Originally posted by Roy
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I will make my choice of my own free will. God knowing what that choice will be does not itself constrain my free will. I can make any choice I want to. But God knows which choice I will want to make in a given set of circumstances. You are implicitly assuming a feedback where none exists. God's knowledge isn't creating or forming my choice, His knowledge is not part of that system as it were.
The word 'can' has multiple senses of meaning that are being conflated above.
can: what is potentially possible - the set of potential choices before me
can: what I am allowed to do.
What you are assuming is that God's knowledge changes what is potentially possible at the moment of choice and somehow only allows one choice. You are taking God's knowledge of my future and pulling it back to the present (or the past) and saying that knowledge alone actively prevents me from choosing what I want to choose from the set of potential choices before me.
But it doesn't. I still choose from among the potential choices before me the choice I want to choose. God just knows what I want to choose. There is no limitation of my free will. When you say I can't make another choice, you are implying causality where none exists. I won't make another choice: i.e. - it's not that I can't (I am free to make any choice I want), it's that I won't (I don't want to make any other choice).
IOW, the restraining factor here is my will itself. It is my free-will that limits my choice by the fact that I must choose between the options and I will therefore of my free-will what I want to choose which is also that which God already knows I will choose. It's what we'd call in mathematics a special case. My free-will exists and is not violated by God's knowledge because His knowledge and my free-will at the point of decision are congruent.
Jim
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