[David Sklansky]

It is not necessary to argue over whether someone's knowledge of the future means you have no free will.

It is only necessary to argue whether you could have free will if that prescient being TELLS YOU AHEAD OF TIME about the future, including yours. Clearly if he does, and you can't prove him wrong, then you have no free will.

Taking this further we can thus state that if YOU had perfect knowledge of the future then you don't have free will. Because you are perpetually telling yourself about the future and are unable to disobey it. This is a tautology.

This means that if there is a God that will interact with humans in any way, he can't know the future unless he gives up his OWN FREE WILL. See why? Suppose he knows that he will part the Red Sea? If he is infallible in this ability, he can't change his mind.

What we have here, at least as far as religious people are concerned, is a situation very much like the question of whether God can form the word "dog" from the letters in "cat" or whether he can come up with a cube that is the sum of two other cubes, or whether he can build a rock he can't lift. Just because God can't do those things does not detract from him and most religious scholars agree. Even Not Ready does. Thus there should not be a lot of effort in trying to refute my argument (which I have never seen before and I'm wondering if it is original with me) that God can't simultaneously interact with people, know the future of people, and have his own free will. Just like the rock he can't build. Since something has to give, I would assume that religious people would choose it to be his ability to see the future.

The fact is that from what I can see, most religious people should not resist the notion that God can't see the future. They seem to have held on to thinking he can merely to give his omniscience due. But if you take away this power from him( like Skalnskyanity does), with the realization that it is nothing more than taking away his power to make something like 3+3 = 7, it actually helps make many religious precepts acceptable. Many of the non believer's arguments now go away. Think about it.