> The point of all this is that if someone's actions are known, it doesn't mean they weren't truly one's own decision. God knows what shirt I'm going to wear tomorrow, but is it therefore his choice? I don't think so. It's my choice. In the eyes of an omniscient being, it's a predictable choice, but it's still mine. God's knowledge of that choice doesn't make it any less my free will choice as Darleen's knowledge of the shirt I wore today removes the free will involved with *that* decision.
I agree. Another analogy here (hope this is useful to someone) is in a game of skill, such as chess. If you know how someone will play, you can beat him much more easily; but it's still up to him to choose his own moves. Free will is something God has *chosen* not to take away from us. He could take away all choices but one (or make the others look stupid - see Yes Minister on foreign relations, where the Civil Service pretends the Foreign Minister has free will), or turn us into little robots; but He chose to let us choose, and that means let us choose evil if we wished - which leads into this other point.

> Today, there is a lot of evil, and there are a lot of things that are just "bad" -- things we would call accidents and so forth -- that aren't *evil* so much as simply bad things that *are*. But even those can be dated back to the first sin of Adam and Eve, the first time in history that humankind exercised free will to choose something against God's command. At that moment, evil entered the universe and corrupted it; prior to that, there weren't even natural disasters or other sorts of things we would call "bad" yet aren't the purposeful result of someone's actions.

All of creation is groaning under this burden.

Natural disasters. That's an interesting point. Would such things have happened, had sin not entered the world? We could discuss this one for years, never coming to a final conclusion, I think. We are not told what *might* have happened. BTW: This concept is fairly good evidence that there are no other inhabited planets in this universe. No other free-will beings should be punished by our sin - nor should we by theirs - and all through the universe signs are visible of the groaning.

This probably isn't much help, but it might be. If it is, good; if not, oh well, mebbe this post gets deleted.