Series - "Common objections to Christianity Pt 3"

Can God create a rock too heavy for him to lift?

The answer is that God cannot do the logically impossible. There can't exist a rock that is too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift. Since it's a logical impossibility, God can't create it, just as he can't prove that A is the same as not A. This does not limit God's power, for he can do everything that is logically possible; nothing is too hard for him (Jer 32:17).

If God knows for sure that an event will occur at a certain time in the future, can he prevent it from occurring?

When we say that God is omnipotent regarding future events, what we really mean is that God can cause any particular event to occur at any given time. If God wants it to rain next Friday in San Juan, he is capable of causing it to rain. Furthermore, God's omniscience means that he's always known what he will want to happen on any given day, and can plan events accordingly. If God wants it to rain next Friday in San Juan, he would have known that he wanted that event to occur when the universe was created, and he would have set things up accordingly.
Thus if God knows it will rain next Friday in San Juan, it's because he wants it to rain then and there and will cause it to happen. If he wanted different weather in San Juan next Friday, he would have caused that weather to occur instead.
God doesn't change his mind (1 Sam 15:29), so he will never be in a situation where one day he wants an event to occur but the next day he doesn't. Yet even if he did change his mind, he would have always known that he would change his mind and what his final wishes would be, and he could act according to his final wishes.

How can we have free will if God has a plan for our lives and knows everything we'll do in advance?

Since God is omniscient, God has foreknowledge, meaning he knows what everyone will do in the future and what any individual would do in any given situation. This foreknowledge enables God to have a plan for everyone's life. For instance, if God wants a particular action to occur, he knows who would choose to do that action, and under what circumstances they would choose it; thus he is able to plan for it to happen. However, God's knowing what choices we will make is simply knowledge - it doesn't remove our free will, for we are still the ones making the choices.

This may be more understandable if we consider that we have a type of foreknowledge from our knowledge of history. For example, we know that the Americans won the Revolutionary War. If we went back in time before the Revolutionary War took place, our knowing the outcome wouldn't force anyone to do anything. Our knowing the Boston Tea Party would take place wouldn't mean that the colonists would be forced to throw the tea overboard, it would only mean that we'd know what the colonists would choose to do. It's the same with God: his knowing what we'll freely choose to do doesn't mean we're forced to make that choice.

Have Intelligent Faith!!

- Nelis