>>12244788>God knowing you are going to do something before you do it does not mean that you were never free when you did it.It's a legitimate argument. Free will is prima facie incompatible with determinism, and God's foreknowledge seems to suggest a deterministic outcome. The theist's responses are actually pretty interesting.
You can reply that God, being "out-of-time", doesn't actually form his beliefs before your action, but rather in the moment you act. This was Aquinas' solution.
You can argue that God's foreknowledge was an "accidentally necessary" counterfactual, such that God's past beliefs in fact did depend on your future free action, but this is problematic and you run into issues with preserving the past as something necessary (i.e., it would seem like the past could change).
An approach I really like, but which is probably too weak, is the Molinist interpretation, where God has foreknowledge of what you would do in every set of circumstances (in every possible world). But this is more an account of God's foreknowledge than a defense of free will, and it runs into the same problem where your actions appear pre-determined.
The best defense is probably just that free will doesn't require alternate possibilities. You can do something freely even when you had no other choice, if you would've done it freely anyway. Interestingly, Augustine gave this argument, although he wasn't really known for it at the time and nobody took it seriously until recently.
