That's really what led me to start this thread. Most Christians claim both God's will and free will, as it suits the situation. It just doesn't make sense to me. Why set it all up if it's just a setup? I need an explanation I can be comfortable with - that makes sense to me.
I cling to my childlike faith that Christ is God/Son of God. It's honestly not relevant anymore whether He really is; His teachings sustain me.
But, for me - for my sanity - I have to believe we have free will. We make decisions, act on those decisions, and have the capacity to change our minds and our behavior. Without that, there's no point to life ... to trying.
I think God created us. I think He has the capacity/ability to see and know all - Past Present and Future - but, just like parents who don't go searching through their teenager's sock drawer, He CHOOSES not to know. He CHOOSES to allow us our choices ... to learn.
Yup. God puts us together, winds us up, then lets us go.
One solution is that free will pertains to most situations, but that there are some place and times where God steps in and dictates what happens, regardless of our freewill. He can do this because, well, He's God.
Anything that doesn't really matter to God's ultimate plan, He will let happen, but He has certain things that must happen, such as the prophecies of the apocolypse and the downfall of the world, rise of the beast, death and ressurection of Jesus, etc.
Picture it like a chess game played by a computer. God is the computer, we are the chess pieces, and God's plan is to checkmate the opponent. Because God can calculate every possible move from beginning to end in a millisecond, he knows that there are trillions of combinations of moves he could take to win. But, he gave the chess pieces free will. So, we move ourselves, pawns, kings, and queens alike. Some of us make stupid decisions and get "captured", and some of us make smart decisions and stay on the board. Every time one of us makes a move, God recalculates every possible future move to ensure He can still win the game. But after a while, the pieces start dwindling, and God's checkmate options are dwindling as well. Finally, there is only one option left. The piece that has to make the move to win wouldn't have free will, else God's will would not be done. Though that piece has been free to do whatever they wanted up until that point, that last move has to be dictated by God. What this would look like or feel like to the person involved, I do not know. Or maybe it was simple a predestined act with the illusion of free will.
The only other solution is that because God knows the future, he also knows how we will react to a given situation, regardless of whether it actually happens or not. Those things that are under God's control, such as the weather, natural disasters, etc, he can use as tools to guide us, but beyond that, we are free to screw up the world as we like.
So, taking a similar approach to understanding this concept as the previous one, let's picture God as a computer again. Assume that God has a goal (say, to have as many people come to believe Him under their own free will as possible). Now assume that he calculates every possible combination of events under his control, and finds out how many people would come to believe in Him in each combination of events, and picks the combination that would yield the highest number of believers.
As a simple example, say He had three events to play around with. An earthquake, a drought, and a year of good rainfall. He knows that the earthquake will scare a bunch of people, and many will seek out Him because of it, because it's something that people naturally do when they are so close to death. He finds the exact time, day, month, and year, as well as magnitude and location of the quake, when and where He could use the earthquake that the most people would come to believe in Him.
At the same time, He also knows that a drought would bring people to seek Him out, to pray for rain, etc. So He uses that, in combination with a year of good rainfall, to bring more people to Him. He selects the time and place to be ideal based upon how many people would come to believe in Him from the event.
Obviously, this sort of thinking can be painstakingly detailed, down to something like during the creation, He could create a specific rock formation have a specific shape so that a specific quarry built 6000 years down the road will break up a specific piece of that rock formation into specific smaller pieces, but more specifically one specific piece of those specifically smaller pieces, which He knows will be used in a gravel driveway that a young child will be bikeriding down and hit that specific pieces, wreck his bike and get a bloody knee, which will cause the neighborwoman to come out and help him, while she talks to him about Jesus, and the young child becomes a Christian. You know, stuff like that. The tiniest things can make a huge difference in someone's life, and only God knows how every piece of the world we live in could affect us.
So now, God has a "plan" for every person. He knows which ones will come to know Him, and which ones will not, because He knows the future. And though He hasn't made the choices for us, He has used the tools He created for Himself to nudge us towards Him. Some of us will choose to follow Him, and some of us will not. But it is all a part of His master plan, based on His combination of the use of the natural tools He has created.
I think the second solution I proposed makes more sense, and is generally what I believe in, but I haven't fully fleshed out the idea either. And it's still dang mind-boggling to think about anyway.
