[Roxberry]

Originally Posted by Rust

He knows that will happen before we are even born. That you want to label him as timeless doesn't change this. To us, the beings whose freewill is being questioned, the event is already set in stone before we are even born.

God being timeless is irrelevant so long as it can be said that future events in our timeline are known.

I don't want to get in a debate about this (so this may be my only post in this thread), but there is a pretty good Wikipedia article pointing out the problem of the conclusion that free will and omniscient beings are incompatible.

One criticism of the Argument from Free Will is that in point 4 of the proof it simply assumes that foreknowledge and free will are incompatible. It uses circular logic to "prove" this, by simply stating that "a being that knows its choices in advance has no potential to avoid its choices". Point 4 is therefore saying, in essence, "A being that knows its choices in advance has no free will, and therefore has no free will". By assuming what it is trying to prove, that point undermines the entire argument.

Specifically, point 4 commits the modal fallacy of assuming that because some choice is known to be true, it must be necessarily true (i.e. there is no way it could possibly be false).[11] Logically, the truth value of some proposition can not be used to infer that the same proposition is necessarily true.

Using logical terminology and applying it to AFFW, there is a marked distinction between the statement “It is impossible (for God to know a future action to be true and for that action to not occur)” and the statement “If God knows that a future action is true, then it is impossible for that action to not occur.” While the two statements may seem to say the same thing, they are not logically equivalent. The second sentence is false because it commits the modal fallacy of saying that a certain action is impossible, instead of saying that the two propositions (God knows a future action to be true, and that action does not occur) are jointly impossible. Simply asserting that God knows a future action does not make it impossible for that action not to occur. The confusion comes in mistaking a semantic relation between two events for a causal relation between two events.

With these assumptions more explicitly stated, the proof becomes:

1. Assume that person X has free will (assumption).
2. By the definition of free will, at any point in time, X can choose to do any action A, where A belongs to A(T), the set of all actions that X is physically capable of at time T (definition of free will).
3. At time T, person X will choose to do action A (i.e. a person can not logically choose to do both A and not A) (Law of the Excluded Middle).
4. Assume that an omniscient God exists (assumption).
5. By the definition of omniscience, God knows everything that will happen at any point in time (definition of omniscience).
6. From 3. and 5., God knows that at time T, person X will choose to do action A (logical conclusion).
7. Therefore, person X must do action A at time T.

This claims to prove that at time T, person X is unable to do any action other than A. However, you could also remove steps 4–6, and arrive at the same conclusion. This is called logical determinism, and it suffers from the same modal fallacy as AFFW. If a certain proposition is true, that does not imply that the proposition is logically necessary. Once you remove the invalid assertion, then the argument for logical determinism is shown to be false. Similarly, when that same invalid assertion is removed from AFFW (“by the definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘choice’, if one knows for certain what choice one will make in the future, one will not be able to make the opposite choice”), the proof is shown to be false.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_free_will