If (1) God’s foreknowledge of the event is temporally prior to the event, as it would be if He is omniscient, but (2) the choice made by your friend is causally prior to God’s foreknowledge of the event, such that it causes God’s foreknowledge of the event, then I don’t see any begging of the question. This scenario I describe could happen if God can operate both inside and outside of the time realm that we experience in one direction only.
You keep ignoring my insistence that I haven’t disputed ‘free will’ could be held to be compatible with omniscience. My discussion hasn’t centered on that at all. And I take your final remarks to just confirm that the nub is semantical confusion, and does not challenge what I’ve tried to argue.
I fully get that you think a future freely chosen still undetermined event is something knowable, and thus omniscience can know it. That doesn’t change what I argued, that if X if the flying out that God knows, then it can not prove “false,” and as I said, “X IS going to happen,” and there is at that point “no alternative” outcome.
Again, it is not all about you. The main question I speak of is the main question that I have been addressing throughout this thread. It started with my reply to Paidion, and since I was the one who first brought it up, then I am fully capable and entitled to call it the main question since that to me is what it is.
As to your other point, I have nothing more to add since I can barely understand what you are saying.
Actually, I do believe that God knows all things. That’s what it means to be “omniscient.”
However, knowing in advance what a free-will agent will choose is a contradiction in terms, and so is not included within the scope of “all things.”
That’s how the choice causes God to know the choice before it happens in our time. Consequently, one freely makes a choice that is foreknown by God.
Here is what William Craig says about this issue. Note he uses the term logically prior to instead of causally prior to in this explanation.
“What we want to say is that though God’s knowledge is chronologically prior to the event foreknown, the event foreknown is logically prior to God’s knowledge. First God foreknows it, then the event happens. So God’s knowledge is chronologically prior to the event. But the event is logically prior to God’s foreknowledge. Whichever way the event goes, God’s foreknowledge will follow it. If X happens, then God will foreknow that X will happen. If X were to fail to happen, then God will foreknow that X will fail to happen. God’s knowledge is sort of like an infallible barometer. An infallible barometer will tell you with infallible correctness which way the weather will be. But the barometer doesn’t determine the weather; the weather determines the barometer. From the barometer’s reading, you can know how the weather will be, but the barometer won’t determine the weather, it is the other way around. Such is the case with foreknowledge, too. It is X that is logically prior to what God knows. It is not that what God knows is logically prior to X. What God knows is only chronologically prior to X.”
Right, I get your contention. And while I’m more unclear about what ‘free-will’ means or exists, I find your perception worthy. My frustration was that I perceive Lancia never engaged it, and dismissed the challenge you raise by speaking as if the real meaning of words like “will” could prove you are mistaken.
That argument appears non-sense to me. The question of whether it’s coherent that a God who knows all that is knowable would know the outcome of ‘free-will’ decisions that haven’t been made yet stands on its own, and is not resolvable by quarrels over the language with which it is posed.
Yes, my theme has been that the crux is that we each are struggling to grasp the other’s semantics,
and that language about this unknown mystery is difficult. I’m sorry my words remains obtuse.
Trying again, I’m saying ultimately that in a context with no determinism, whether it’s logical that ‘free’ choices that have not even been processed yet by their agent can be already known by a deity able to access all knowledge that presently exists, remains debatable. So arguing that word definitions can show that omniscience can already know such choices can settle nothing. (And I can see why Paidion is skeptical that ability to know this makes sense, and is not contradictory.)
But that IF God indeed already knows a future choice (e.g. X: the chooser is going to decide to fly), even though the causative mechanisms involved in the process of a ‘free’ agent’s decision about that have not even yet begun, then now it logically follows concerning that choice defined as ‘free,’ that “X IS going to happen,” has to happen, must happen, or as I tried to convey, is “bound to be” what happens, and thus there is “no alternative” to that outcome resulting. That’s why I found all the insistence that X could still prove to be 'false" very confusing.
In any event, great thanks to you for providing a delightful diversion from our site’s seeming obsession with arguing Donald Trump’s (or the godless left’s) virtues, or lack thereof 
Yeah… who knew? 
But of course a barometer doesn’t detect any future information. It only detects present reality and on the basis of deterministic cause and effect, extrapolates what should then be coming next. So I doubt that this non-parallel analogy will convince those who doubt that it makes sense that ability to know everything that can presently be known would make it coherent that free choices that haven’t been determined or even addressed yet can also be known with certainty.
IF the future ‘exists’, then God himself is bound by it.
The question is not about omniscience, it is about time. Does it rule, or does God?
Isn’t it a theological truth that God can exist timelessly?
If time began when the universe was created (simultaneous with the big bang), and God is the creator, how could He not have existed timelessly?
And if He existed timelessly, how could He be bound by time?
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Yes, those questions bother me as well, but I’m sure part of it is our using the concept ‘timelessly’. I’m not sure we can even elucidate what that means.
In any case, my theory is that, IF time is a thing such that the future can be observed, then it is the kind of thing that does NOT have to be ‘observed’ but is in fact ‘done,’. Once it ‘started’, if it is the kind of thing where the future can be ‘seen’, then it is done and cannot be changed.
I’m not talking about ‘libertarian free will’ and that whole can of worms, just the concept of time as being the type of thing we have been talking about.
I’m open to any and all comments about that.
I’m trying hard to use everyday language; I’m not sure that I’ll be successful at that.
Is there some reliable consensus on what is “theological truth,” and how is it confirmed? I find a variety of theological beliefs in the world.
More important, I’m a bit agnostic and don’t know what it would even mean to assert that God is “timeless,” or what that would confirm about being able to know future undetermined choices that free agents have apparently not even contemplated yet.
More broadly I hear Dave’s effort to phrase the puzzle in intelligible language to be getting at the same kind of problems I keep posing in my own recent posts. If God indeed is somehow able to look into a ‘future’ where he can discern what will be done by yet to exist free beings who have in what we can grasp of reality not yet even contemplated making those choices, then that ‘future’ world sounds like a kind of thing that in a profound sense is a done reality and cannot be changed.
That leads me to think that the open theists view that omniscience only means knowing what can now be known is not so irrational.
I’m inclined to view it more in terms of… God has bound Himself TO time, but in no way is bound BY time.
As I presently see it… time is not a thing per sé, but rather… an arbitrary measurement guesstimated to establish a quantifiable distance between two points to help frame a reference point.
You may be right about that. I like your definition of time, also.
It does seem to me that the question is moot IF time is NOT like we’ve been talking about - if the future is not ‘out there’ at all. I don’t know how to establish that, one way or the other.
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We should have a short song, to illustrate this! 
Of course, some folks here are curious…as to Got Question’s take on this.
I think the point remains, though - IF time includes the future, then God is committed to it.
Now we can go all Calvinist and claim that God pre-ordained each thing that happens, from beginning to end, before it happens. Every atom in the Universe, for 13 billion years or so. In that way, we do lose free will - whatever that is - but we do save Omniscience - whatever that is.
But if God has to ‘look’ to see ‘what happens’ - then time is in control.
If the future is yet to happen, God is still in control, and free will is saved.
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Causal or logical priority does not imply temporal priority in a being who transcends time as we know it. So, just because nothing can be temporally prior to God, it doesn’t follow that nothing can be causally or logically prior to God’s foreknowledge.
In saying that an event is foreknown by God because it is causally or logically prior to God’s foreknowledge, we are not implying that the event occurs prior to God’s existence. We are saying that God foreknows the event occurs at some future time (as we view the future) because the occurrence of the event at that future time causes God, who transcends time as we experience it, to foreknow it.
That’s the troubling clause, and I don’t know how to get around it. If the future event is so embedded that it has the force of causing God to acknowledge it, we have I think a conceptual hurdle.
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