Okay, I’m back. Interesting back-and-forth you guys have going here; I’ll just go back and address points that seem to still be open:
First, causality. I’m a little surprised causaity was brought up with regard to my argument; I don’t mention it at all myself. My argument is exclusively about what is, and who knew what about it when. Wether the events are nonsensical or not makes no difference to my formulation of the argument (though there do seem to be other formulations that do rely on it).
Okay, point two. There seems to be some confusion regarding my use of time in the argument. When I referred to time I was referring strictly to time as we percieve it; wether god operates in a different time-arena or not is irrelevent to the discussion.
To explain: I state a premise “God was omnipotent at some point before you were around. (We’ll call this time ‘T’.)” Time T could be August 17th, 1772, standard earth time. Wether or not God experiences time in reverse like Merlin or He’s simply totally independently of the timeline, most would say that God did exist at time T, which, on our timeline, meant that all the events he was predicting were future events. Since this is the definition of ‘future events’ that I’m using in my free will defintion, (that is, since we make all our decisions in our own timeline,) that’s all that’s required for the argument to unfold consistently.
To analogise: If we presume for a moment that our timespace/reality (hereafter abbreviated as spacetime) are entirely different from that in which God lives, and that God has the ability to view and operate our entire spacetime at once. Further, for the purpose of this argument, we’ll assume that god has the ability to change our spacetime at will. (In other words, he’s omniscient and omnipotent as far as our reality goes; note that this sort of omniscience and omnipotence is not subject to absurd contradictions.) The analogy of a book that God is writing is a perfect one, with the caveat that there is a complete book at all time, and God is simply making modifications that always result in a complete, though different, book. (The book of our history must always be complete, since god always has complete knowledge of our history.)
So. At any given instant in God-time all of our reality is exposed to God. He may make changes to this reality, but these changes take place in God-time; God-after the change, there remains one entire consistent and unchanging version of our reality, written and complete from beginning to end. So, within the perspective of our spacetime there is only one series of events, eternal and unchanging, and whatever had happened differently in the previous draft of history is not any part, past, present, or future, of the current reality.
So, God can change our reality. But for us to have free will, we have to be able to change our reality. The problem is, when would we do it? We only exist within our own timeline, and that timeline (at any given God-instant) is written out in its entirety. All the ‘choices’ we will make/are making/made are already described in detail in the completed spacetime; moreso, that’s where they occured/are occurring/will occur. We can’t get outside of our reality/history, so we can’t change it. Or, to phrase it within the book analogy, the characters cannot change the book because they only exist within it.
Before somebody brings up the point that God himself turns up within our timeline and interacts with people, I’d recommend you google “Mary Sue” as it relates to fanfiction. God has written himself into history much the way some ‘conventional’ authors do (usually bad authors, interestingly). So how does this effect the argument?
Well, because god percieves all fo our spacetime at once, he percieves what his own impacts on it will be, and their effects. God, being outside our spacetime can change these details at will, but he makes these changes from outside the spacetime, altering the behavior and ‘choices’ of the version of himself written into the complete spacetime. These changes cannot be made by the god within the spacetime, because any changes he might make there have already been made, and are available for viewing by his out-of-time self. So, the version of god that he can see the future actions of is subject to the same rules as anybody else on the timeline, except his extraphysical self can make changes on his own behalf, from outside reality.
Confusing? Not really God just pulled a Mary Sue. The fact that he did has no impact on the rest of us, who still have to make all our choices in our own space-time contiuum, which unfortunately is not a forum with the flexibility to make unpredicted decisions in. Sorry, no free will there.
On to point 3. In post #54 Tevildo brings up what I like to think of as the ‘Yoda’ method of foreknowledge: There are a myriad of possible futures, determined by the untold billions of choices that might be made, and only when the choices are made is the ‘true’ path chosen, and all others discarded. The analogy here is a ‘choose your own adventure’ book.
The problem with this sort of foreknowledge is that it doesn’t tell you very much. Specifically, all it tells you is what is impossible. You might think for a moment that that it tells you the probability of events occuring, but it doesn’t; there is no reason to believe that a free agent would choose between options with equal probability. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) Having a form of foreknowlede that only tells you what will definitely not does indeed sidetep my argument, but unfortunately it’s not exactly what most people think of when they say omniscience, and on its own is totally useless for predicting which future events will actually occur. “Changing and uncertain the future is” isn’t something we want coming out of God’s mouth.
But what happens if you combine Yoda foreknowledge with an infallible knowledge of which choices people are going to make? Well, if the foreknowledge is perfect, you’ve taken your choose-your-own-adventure book and torn out all the off pages. This leaves you with a single narrative…and a single spacetime. The effect on my argument is simpler; by my definition of free will you’re assuming the conclusion.
That article brings up an interesting point about wether a person can be making a choice freely if, essentially, they have no other alternatives. Note that this has no bearing on my argument because I tidily defined free will to require unpredictability, which is clearly not occuring here. 
But, lest somebody call my definitions into question, let’s look at the issue.
First I would state the analogy presented, that of the device that detects and prevents disagreeing neural activity, is flawed. There are two cases: 1) there is a decision-making agent (the ‘soul’) that makes the decision independently before instigating neural activity; 2) decisions are instigated in the neural activity.
In case one there is in fact a decision being made, and what is being stifled is the result. The device appears to prevent alternate choices but it does not; the choice was still made at the ‘soul’ level, even though it was blocked or corrected an instant later. Note that an omnipotent god would have to know what the actual decision was (and not just the possibly altered effect) to qualify as omnipotent.
Case two has two subcases: your decisions are a result of deterministic neural activity, or they’re not. If they are, then you don’t have free will anyway! You’re just a big biological computer. Even if that doesn’t disqualify you in and of itself, God knows your logic system and current state inside out; you are infinitely predicatable. QED.
If your neural activity is nondeterministic, then you might normally have ‘free will’ (if you can call it that; if qualifies under my definition by I don’t think randomity is what most people are looking for here) but you lose it under the influence of the implanted device. By preventing the ‘wrong’ neural state from manifesting, the device essentailly removes it from your list of choices. You cannot choose otherwise, at any level, so your free will has been abrogated; this occurs even if the same result would have occured naturally. Even though I might have chosen to buy a learjet with my pocket money if I had the chance, I didn’t make the choice; the option wasn’t offered to me.
Beause all the cases present a lack of free will, the total analogy, which is based on the pretense that free will is occuring in the example, is flawed. I severely doubt that any similar example would escape similar dismantling. If you can make a choice, then God is expected to have foreseen the choice itself, subjecting it to predictability by my argument; if the choice is eliminated entirely it implies no free will.
I think this covers most of the ambiguous bits I had in my initial post. I look forward to any reactions to all this; hopefully I’ll be quicker about replying next time.
