Some arguments against the existence of Godfocus on the supposed incoherence of humankind possessing free will and God's omniscience. These arguments are deeply concerned with the implications of predestination. Moses Maimonides formulated an argument regarding a person's free will, in traditional terms of good and evil actions, as follows: A logical formulation of this argument might go as follows:
God knows choice "C" that a human would claim to "make freely".
It is now necessary that C.
If it is now necessary that C, then C cannot be otherwise. That is, there are no actual "possibilities" due to predestination.
If you cannot do otherwise when you act, you do not act freely
Therefore, when you do an act, you will not do it freely.
Norman Swartz, however, contends that the above arguments commit the modal fallacy. In particular, he asserts that these arguments assume that if C is true, it becomes necessary for C to be true, which is incorrect as C is contingent. Otherwise, one can argue that the future is set already regardless of his actions. Other means of reconciling God's omniscience with human free will have been proposed. Some have attempted to redefine or reconceptualize free will:
God can know in advance what I will do, because free will is to be understood only as freedom fromcoercion, and anything further is an illusion. This is the move made by compatibilistic philosophies.
The sovereignty of God, existing within a free agent, provides strong inner compulsions toward a course of action, and the power of choice. The actions of a human are thus determined by a human acting on relatively strong or weak urges and their own relative power to choose.
A proposition first offered by Boethius and later by Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis, suggests that God's perception of time is different, and that this is relevant to our understanding of our own free will. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis argues that God is actually outside time and therefore does not "foresee" events, but rather simply observes them all at once. He explains: A common objection is to argue that Molinism, or the belief that God can know counterfactually the actions of his creations, is true. This has been used as an argument by Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, amongst others.
suggests that this can lead to a "Free will Argument for the Nonexistence of God" on the grounds that God's omniscience is incompatible with God having free will and that if God does not have free will God is not a personal being. Theists generally agree that God is a personal being and that God is omniscient, but there is some disagreement about whether "omniscient" means:
"knows everything that God chooses to know and that is logically possible to know"; Or instead the slightly stronger:
"knows everything that is logically possible to know"
These two terms are known as inherent and total omniscience, respectively.
