Some Schmo wrote:Alrighty...
I think the problem I have with this idea of free agency is the other idea that god is omniscient. If he knows all, then he knows what we will "choose", he knows where we will end up, and he knows whether we're screwed or not before the game begins. So it begs the question, "Why would he even bother?" (Not to mention "what's the point of Judgment Day?")
It's just so damn silly. In the most basic and fundamental terms, the gospel makes no freaking sense at all.
Have you seen the movie "Minority Report"? It touches on this philosophical issue, though in a secular and much more limited way.
The problem with your question is that it fails to take into account a large portion of the life-equation. It looks alone at things in terms of outcome, and in a mono-dimensional way, without considering the processes often needed to produce those outcome.
It's somewhat like asking a physical trainer: "If you know, with perfect certainty, that through your program, and according to individual choice and action, which of your clients will become healthy, fit, and strong, and which will get fatter, or which will end up somewhere inbetween, then why would you even bother putting any of them through your program? What's the point of the check-up at the end of the program? Why not now just give those obese clients you know would become healthy and fit, a clean bill of health, and be done with it?
Wouldn't that be "damn silly"?
The same is true for the plan of salvation--which requires actual obedience to certain laws (not to be confused with perfect knowledge that certain people will obey those laws) in order to attain the subsequent blessings. It requires personal growth in love and "truth", and a change in one's nature (from carnal to spiritual) via spiritual progression, to become like Christ and his father. These are things that cannot be endowed, but must be experienced and earned.
I realize that this doesn't fit the stereptyped answer that silentkid expected from apologists, but there it is.
Thanks, -Wade Englund-