Arguing Against Gods
Omniscience vs. Free Will
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Another tricky issue is whether or not genuine omniscience is in any way compatible with free will - either ours or the alleged god's. To start with our free will, it has been observed many times that if a god knows the future with infallible certainty, then what this god knows will necessarily happen - there is no possibility for anything else to occur. We are, then, incapable of altering the future. Although the concept of human "free will" is hotly contested, I'm not aware of any theory of free will which could be conidered compatible with a being perfectly knowing the future. If a god knows who will win the next presidential election, then it isn't possible for anyone else to win. That's predestination - and some theologians have unflinchingly embraced it, for example John Calvin.
Others, however, have recognized that this is a tremendous problem and have sought to remedy it. A few try to argue that their god is "outside time," and hence sees the whole course of history all at once. But this removes god from the realm of intelligibility and knowability, and reduces theism to an incoherent agnosticism. Moreover, it doesn't ultimately solve the problem at hand: even if a god is simply sitting outside of time and observing the whole of history, then that means that only one course of history is possible - otherwise the picture for this god would keep shifting and it wouldn't have perfect knowledge of what happens. At best, it means that we are predestined without this god forcing it - but we are still predestined, just with an unintelligible god acting as an audience.
Still others reach for a more popular solution, namely to argue that their god has a "limited omniscience." This god knows everything, where everything means only what it can logically know. Everything doesn't really mean "everything" anymore - instead it means a limited but not yet defined set of things which will become more limited as more problems with the concept of omniscience are discovered.
Thus, certain realms of knowledge are closed to the supposedly "omniscient" god. We will revisit this again later, but from the outset it seems clear that a "limited omniscience" linguistically nonsensical. The word "limited" and the prefix "omni-" logically contradict each other. If a god is in any fashion limited in its knowledge, then it isn't really omniscient - and to say that it is becomes an exercise in confusion, if not deception.
Now what about this god's freedom? A legion of contradictions emerges when we consider a god which is both omniscient and possesses free will. Some theologians readily admit that the same problems as above exist here, but have yet to invent an adequate solution. For a god to be free in action, then its future must not be fully known in advance - there must be the possibility for a change of mind. If a god cannot freely alter its actions, then it cannot be said to be free. But this means that the god itself cannot perfectly know its own future. There must be true propositions about the future which it does not know.
In fact, it can be argued that this god cannot know anything at all about the future. Unlike the rest of us, such a god can always intervene in the course of human events and perform a miracle. We usually have to sit and allow nature to take its course - but this god doesn't. Yet for a miracle to be a free act, it cannot be known in advance. And if this god changes its mind, then we cannot say that it really did know in advance what would happen, much less know it perfectly.
For example, if a hurricane is approaching Orlando, poised to punish the city for it's tolerance of homosexuality, we simply have to sit and wait for it to hit. A traditional sort of god, however, has the choice to turn it away. If the decision to do so or to allow it to hit is to be free, this god cannot know for sure what it will do in advance. Since this god cannot know for sure if it will intervene, then it cannot know for sure if the hurricane really will hit. The same is true for every single event which this god can alter.
Since god cannot know in advance if and when it might perform any miracle, it cannot really know what will happen in any given situation. Once again some people reach and claim for their god a limited sort of omniscience, but I must raise the same objections that it makes no linguistic sense. So if a god is supposed to have both omniscience and free will, then it does not exist.
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