Free Will and Foreknowledge

You see, this is where I struggle mightily with the concept of "Free Will." I understand perfectly well the importance of believing we have free will -- it keeps us from being robots. And as I wrote before, the value of this is really ours, not God's. The value to us is that only by having the option to disobey God does the act of freely obeying him provide us a real sense of his love.

No, the problem I have is purely one of grasping the notion of living within a timeline versus existing outside that timeline. God is outside the timeline and therefore presumably sees everything in the timeline -- past, present and future. If God is able to see that I'll order a ham and swiss sandwich for lunch tomorrow, when tomorrow comes (for me) will my actually ordering that type of sandwich be a free will choice, or a predestined choice? Would I have the opportunity, at the very last moment, to say, "Oh! I'd rather have a chicken salad! Ha! Fooled ya, God ... you didn't see that one coming?" That can't possibly be true, otherwise God isn't truly omniscient (all knowing). Further, if God can't see into our future, then he couldn't possible direct prophecy, since he wouldn't know what was going to happen.

I do not believe God is so limited. I believe he is omniscient -- including events in the future.

Therefore, I'm back to my dilemma -- will my free choices tomorrow truly be free?

As I think about this, two things strike me:

1. They will certainly appear free to me, as at the moment I make the decision I won't (likely) feel an irrestistable force directing me to make that choice.
2. If God doesn't direct the choice, but merely knows what my choice will be, then the decision is mine.

So maybe I just answered my own question. :-)

My answer, then, is this: God did not force Judas to betray Jesus. Judas was faced the opportunity, and God, knowing Judas perfectly, knew that he would make the choice he did.

My brain hurts. Stop talking about free will and predestination!!

This reminds me of the Star Trek episodes where the Enterprise hurtles back in time by sling-shotting around the sun. The "Gary Seven" episode is one of my favorites, mostly because the young Terri Garr in those 60's miniskirts was wonderful. I also found it funny that when they zoomed around the sun and came rocketing back -- at Warp 11 or something like that -- it took about six paragraphs of dialog to go from Venus to the Earth, when in reality at Warp 11 it would take a microsecond.

Was "Warp Speed" a linear scale or logarithmic?