Letters from a Skeptic. Correspondence 4.

In correspondence four the father brings up how god can allow problems to exist if god is omniscient. The father brings up the below points:

"Since God supposedly is all knowing, why didn't He just look ahead and see who was and wasn't going to use freedom rightly, and then just create the good people? We'd still have freedom, but in a world without suffering. It strikes me as odd that God should have to take "risks" at all. Isn't He (in your view) in total control?"(37)

The son gives a longer response below, and admits that he changes the traditional Christian view. He explains that god does not know what will happen if persons have freewill. This is great because it is logical, and this is where I think the traditional Christian views are in conflict. Obviously, any one who uses logic would understand; if you know the future, then, there isn't freewill since all actions where all ready known and they didn't deviate. 

"In the Christian view God knows all of reality——everything there is to know. But to assume He knows ahead of time how every person is going to freely act assumes that each person's free activity is already there to know. But to assume He already knows ahead of time how every person is going to freely act assumes that each person's free activity is already there to know——even before he freely does it! But it's not. If we have been given freedom, we create the reality of our decisions by making them. And until we make them, they don't exist." (38)

Here, above, the son explains that the Christian god does not know the future, because the future does not exist. Here below he admits the traditional Christian view is not logical:

"Now I should tell you that this isn't the traditional Christian position. The traditional Christian understanding is that God does fore know the free actions of everybody... I personally think this last position is philosophically untenable."(39)

I agree with the fact that a god who knows the future does not allow free-will for persons, and the traditional arguments are not logical in conjunction with free-will. The best thing that any Christian philosopher can do is avoid the omniscient and free-will points about knowing the future. Finally, a theologian who believes in free-will and admits that god cannot know the future. 

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