How do the religious reconcile free-will and pre-determination without being logically false?

This is not a fallacy at all for those of us who understand the two. It's quite easy for someone to take such adult concepts and make such simplistic and uninformed comments as you have..

If you mean everything in the strong sense where even our very thoughts are predetermined, then of course the only free will would be God's. Indeed, in such a case I cannot see how "I" as a self conscious entity would even exist. I would simply be a computer running God's programming.

But your additional preemptive comment suggests that you aren't asking about predetermination, but about foreknowledge. If that's the case, then I don't think free will is subverted. Are you really arguing that knowing what happens is the same as making it happen? That sure isn't the case for me. I know the sun is shining this morning (where I am) but I'm pretty sure I'm not making it do so.

Where a lot of people get stuck is on the wheel of before and after. If God knows something before it happens, it has to happen. Well, even if that were true it still wouldn't prove that knowledge the cause. It would only mean that the future (as a product of free choices made in the past and present, along with other things) is known. But it's not known to us so our choices would still be uncoerced.

But omniscience (God's knowing everything) doesn't work like that. When I say God is all-knowing I mean that all of reality, past present and future, is *simultaneously* present to His awareness. God doesn't know things before they happen from His perspective. He just knows. For us reality unrolls like a scroll, and we move from unknowing to knowing. That's where the apparent tension arises. It isn't omniscience that troubles some. It's their incomplete understanding of what the term really means. Add to that the fact that we naturally interpret reality from our own perspective and assume that perspective absolute. That assumption is a blind spot that skews our thinking.

There! Hopefully I've used enough big words and convoluted sentence structure to hide my ignorance.

peace

The fallacy here is in your assertion that God has predetermined everything, this is just not true. There is room for freedom of will within God's overall plan. God steps in periodically if our actions are about to interfere with his overall plan, otherwise God allows us to exercise our free will.

Also mathematicians can unlock some of this "omniscience" with ever improving models that model people's free will as anyone who gets into town planning knows about.You don't need to know where the individual is going to go to model the traffic flow of an entire city since all the "random" fluctuations in individuals behaviour is cancelled down by the sheer numbers. In fact in physics, when we deal with radioactive decay, one single atom might decay now but might not decay for a million years, as far as we can tell it's completely random which atom is going to decay, but because there are so many atoms the rate of decay is so constant we can create the most accurate clocks in the world. So on this scale the randomness is factored out completely. So the more people you try to model the less their free will (which is important to the individual) matters to the analysis of the system as a whole.

Another reconciliation is called "limited freedom of will". I think of a dog on a leash, the dog has free will within the boundaries of the leash but the dog's will is not fully free but also not fully determined.

If you are of a more deterministic mindset you could consider a train, destined to go to the end of the line but the passengers are free to get off anywhere along that line but not after the end of the line and not at stops that don't lie on the line.

I think the main problem here with your thinking is that you may be taking bits from one philosophy and splicing it into another. For example the concept of determinism in some protestant branches of christianity (which I like to call Wesleyan after the theologian John Wesley who was a staunch believer in free will) is very different from those of others (which I call Calvinistic after John Calvin who was a staunch believer in determinism). If you try to superimpose Wesleyan doctrines on free will into a Calvinistic mindset that will create problems, however the Christian scriptures themselves don't support 100% determinism or 100% freedom of will.

The conflict between determinism and uncertainty isn't just religious of course, this is a problem that has dogged physics since even before the birth of quantum mechanics. The rationale that the uncertainty of the microcosm is factored out in the macrocosm seems to me the best solution to this problem.

That's a Calvinist teaching, not a "religious" one. And, in the Bible, pre-determination was set for the prophets, not for everyone. But many Calvinists try to use that argument that everything is pre-determined, yet you have free-will. They use that argument to make it Your fault that you go to hell, instead of it, logically, being gods fault since he pre-determined it.

Not all Calvinists teach this strange doctrine, but I have seen it many times while discussing free-will with Calvinists.

Knowing what will happen and DETERMINING what will happen are 2 different things though. Knowing you will pick a certain thing doesn't mean that particular god determined you will do that. You are forcing it. (and nowhere in this statement does it say that it means free-will and preDETERMINATION can co-exist)

Agnostic

We have free will but who is making the claim that God has predetermined everything ?

That sounds like YOUR logical fallacy.

Christians don't believe God has predetermined everything.

Just because the future is known or may be known does not mean it is predetermined by the one who knows it.

Do you know what a rapist will do if he has 100% chance of not getting caught ?

Do you know what a starving person will do if he is suddenly given food ?

Do you know what a politician will do if he receives enormous campaign donations ?

By your reasoning if you know what they will do, that means you have predetermined their future.

This reasoning and logic is false.

That's why Christians don't believe it.

Free will is a somewhat dangerous term. As a Calvinist, I believe in free agency and predetermination of all events. Free agency simply means that people are not forced by God to do anything against their will. Free will means that people can desire to do anything. According to the Bible, the natural will is bound to sin, and therefore it is not free. We are still free agents with the ability to act in accordance with this will which has been bound to sin. I believe God has formed each person, creating them to be a certain way, giving them specific qualities and characteristics which cause them to react in certain ways to certain conditions at times in their lives. God created an intricate and vast web of people and objects that interact with each other according to their natures and influence each other to take action which will, in turn, influence other people and objects. I think that if you, at any point in your life, have the same knowledge, same personality, same character, and same situation, then you will always choose to take the same course of action. This has been predetermined by God in that He causes all things to work together in His brilliantly crafted web of events, but does no injury to free agency, because no one is forced to do anything against their will. It's pretty complex, so many Christians sadly reject the doctrine of fore-ordination. But the condensed version is that God created everything to behave in a certain way which is harmonious to its will/nature, and this is how He predetermined all events without forcing anything against someone's will.

The solutions are everywhere in the map, and all are both "valid" (or invalid), because heaven, as a very imaginary position or state of being, is a mode of content fabric-free psychological projective attempt, like an empty room that non secular believers can beautify and grant with in spite of stuff they choose.

The answer is: It is logically false. There is no fate. There are only consequences for actions. If people want to call it fate, they have the "free-will" lol to do just that. But calling an apple an orange doesn't make it one...

Let me rephrase here, we get saved, but we still sin. This is something we chose to do everyday, to sin or not to sin, if God would make me more perfect like him faster than regeneration does it, then I wouldn;t have the freewill to sin, which is in everyone's nature to do.

@Robin, many Christian sect interpret scripture differantly so how can you say Calvinism is not a theology?

We Christians know the difference. Atheists don't have the understanding to know the difference.