>God knows what he's going to do and yet He does it.
>Can He help it?
Reggie,
there's a school of thought that holds that even god has no free will. Here is something I plagiarized from
http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/god_...free_will.html that explains this notion.
1. AN OMNISCIENT (ALL-KNOWING) BEING DOES NOT HAVE FREE WILL
If you are all-knowing, you know your future actions, what choices you will make, and you cannot change them otherwise your knowledge would be wrong, and you wouldn't be all-knowing. An omniscient being has no free will to choose actions; all its actions are predetermined.
If you knew a decision you are going to make in the future... what would it mean? You would have no free will to change that choice. No option, no choices... based on the fact that you know its going to happen, it is predestined and no amount of strong will can change it. The further in the future the predicted choice is, the less free will you have to change it! Well imagine if for infinity you'd always known exactly what choices you were going to make, and that you could never be wrong. You would never have had any free will in any choice, ever!
In effect God is an observer. An omniscient being has no free will - its entire future is set out and it has no choice but to follow its predestined path.
2. A PERFECT GOD HAS NO FREE WILL
Out of the possible options in a situation God always makes the best choice because it is perfectly benevolent. It cannot do something that is less moral or "good" than something else, because that would not be perfectly good, but merely second-best good. In every situation, God only has one choice: The most moral/good one. God does not have free will. It can make no choices, there are no possibilities for an omniscient-benevolent God to choose from. In order to give God its free will, we would have to take away its omniscience - its all-knowing nature - or take away its benevolence.
When people say that God has free will, they must also mean that God is imperfect. If God is not perfect then it becomes possible for God to choose a less-than-perfect action. If God is not imperfect, then, it is impossible for god to perform imperfect actions. Therefore God has no free will.
3. A MORAL GOD HAS NO FREE WILL
God, as the ultimate creator, created goodness. God is also said to be a perfectly good benevolent God. This means that God fulfils every possibility of the goodness it has created. It is the be-all and end-all of goodness, perfectly good and unerringly good. If God was not 100 percent perfectly moral, God would not be perfect. This results in a complete lack of free will for God.
God knows the nuances and complexities of every situation. God knows which actions are optimal, it knows which actions are perfectly good. Only God, I would guess, is capable of performing actions that are perfectly good. And it does so unerringly, constantly, because it itself is perfectly good and never errs. It is all-knowing and perfectly good. But, the problem is for free will, in any situation, of all the possible things God could do, God does the perfectly morally right one. It never chooses an inferior course of action because it is perfect. If it acted imperfectly, it would not be perfect.
So, in any situation, a perfectly moral God has no choice: It must carry out what action is most good. God, in creating goodness, and being perfectly good, is completely limited to only a set, predetermined series of actions. In any situation, at any point in time or out of time, God has no free will: It must robotically and automatically carry out the precise action that is perfectly good.