Imagine you're watching one of Randi's tests on dowsers (any of them, they all go the same way). Now, you can predict before the test starts that the dowser will fail, and then he will make up a lame excuse for why he did. You can't predict what will happen with absolute, omniscient certainty, but it's close enough that you aren't in the least surprised when it happens.
Now, are you still mad at the dowser for running from reality? Yes! It doesn't matter that you knew he would in advance- you're angry about the choice he made.
If we're mad at dowsers, it is only because some of them (not all of them) take money from desperate people, promising them aqua vitae. As Randi pointed out in
Flim Flam, among all paranormal believers, dowsers seem to be the most innocuous. They usually aren't scam artists but genuinely and sadly deluded people. They are also fairly straightforward, in that they, more than any other believer group, are willing to take the challenge to test their "powers". That is not the mark of a fraud. That is the mark of a mistaken person. Even our own local dowsing expert,
Edge is actually a sweet guy who is incapable of seeing the obvious in front of him. You just want to say, "Stop it and do something useful!" So it's hard to be mad at them unless they're taking advantage of others.
Imagine a situation in which you knew a murder was about to take place. Would your foreknowledge of this murder cause you not to get angry at the murderer? Of course not!
This does not describe the kind of knowledge God is said to have. He didn't one day discover the murder, too late to do anything about it. He knew about it from the dawn of creation and did nothing.
If I knew a reasonable time in advance that a murder was going to take place, I could at least
try to stop it. I might even succeed. This is an important difference in omniscient foreknowledge and brief, uncertain foreknowledge.
There's an old argument here about free will and predestination- you could say that it's God's fault that the murder occurred, so that he can't get angry about the criminal's actions. But that's just not true within the Christian framework of ideas- just because God knows the future doesn't mean he's responsible for it.
It could mean exactly that it is God's fault, or it could mean that He is powerless to stop it. Such a concept turns God into just another pawn in the game. Most Christians wouldn't agree to that. Another possibility is that He knows it is going to happen, but He somehow agrees with it for reasons unknown and unknowable. This description of God turns Him into an amoral being since He doesn't share the same definition of "morality" that most humans have. Most Christians actually say something like this when they say, "We can't understand the mind of God".
But of course, if the future is known with 100% certainty, either by God or by any other entity, then the concept of free will is out the window. If you cannot do other than what is ordained by infallible knowledge of the future, then you have no choice or free will. You
must do what is ordained.
Remember that I'm just presenting a counter-argument to the OP and not arguing towards the existence of God.
Understood. I'm countering your arguments here, knowing that you're playing "devil's advocate".
