FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM

There are at least two views on what is time:

One view, the more classical and familiar, has it that the future events are just what they are, things yet to occur, non-existent until brought into reality as the clock ticks forward.

While another somewhat radical view of time is that there is no time. Instead, reality is like some Cosmic DVD with an (almost) infinite number of scenes, and the Creator, aka God, Allah, Shiva, etc., owns the DVD player. And as such, the Creator can skip ahead to whatever scene he wants to see in the future, past, or present.

Which means if the future is already encoded as a scene on this Cosmic DVD, then by default we as humans have already made our 'free will' choices to make those scenes occur. But here it seems 'free will' is an illusion, as the future is knowable by fast-forwarding the Cosmic DVD....

....Unless, we get off that linear Cosmic DVD. I noticed a recent trend with some suspense movies that there are options in the "special features" section to play the movie with alternate endings. So, maybe the Cosmic DVD of Reality has this random feature, with an infinite number of possible alternate outcomes, based on our 'free will' choices?

Which if, this is the case, we DO have a degree of 'free will'.

(But does this allow for parallel realities existing in the various other outcomes, which we did not use our free will to choose? For details on this concept, see the Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics http://frombob.to/many.html )

And, ultimately, does the Creator know which outcome we'll pick? And if so, what's the point of creating us if the Creator already knows the ending?

Or does the Creator have the omniscient ability to know the outcome, as we perceive our Creator to be all-knowing (and omnipresent too), but choose not to look ahead?

The next installment will delve into the religious mythology associated with this concept... i.e., eating certain fruits in Eden...