Christianity does not support determinism

If you're using the "God works in mysterious ways" argument, I could just as easily say that God's foreknowledge not interfering with our free will is just beyond our human capacity to understand. God is just so far beyond our level of thought that we cannot understand how he knows the future yet we retain free will. Going in reverse order as you can see, I would reject your other idea that God is not good by supplying these quotes from the Bible: PSALM 145:8-9 8 The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, Slow to anger and great in mercy. 9 The Lord is good to all, And His tender mercies are over all His works. LUKE 6:35-36 35 "But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Highest. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. 36 "Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. God's goodness is a main tenet of Christianity and to argue against it for the sake of determinism makes determinism much less compatible with Christianity simply because of that. Free will is supportive of justice as is Christianity. As for our lovely quotes we supplied, my topic may be that Christianity does not support determinism but in my opening argument I clarify what the debate is exactly: "In other words, would the Christian faith support the viewpoint of free will or determinism?" So our biblical quotes nullify each other in a way. By the name of the debate I would agree that my quotes mean nothing, but as to the actual argument and question I have laid out, they are meaningful in that they show free will in the Bible. Still, there is evidence of both free will and determinism in the Bible, thus I thought we should look beyond direct scripture about it. I understand what you're trying to say about causal chains and that "perfect prediction" isn't possible in an indeterministic universe, but I will explain further. You brought up playing the odds that your friend would buy a certain soft drink because you knew him/her so well. This is different from the example I gave about the hypothetical time machine. In my example, I am not going to be wrong and I am not going to play the odds when I guess the score to that game, I will know 100% the outcome. That doesn't mean the universe is deterministic, it simply means I could know both the present and the future at once (in minute form). Time is obviously a tricky subject to deal with, but I don't believe that God's knowledge of all time at a given moment means that we do not have free will. I do not believe that I have admitted a deterministic universe to exist. God seems to be above time almost, I mean, he created time in a sense when he created this universe according to Christianity. So as I've said before, it is not as though he sees the present as the present, it is all in one continuum. Our past, present, and future are all the same to him, like points on a line. Again, this is a complex argument because it is hard for the human mind to imagine something above time, such an elementary concept. One other argument against determinism is that determinism actually doesn't support God's existence at all. It is defined as the belief that "every event is causally determined by an unbroken prior chain of occurrences." So would that not go against the idea of God? If a determinist were to ask a Christian the question "How did the earth come to be?" A Christian would most likely say "God." or perhaps the Big Bang theory if they were very metaphorical in their interpretation of the Bible. And the determinist may ask "What caused the Big Bang?" but whatever question the determinst will ask, it will always come back to God for a Christian. And this is unacceptable for determinism. If each event is causally determined by an unbroken prior chain of occurences, there can be no first cause. A determinist would most likely hold the belief that cyclical theory is correct. Cyclical theory says that the universe has been contracting, expanding, and exploding for infinite time and will do so for infinite time. Therefore, there is an infinite chain of causes that would please the determinist. But in Christianity, God is that first cause. He is eternal, he did not cause himself and nothing caused him. Determinsim certainly wouldn't support that claim because there had to be some cause before God and cause before that and a cause before that, so on and so on to infinity. An infinite number of causes is what determinism would support. An infinite being who has no cause but has always been is something determinims would not support. Therefore, free will is the much better option. It allows for more openness in the existence of God in that it does not defy his existence as determinism does. Justice is supported by both free will and Christianity. And last of all, omniscience does not mean there is no free will, just that God is beyond time, as he created it in the first place. Thank you for debating with me, it has been a pleasure. Look forward to hearing your conclusion/counterargument.