freedom and god’s omniscience

there are those (and i’m not giving my hand away — i’m playing the advocate for which ever seems fun at the time) who hold that it does, however.

let’s take and omniscient god’s point of view, from outside of time.

let us suppose that a certain rubber duck with horns is born, and lives on my monitor:

at some point during my rubber duck’s life, he decides to end it all, and leaps off the right hand side of my monitor to his doom, on my desk:

now, we, who have the benefit of being omniscienct, and have a point of view from outside of time, see all of this happen. we don’t see it in sequence — we always see all of it.

we cannot see that which *won’t* happen, since we see truth, we see the universe at it is.

for instance, we don’t see him leap off of the left-hand side of my monitor, and land on the powerbook, shaken, but not dead:

we see, from before time began, that the duck was going to go off the right-hand side, and die

and we see it happen as it does.

and we see after time is over that he did.

there is, even before the duck exists, a 100% chance of him leaping to his death.

there is no chance he would have chosen to leap off the other side, or we would have seen that other choice.

to the duck, looking down at the desk below, it may well *feel* like he’s choosing, but history is already decided, and his choice has been made.

how he feels about it is irrelevant, all he can do is what seems best to him at the time — and ends up doing exactly what we knew he would, as he had no real choice in the matter.