The original poster tried to demonstrate that God couldn't have free will because omniscience and omnipotence were logically incompatible. The premise and conclusion were both flawed, but it's really only the premise I'm interested in. He used a rather classic straw man argument: defining terms his way and applying them to the system of his choosing in order to show that system inconsistent. Christians never attributed free will to God in the sense that the poster would like to think of it.
The Bible is clear that (in at least one instance) God could not lie (He 6.8). All we really need in one instance to show that the poster's vision of God's omnipotence wasn't the same as the Christian's. And, for whatever it's worth, all Christians ever said was that we couldn't sin in heaven, not that we weren't free. The Scriptures really don't support the idea of free will as the power of contrary choice. They do a handy job of telling us that freedom is the ability to do what is right.
The original poster declined to respond, but another took issue with my statement that science provides no notion of free will either—it only ever ends in determinism (biological, chemical, and so on).
He used chaos theory, a new argument to me but not particularly to the debate. The mathematical basis isn't terribly difficult to grasp, and most people are familiar with the concepts regardless. The Butterfly Effect is the classic example: a butterfly flaps its wings in Venezuela and a tornado occurs in Texas. It's captured in the well-known rhyme:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost;
For want of a rider the battle was lost;
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
Cutting out a fair amount of speculation and text, the thrust of it is that the present state of a chaotic system is very sensitive to initial conditions and that provided the same set of initial conditions, small variations along the way can produce drastically different outcomes after the same number of iterations.
This is important for a few reasons, one of which is that a lot of systems in nature are chaotic—the weather, for example, and the firings of neurons in the brain. What we find is that individual events are unpredictable, though classes of events are.1
The poster admitted, however, that this really wasn't avoiding determinism at all, though it provided the perception of it through unpredictability. In fact, chaotic systems are deterministic, just not "orderly."
There's another problem here, and that is that "Joe Freewill" (the moral agent in his example) is under the same constraints I am: he can't predict his own choices, either. In other words, the person making decisions is as ignorant about them as I am.
Yet another issue is that while chaos theory describes it cannot impute. In other words, chaos theory can describe natural phenomena, but it cannot explain how they arise. Science doesn't answer those sort of questions, and indeed cannot. Chaos theory says, "Event A is unpredictable," but it doesn't tell me where the source of unpredictability is.
Lots of interesting things to think about and study here, and it will be interesting to read about if I can escape the mound of books I'm buried under. At the end of the day, though, science and math really don't provide humans with much humanity—at least not in this case.
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