched it a hundred times over. He knows when it comes to point "X" in the film where you make choice "X" it will always happen and it always has the same outcome.
Now, as a character, you BELIEVE you can make a different choice, and indeed a CHOICE - independent of anything, but the viewer - GOD, knows you DON'T.

In this sense you have the ILLUSION of choice, and it seems real from the human perspective.
BUT it's illusion, and, seen from the Godly perspective, the illusion is shattered.

 

[phsyxx]

I'm sorry, Mark777, your argument rests on the basis that God gives people free will, and then chooses not to stop them from "going away from God".

Erm....
can I ask, what is the difference between God ordaining something, and making something happen?

Or, what if god DIDN'T want the people that willfully choose to "go away from Him" to do the forementioned?

 

[MARK777]

I'm sorry, Mark777, your argument rests on the basis that God gives people free will, and then chooses not to stop them from "going away from God".

Erm....
can I ask, what is the difference between God ordaining something, and making something happen?

Or, what if god DIDN'T want the people that willfully choose to "go away from Him" to do the forementioned?

Hi, the way I understand it is, God in eternity past ordained a perfect life for all, freewill being the issue the only way a person can live in this plan or life is to first take that step from their own freewill so they can be reconciled with God, once this is done people enter into this plan, and can live in it for as long as they like, this is the pre-determined plan of God.

God on the other hand does have the overulling will and as such, according to his rightiousness, can and will allow certain things to happen in a persons life, which ultimately will bring them to him and offer them salvation, or bring them back to him if they walk away from his plan, or do certain things to stop the human race from self destructing, it is all done for the good of the human race however according to his Rightiousness.