You keep repeating that, but never explain how it is possible to know how the future will unfold and also possible for people to freely make decisions.In short, what God knows has NOTHING to do with what humans can or cannot choose to do, NOTHING.
Yes, I know.Yet no nonbeliever can tell me WHY my belief is illogical
Not to me. You just keep reasserting that the impossible is possible. You just keep saying that God knows all but we still have freedom to do other than what God foresees.I have explained over and over and over again why their belief is illogical.
Those are the same thing if the prediction is always correct.God does not predict what is going to happen although God knows what is going to happen because God is all-knowing.
And you keep saying that, too. Why? It's not important to this argument that God causes anything. It's only relevant that he knows what's coming.God does not determine will happen in this contingent world.
Think about the pinball machine analogy again. I did not cause the machine to behave in a predictable way. I just discovered what it would do.
Let's extend that analogy and make the pinball machine humanlike such that we wonder whether it is conscious. Maybe it can speak to us, and it tells us that it has free will, that it is in control of the number that will appear at the end of the game for the free game match. It tells us that it freely chooses a number each game.
We smile knowingly at it and say, "No, you don't make that choice. It is determined for you. It only feels like it was your idea and that you could have chosen differently."
The machine asks, "Why do you say that? How can you know that even if it's true?" and we answer, "Because your so-called choice is known to me before it is to you."
And I will answer again. It doesn't. Knowing the future doesn't cause it.I will ask it again: How does what God knows affect our ability to choose?
That's another self-contradictory comment. To exist is to exist in time. To exist is to persist in reality through some duration of time. If you claim that your god thinks and acts, it does so in time. It progresses from before states to after states. Simply declaring that that can occur outside of time doesn't change the fact that it requires time to persist, think, or act.What you do not understand is that God does not exist in TIME the way we do on this earth.
There's the problem with belief by faith. One can come to belief false, unfalsifiable, and incoherent ideas that he would be shielded from if he only accepted ideas that were vetted empirically. He wouldn't accept or believe impossible ideas even if he couldn't see that they were impossible because there wouldn't be sufficient supporting evidence for the belief to accept it.
But if one collects ideas using faith, and they become important or even sacred, if they are believed to be fact with certitude, then one will occasionally find himself in the position you're in trying to defend incoherent ideas like the compatibility of libertarian free will and strict determinism or the idea of existence outside of time. We can say those words, and we can believe them if we don't think too hard about them, but we can't make them coherent. We're simply stuck believing impossible things. As you say, nobody can explain these things to you. Nobody can make you understand what you have a stake in not understanding.