The first paradox many people have trouble with is, “Can free will and an all-knowing creator exist simultaneously?” The answer to this is obviously no, they cannot. That does not mean, however, that free will cannot exist at the same time as a God who can know the future. The fact is; the Bible provides us with prophecy, which means that absolutely God can know the future. What it does not mean is that God does know every detail of the future of every person alive. God chose to use his power of fore-ordinance in order to provide us with details about the rapidly approaching judgment day, and the events that are to occur leading up to it. Jehovah, however, uses this power selectively, as he does with all his powers. Jehovah only uses his powers when it serves his purposes, he does not use them to show off. The purpose of prophecy is to give his followers direction. So what this paradox actually states is that if someone knows with 100% accuracy what you are going to do tomorrow, then you do not have the free will to do otherwise. In God’s case, he does have the potential to know what you will do tomorrow, but chooses not to exercise that ability, and therefore, your free will remains intact.
If this explanation seems contrived, consider this. According to quantum mechanics, the property of a particle or any object does not exist unless it is observed (in fact, "particles" can exhibit properties that are mutually exclusive from one another...all "particles" in the universe, for example, exhibit wave properties under certain tests that are mutually exclusive to the particle properties they exhibit in other tests). As an example, the uncertainty principle states that a particle’s (or any object’s) position and velocity cannot be known with infinite accuracy. That is not a statement about the limitations of current technology, but a fundamental property of objects within this universe. Quantum mechanics therefore states that those objects do not have an exact position or velocity, but rather, their position in phase space (an abstract higher-dimensional space with dimensions corresponding not only to physical space, but also the components of velocity and other degrees of freedom that are important to the experiment) is a probability curve, so that, for example, if I measure a particle’s position, rather than being able to predict what answer I am going to get, I am presented with a probability spectrum of where I am likely to find the particle. This fact does apply to macroscopic objects as well, but we normally don’t think about it because our technology is not advanced enough to find a macroscopic object’s position with that much precision anyway. Now, if it is true that a phenomenon (such as a particle with a given position) is not, in a sense real or concrete until it is actually observed in the present, then this must be true even more so for phenomena in the future. Therefore, just because Jehovah has the ability to know the future (just like we have the ability to perform an experiment to find a particle’s position in the present), the fact that he does not use this ability in people’s everyday lives (just like we are not constantly running experiments to determine the position of every particle in universe at every instant of time) means that a person’s future is yet unwritten and free will remains intact (just like the particle whose position is undefined).
The other paradox is the one concerning an all-powerful deity. Is such a notion a contradiction? If such a deity can create a being with the ability to defeat him, then he is not all-powerful, and if he cannot, then it seems again that he is not all-powerful. The problem with the paradox comes down to definitions. To solve this, I am going to again turn to physics and quantum mechanics. According to classical mechanics, if you put a particle in a box, the smallest amount of energy that particle can have is zero (this is ignoring mass-energy equivalence, I’m talking purely about mechanical—that is kinetic, potential, and to some extent, internal—energy). This energy level in classical mechanics—the level of zero energy—is called the zero-point energy. According to quantum mechanics, however, just like there is a position-momentum uncertainty principle, there is also a time-energy uncertainty principle, and the important application here is that it is actually impossible, because of this uncertainty, for the particle in a box to actually have zero energy. The smallest amount of energy a particle can have, then, is whatever it is, but it is slightly above zero, but we still call that the zero-point energy. In this situation, zero-point energy does not mean that the particle has no energy, it simply means the smallest amount of energy that particle can have. Similarly, when we say God is all-powerful, we are not actually saying that he can do anything. No one, including God, for instance, can create a situation in which a true paradox is realized. So what we mean when we say that God is all-powerful is not that he can do anything, but rather, nothing that is within the set of all things that are possible to occur is impossible for God to do. It just so happens then, that the existence of a being more powerful than God is not within that set, but rather, in the set of all things that are impossible to occur, so the fact that God cannot create a being more powerful than him does not result in contradiction when we have the right definition of what it means to be all-powerful.
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