“Please tell me if you believe God knows everything that will happen in the next 10 minutes?”
Certainly, he must if He is all-knowing.
“Or, do you hold that the future is made up of many “free will” decisions (by “free agents”), and since they have no constraint upon them, no guidance, no pre-determination, then there are something approaching an infinite number of futures about to occur?”
Yes, I believe that is also true, except for the part about “infinite number of futures”. There might be an “infinite number of possible futures”, but there is only one future, based on the choices that are actually made. As soon as a choice is made, all the other “possible futures” arising from that decision point would cease to be possibilities. I also believe that there is no contradiction between the first proposition and the second.
“Or, do you hold to a what has been called a “contingent” future? That is, God knows approximately how people will behave, and in His great wisdom He guesses very well at those outcomes.”
Well, that is certainly something God could probably do, since God would know every creature’s nature and personality very well, but I don’t think it is necessary for God to “guess”, so I don’t think that is actually what is happening. God knows what will happen, so there can’t be guessing involved, or He could be wrong on some counts, which cannot be true.
“Or, do you have yet another paradigm that you believe the Bible has described?”
Well, it is like I have said, we have free will, but God still knows what will happen, and I see no contradiction between the two. Knowing what will happen is not the same thing as controlling what will happen. We are only tempted to think that is true, because that is what would be have to be true for US to predict the future, but it doesn’t logically hold true for God.
Think of it this way. God, who is outside of time and space, and not limited by anything, can see the entirety of fourth-dimensional space-time, in all directions. On the other hand, we can only perceive one slice of space-time (the present), and our perception progresses forward constantly outside of our control (we can’t look back at the past or future, or choose to stay in the “present”, we are just carried along).
So, we have a perception that there is this “future” that is unwritten, but is this true for God, or is it simply an artifact of our limited perception? We don’t have many tools to answer that question that aren’t biased by our own perception in the first place. One would be revelation from God, since he is outside of our limitations, and the others might be science and mathematics, as they allow us to discover things outside of the natural limits of our perception.
Both those sources seem to tell us that our limitations wouldn’t be binding on God. God himself says as much directly, and as for science/math, well that seems to tell us that time is just another dimension, and there are many “artifacts” (such as equations of real world phenomena routinely returning imaginary numbers as solutions) that suggest there are things going on in that dimension we can’t perceive. When we discovered relativity and started representing space-time mathematically, we learned that we needed those imaginary numbers to represent our fourth-dimension axis. So I think that fact, that these numbers were discovered before we truly understood their purpose, is good scientific evidence that there is a dimension of time that functions much like the others and we simply can only perceive it in a very limited sense.
So, even though our choices aren’t written in advance, anyone who could perceive the entirety of the fourth dimension could see what choices would be made. This wouldn’t even be “predicting the future” as we conceive of it, because for such a being, “the future” is a meaningless concept. To them, all the actions that ever will occur have already occurred.
Well, if you re-read your post, you have “answered” the question that there is one future which God does know. As you point out, once that future is established (which it must be or there would not be a future that He knew definitively), the other options cease to be possible. Thus, the “free agents” are not free.
If you were consistent, you would be an Open Theist contending that God does not know the unchosen future any more than we do BECAUSE the free choices have not been made yet. However, you attempt to say, Up is both down and up. That may be grammatically correct, but it is not possible in the world. A is not non-A. Law of the excluded middle.
Again, I am not referring to our “perceptions” of reality (which are governed by our discoveries), but by reality itself. If there is only one outcome for the future, WHICH God actually knows, then that outcome must occur exactly as He knows it AND there is no alternate reality which could have occurred. There are alternatives which one could have imagined to have occurred, but they could not have occurred if they did not comport with the reality God knows is going to occur.