Thanks to Prof. David Bernstein for dropping my email into his "athletes praising Jesus" post. I'm not sure that Tom Smith of The Right Coast has it right entirely, though. I agree with Tom about St. Augustine and John Calvin, but I really think that he's approaching it from the wrong side of Augustine.

Here's my opinion (prior to my review of On the Free Choice of the Will, which will happen tonight):

Augustine reasons briefly that if God knows all, then he must know how we will act in any given situation, and so we don't have free will. But if there is no free will, there is no sin, because we make no individual determinations for which we are culpable, and are merely deceived into thinking so. This would make God evil, which is not possible. Therefore, we must have free will, so that we are free to sin.

However, a good God cannot want people to sin; and a God who knew what we were to do before we did it would be willing us to sin. Therefore, God knows what will happen, and what should happen; free will is the difference, broadly speaking, between the two. When you use your free will in accordance with God's will, you will achieve happiness because you are acting in concert with God. When you use your free will in opposition to God, you will sin/be unhappy because you are in opposition to God's plan.

The major hangup for Augustine's kludge is that if you're not Christian, it's not possible to intuit God's will, since you lack the tools (faith). So it's dogmatically very sound, and a perfect doctrinal test, but essentially useless in determining whether God wanted a team to lose an athletic contest: clearly, if athletic contests are moral choices, the team that won acted in accordance with God's will, and the team that lost did not.