There would appear to be a fundamental incompatibility and
logical contradiction between omniscience and free will, and by
extension omniscience and the whole notion of heaven & hell.
The
good majority of people who believe in the judeo-xtian god (and
probably most other major gods as well) claim that this god is, among
other things, omniscient--that he knows everything. But what does this really mean? If you know everything,
that by definition includes the future. What the weather will be like
14,952 days from now. What Stalin's last thoughts were before he
died. What next Wednesday's lotto numbers will be (for every
lottery). And, what your next decision will be.
Your next
decision? Really? But, if that--and not just that, but
every--decision could be known in advance, it then becomes awfully hard
to argue that we still have free will, that we're not just some
elaborate program or automatons being run by god for some unknown
purpose. Free will necessarily and by definition involves the ability
to make a decision, to affect the outcome of a situation, such that
there is more than one possible outcome. If an outcome can be known
with absolute certainty before it happens though, that means there was
no possibility of any alternate outcome. Thus there could not have
been any genuine freedom of choice and no free will to choose an
alternative.
The consequence of that, in turn, means that
if we don't have free will, then we could not be held responsible for
our actions, since we really had no choice in the matter. This renders
as useless any system of reward or punishment, i.e. heaven & hell,
since we didn't have any free will to choose to do good or evil. Thus,
if a god existed, then either he is not omniscient, or he doesn't judge
us after death, or he is a capricious and malevolent being who punishes
people for no fault of their own. And if he is omniscient, what does that say about his own free will, or lack of?