If God is all knowing and knows our future, then how is that free will ?

Question

your answers and opinions would be nice Thank you..

Answer 1

He knew your heart and knew how you would choose even though you have free will. Sort of like a parent knows their own kid well enough to know what they will do before they get the chance.
Like a kid being caught at the cookie jar with the crumbs all over their face.

Answer 2

Simple answers.

God knows everything including our future. He has preordained that we will live and learn, undergo every kind of experience, fail many times and try again, performing better each time around – until finally we are able to attain to spiritual perfection and live with Him in His kingdom forever.

He formulated a Plan of Evolution. We spirits will need to come to earth, incarnate or motivate a flesh body and at day’s end, class will terminate, we will die and we will return home to the Real World. Earth is just our school where we prepare for the true life to come.

However, it is entirely up to us what we want to do with our life. We can opt to stay where we are or strive for better. We choose the situations and circumstances that will become part of our earthly life experience even before we are born to aid us in our studies. They correspond to the experiments we undertake in an ordinary earth classroom to prove our theories. To a spirit, this is just as easily done in the same way that man on earth plans for next day, what he will do tomorrow.

This plan is in effect in every life. While there would seem to be nothing we can do about our fate (the plan), nevertheless all that happens to us in our life are really of our own choosing.

Answer 3

Think about it. How does that negate your free will? Do you still have a choice? Sure you do. Free will is simply the ability to seek the truth or believe a Lie and that choice is yours whether or not God knows the outcome does not change your ability to choose. It does not mean all things are predestined it means God is all knowing and is not restrained by time as we are and can be at the end of a thing at the same time he as at the beginning it does not change the outcome. If I watch a movie for the second time it ends the same it does not mean I interfered or caused it to go a certain way..

Answer 4

If man does not have the ability to seek out God, then God can be all-knowing and know our future and everybody can know the final outcome of our "free will", and it doesn't even have to be an important issue. Isn't the Bible splattered with verses about mankind's true nature and where we're headed? It takes a loving God to draw us to him in spite of our condition, John 6:44.

Answer 5

Basically, you can't have "free will" under a perfect omniscient God, because you would never be "free" to act in any other manner than that God always knew you would act in the first place.

If you COULD act in a manner contrary to how that God "knew" you would act, then he wouldn't be all-knowing, would he?

So how is it that you can "sin" when you don't even have the freedom to act in any manner other than what your omniscient God has "ordained" that you do? The rational answer is, you can't.

But under Christian doctrine you get punished merely for doing exactly what God knew you would do and knew that you never had any choice but to do in the first place.

That's not a God, that's a sadist.

Under Christian doctrine God knows the future, including the exact moment of each human's death. According to Jesus, "even the hairs on your head are numbered." So it's absurd to believe that as a perfectly omniscient being God knows some future contingencies, but not all.

Moreover, it would be illogical for a perfect being to CHOOSE to remain ignorant of some knowledge he could possess. Being perfect and unchangeable (immutable), there would be no reason for God to remain ignorant of those events, as they would not affect him in any manner. Illogic is imperfect, so therefore under Christian belief system God is not illogical.

Also, God is "timeless" under mainstream Christian orthodoxy, and therefore not bound by the same strictures of such things as future contingencies. In fact, if God is not restricted by the dimension of time as humans are, to God there is no such thing as a future contingency in the first place.

In my view there's no getting around it, it's simply absurd to believe both in a perfect omniscient God and human free will. Unless, of course, you're willing to do all those mental gymnastics to get around the patently obvious absurdities, which basically means you're willing to do anything to cling to an absurd belief.

As for myself, I'd rather believe that I have free will than that I'm a marionette for God's perverse entertainment. Therefore, I choose to reject the idea of an omniscient God. Of course, if there IS a perfect, omniscient God, he already knew I was going to make that "choice" (or more properly, illusion). He's still going to punish me for it anyway though, even though I could not do anything other than what I did. Some loving God he is.

EDIT: LOL, I love reading Christians' responses to this question. They just don't get it. Either they're not smart enough to comprehend the logical impossibility of free will existing under an omniscient God, or they just don't want to.

People, if God knows everything you're going to do in the future, you don't have any freedom to act in any other manner, because he's perfect and he's omniscient! You're just a puppet on his strings! LOL!

Answer 6

God knows whats gonna happen in the future as to this world, but it's up to people to choose which path they're gonna take, the narrow road to everlasting life or the road to destruction mattew 7:13&14

Answer 7

We have a free will of our decisions that we make each day. Our
decisions are not controlled. We can't blame anyone else for a wrong decision. A Christian can be led by the Holy Spirit if he chooses or ask him to. I hope you can understand that, I hope I answered your question properly

Answer 8

Is it possible to know something, and yet not have any control over it? For instance the sun, we know its going to come up tommorow, but it is not because of anything we did. The same can be said for God. God knows what we decide, but we still make the decisions.

Answer 9

Just because he knows what you will chose doesn't mean it wasn't your choice.

A better question is why did he let me chose to let some people go to hell? Some need a little firmness from God here :)...ah but alas, that WOULD NOT be free will.

Thus therefore, the free will you wanted is what screws you. Weakling.

Salvation is very easy to obtain, and hard to maintain.

The road to heaven is narrow, but His burden is light.

Answer 10

God knows our futures BASED on our choices toward him by virtue of our freewill. Unless youre a calvinist, God did no literally predestine for you to pull suzies hair or for me to say something hurtful to my parents. This means that we have the freewill to choose our path in life whether evil or for God and we self-determine what happens to us. Gods forknowledge doesnt negate our responsibility for sin.