Awfully hard to be omniscient and not own up to premeditation.
Unless, of course, God purposefully created a reality within which He could not predict the future. At face value this assertion seems to lead inevitably to an omnipotence paradox, but I don't think it's inevitable at all.
One of the most amusing and thought provoking responses to the age old question of whether or not God could create a rock so big that He couldn't lift it is as follows:
God could create a rock so big that He couldn't lift it, then lift it. After all it should certainly be possible for an omnipotent being to set the conditions that allow one thing to be true and then alter those conditions to allow the opposite to be true. He can always lift the rock, if He chooses, but for a time He enforces a set of conditions that make it impossible. At any time however He can remove or alter some or all of those conditions.
This is how we can have omnipotence and free will at the same time. God has created a reality within which He is unable to predict, with 100% certainty, what people will choose to do. Perhaps this is a fundamental aspect of human consciousness, or perhaps, and possibly more likely, it is a fundamental feature of reality itself from which consciousness emerges. The important question here is whether or not God's ability to create a reality within which He can not with absolute certainty predict events is at odds with the idea of omnipotence. When considering this question, also consider that it is within God's power to alter the fundamental nature of reality, or certain aspects or parts of it, at any time that He chooses, to make anything and everything knowable again. For now, however, as it is critical to him that free will exist, He lets it. Anything that He knows in advance is attributable to his superior insight and His ability to intercede occasionally at critical points throughout history in order to ensure that certain things occured. This is why you see Jesus going out of His way to make sure certain prophecies were fulfilled in the bible. They weren't fulfilled as a natural consequence, rather, Jesus would say something like "I did this to fulfill the prophecy...". I don't read the Bible these days, but I'm sure there are a bunch of other people here who can pull out the precise examples if anyone is curious.
Of course, some of you are going to get stuck on the idea that the moment God can't know something, even if He is responsible for manufacturing the circumstances within which there is something He can't know or can't do, then He is no longer omnipotent. As far as I am concerned, that is complete nonsense. He is capable of knowing and doing anything and everything always, and the fact that He sometimes strategically chooses not to know something, sometimes even going to the trouble of creating an entire physical universe so profoundly incredible that the smartest human beings in the world stuggle to understand some of it's most basic attributes, in order for that to be possible, doesn't suggest to me at all that there is some kind of limit to His power. God could create a rock so big that He couldn't lift it,
THEN LIFT IT. That's what omnipotence is.
I'm throwing this bone to all you theists because although it's not going to satisfy everyone here, it's a hell of a lot more compelling than any of the tired old arguments that every atheist has heard a million times before. It reduces all the nonsense to a single question which concerns the nature of omnipotence. Everything else derives in one way or another from this single consideration.
Michaelangelo?
