Daniell Dennett complains about intuition pumping thought experiments at length in most of his books

He also uses a more than a few of his own. Nevertheless, I'm not aware of Dennett putting the issue as succinctly as OrP has done here, though that might be due having only read a couple of his books and papers.

I'm just saying you mention a simple phrase like "chinese room" with that guy and his face gets all twitchy.

LOL

*attempts to control facial tick*

I'm not Necessarily saying neither cant exist, but that they shouldn't be able to co-exist. I'm saying free will by its nature should be a hindrance to omniscience. But as someone said (maybe you but I'm typing in my phone so I can't see who did) if omniscience is said to be all knowing then it doesn't have to be to mean knowing the future since the future is unknown. That loophole could potentially make both a possibility. If this is the case (lets assume that it is) then it leads to a mess of problems. If god created the universe for us (as some theistic texts say) then he would have had to know that we would in fact be in the universe. That should make the possibility of this case 0, especially for any theists who hold to any belief of evolution, since we wouldn't have been there during the creation of everything else.

Sorry if the post is a bit juvenile, I'm not a philosopher and my posts are just brainstorms I'm writing as I think them. Hope it's understandable

Sorry if that post isn't comprehensible, let me try to pose it again. If god created the universe with the knowledge that we would in the future inhabit the earth, then it makes the discussion of not being able to know the future false, since it was created before we existed, even if only for a short period of time. Therefore he must know what the future will be so we land back to if he is omniscient, then concepts like free will cant exist

Nah, just think of human predictions. You can have a good idea what is going to happen without knowing the future in a strong sense. Again, this actually would harmonise a lot of things for theists e.g. resolving the tension between fine-tuning arguments (which posit that God created a life-permitting universe 13.7 billion years ago) and design arguments (which posit that the Earth was not life-permitting until God intervened ~4 billion years ago). Adopting open theism would allow the theist to make sense of this: god creates a universe he expects to be life-permitting, then finds out it isn't life-permitting and has to intervene.

While I'm throwing out great ideas for theists, why not adopt mind-soul dualism instead of clinging to the lame duck of mind-brain dualism? All the benefits (life after death, we're all unique and precious snowflakes etc) and none of the embarrassing questions raised by increasing correlation between brain-states and mental-states....

But this sentence already has a problem. Is my dinner already cooked? That asks "Is my dinner cooked at this point in time?". If not, then it will be done in the future. If you ask "Does the future already exist, the answer is "No". It will exist at some future point in time. That's why it is the future.

There is something to see in the future. Your problem is that you do not have the tools or language to deal with time travel. Neither do I. But using improper tools or language to deal with it does not allow you to make rigorous deductions. They are flawed.

Not demonstrated.

This is probably true to some extent. But remember that the OP attempted to define a logical conflict between an omniscient God and free will. We do not have particularly good intuition about omniscience in the same manner that we fail at time travel. So my point that the conflict may not exist is still valid.

I actually have no idea what you are talking about. I would however appreciate it, if you stop misattributing claims to my name.

Re: "another way of putting it is that without determinism there isn't a time line on which to travel" not being demonstrated

It seems nearly self-demonstrating to me. To put it another way, the premise is that time is space-like. Being able to travel in time without the places you travel to being determined would be like traveling in space where there is an understanding that the place you end up didn't exist prior to your arrival there. It would not seem to be a very space-like state of affairs, as space is usually understood.

So because we don't know, we have to accept your point? Wouldn't it be more prudent to reject your argument if we don't know?

Not necessarily because it is wrong (which we can't know), but because you have no basis on which to make the argument (which we can know).

You are losing track of the discussion. The OP asserted that omniscience and free will were mutally inconsistent. I postulated a framework under which they could be consistent. Thus the OP position is invalidated. You are saying that my position might be wrong. OK, I am not saying you have to accept it as true. It need only be possible to invalidate the OP.

No, I don't think I am losing track of anything. Thank you very much for trying to clarify matters, however.

You don't know if it is possible. It is unknown. That's the meaning of unknown, that you don't know. If you know it is possible, it isn't unknown.

You seem to suffering from the very common misunderstanding that "unknown if impossible" equals "possible". It doesn't. It equals "unknown if possible".

As I've said before, this only works if the entity with time travel powers can avoid honest communication with the person with free will. Also does this entity itself have free will?

Yes, you have made this point before. It does seem to create a paradox if the recipient of future knowledge then uses free will to make choices the change the future. But I wonder a little about our simplistic model of communication about the future. I have no answer for questions about the sequencing of events for an entity that can move through time.

In any event, we at least agree that it works in the absence of the communcation that you mention. I agree that it becomes problematic if there is communcation.

In the example I gave I did assume that the entity had free will. Does that lead to a problem?

This is nonsense. Other people seem to be able to understand the point. Why do I have so much trouble communicating with you? The same thing happened in the discussion about determinism. The logical debate degenerated into some pointless language tangle that went nowhere. Let's not do that again.

I edited my reply but missed the time window. You can ignore my previous reply and use this if you like.

I still believe you are confused.

If it is unknown if something is impossible then it is possible. There are subdivisions within possible of course. It may be likely or very unlikely. It may be that at some point it will proven impossible. But that does not change the meaning of "possible". This is a word game to avoid dealing with the original problem.

Let's take this systematically from the beginning.

The OP:

This is what we are discussing. Or at least, this is what I am discussing. If I deviate from the subject of the OP, then I try to clearly identify that. You should always assume that my comments are constructed within the logical structure proposed in the OP.

Note the bold term "God". This immediately establishes the framework of a postulated supreme Being with extreme but only partially understood powers. It then goes on to establish an apparent logical inconsistency between features of that God and free will.

As a counter to that logical construct I proposed a second admittedly unknown power for that Being and have shown (at least to 2 other readers) that it invalidates the OP's conclusion. Your objection is that the ability that I granted "may" be impossible. I agree. But within the context of OP and the contemplation of the powers of God, it would have to be considered possible. Thus your entire discussion has no relevance to the debate and is being ignored by everyone except me.

I also reconstructed this answer and missed the window, so here goes.

In general I agree with your point, but I have a lot of misgivings about it. I wonder about time and the implications of the movement of information backwards and forwards through time. If I recall correctly you used the example question: "Will I eat a hamburger tomorrow?" and the difficulty that arises if you are determined to use your free will to make the answer incorrect. But what is the actual model of the information carried back through time. Perhaps the answer to the question is "It's not that simple".

It gets wrapped up in the question of "What sequences events when time is no longer useful for that purpose?". It goes beyond the issue of God and is difficult to discuss because the nature of time is embedded in our language.

Yes, which is the argument for why God can't be both omnipotent AND omniscient.

If God is omniscient (the parameter set by the OP) then we can't have Free will since the future is known. But, if God isn't omnipotent then we should be able to deviate from that future if we choose to, implying that there are multiple possible options and that God must actually have known that all along? He knows all our possible futures and we freely choose which happens. So God can be omniscient AND we can have free will.

When replying, please keep in mind the trepidation with which I hit 'submit' on this one.

I disagree. The paradox is only created if the information from the future is shared with the free will actor in the past.

If that does not happen, then there is no paradox. That was DS's point.

I am conflicted every time I open this forum, let alone post a reply.

The argument I read was that if God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future then he can't change (through being omnipotent) it because then how could he have known what it was if it were changed? So he's not omnipotent.

Down thread it was mentioned that it's not possible to know the future, even for God, that would solve the problem. Also it seems that if God was able to simultaneously know ALL possible futures (which would sit better with the idea of omniscience wouldn't it?) then he could know the future but we could still choose which one became reality. So you have an omniscient God and we still have Free Will.

I am not sure which argument you are discussing. The OP was around omniscience and free will. I proposed a resolution to that conflict. DS mentioned a difficulty around the sharing of information.

That is the sequence that lead to the post of mine that you quoted. Discussions of omnipotence were not part of my construction. Omnipotence is tricky because it gets into the issue of things that cannot be done. Like expressing the square root of 2 as a ratio of two integers. If God cannot do that, is He omnipotent?

Yes, RGT these days seem to mainly consist of posters who at arbitrary times loses capacity to grasp English. Strange that.

It's true, I don't know one end of a sentence from the other.

Their ability to write English is a little shaky also.