I shared my best guess in the last paragraph of my comment–soul-making. Perhaps there is something special about the kinds of beings formed by the life of faith that God especially values.
I can’t agree with this. If God is outside our timeline (as I think he is), his perception of time could be quite different. We experience choice then consequence, one happening after another, God quite possibly sees both at once.
I think “after this therefore because of this” is something that is so firmly a part of this life that it’s easy to fall into the trap of saying “this isn’t logical” when we mean “this is outside our normal experience.”
After all there are plenty of things such as relativistic effects, antimatter, and single photon interference that definitely do exist, but are so deeply counter-intuitive that at first sight they seem illogical until we learn to use a larger logic. How, for example, does the photon which has passed through one slit, know where the other slit is, or even that it exists, in order to form an interference pattern? Clearly illogical, but the pattern exists.
Chris,
I’ve been reading that thread with interest. I agree with you that without freedom - libertarian or otherwise 
- we indeed could not make sense of the notions of ourselves and causation. The same is true of epistemic distance.
My problem is with the idea that God may remove some individuals’ ‘freedom’, and the epistemic distance that is necessary for that freedom, in order to save them. As I say, if he is ever going to do that for anyone, then why doesn’t he do it for all of us, right now?
Yes, thanks akimel. Sorry, my question was more rhetorical than actual. And I kind of buy the ‘soul-making theodicy’. Kind of …
No, when I said “isn’t logical” I meant “isn’t logical” as in formal logic. What I said wasn’t logical is your affirmation that “free choices are still free even if God knows about them in advance.” That statement is self-contradictory, and I have shown why in my previous post. The only way that it could be considered non-contradictory is to define “free choice” in an unusual way. If it is defined as soft determinists define it “actions which are not forced by external constraint” then the statement is not illogical. But if “free choice” is defined as “actions which could have been otherwise if the originator of the actions had chosen to do otherwise” then it IS illogical.
I can see what you are getting at but I still don’t agree. I still think God is outside time and sees it all at once. However I don’t think we are ever going to resolve this, and propose leaving it here.
I’ve been thinking a lot of this lately too. Perhaps God can’t really “remove” the epistemic distance without the free will of the creature “answering the knock at the door”? The issue I’ve always had with believing this is that a) it conflicts strongly with my personal experience (it seems oftentimes God has simply “taken away” my sins rather than me “conquering” them in any free sense); and b) it flies in the face of a guaranteed Universalism.
But maybe both those points are wrong. Perhaps a) is wrong because we simply don’t have the tools to adequately assess our own free acts. Introspection is notoriously unreliable. Perhaps it is not possible - or possible only very rarely - for us to be able to know with much confidence what part our free will has actually played in our interaction with God? *God *may certainly know, but maybe it’s not possible to know how our freedom and his grace have worked together? And maybe b) doesn’t follow either. (Check out my ideas on this in my thread about the “box of coins” analogy.) If we assume God has infinite time and can approach closed epistemic distance status at an infinite proportion, then is it not much more plausible than not – indeed infinitely more plausible – to suppose that all free wills will eventually open the door? If “probabilities” are irrational when applied to infinities, and if, indeed, we speak more truly when we speak of “practical certainties,” would it not be true to say that it is “practically certain” that, given infinite time and infinite grace, every person will freely climb the stair of being and become, well…gods?