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Oh, I think philosophy is a complete and utter waste of time, personally. It's the faithless' man's religion, a way to flex your mental peen that yields no tangible result whatsover.
That's unfortunate. Why do you bring it up? I'd like to know how you're defining religion also.
Also, many philosophers would agree with you. The discipline itself contains an enormous divide between those who might do moral philosophy, or meta-ethical questions, or searches for meaning, and then those who do purely logical relations among thoughts. True philosophy needs both.
In any case.
I'm aware of the counter arguments to the incompatibility of omniscience and free will (as I defined it anyway; there are plenty of people now that think that even free will and determinism are compatible, but I don't). However, almost all of the arguments that say that they are compatible are not real disputes; they just mess with the syntax of the statement and pretend that they are saying something with a different logical position, which is why I really didn't acknowledge them. Maybe it is a different position, but I really don't see how.
The real question is how you interpret time. When you say, "one could argue that free will 'comes first'. So humans freely make a decision, but God knows what that decision will be. The 'free' in 'free will' applies to the human's consciousness, not to some 'objective unpredictability'" you are certainly correct, but only insofar as you get to play semantic games with the term "free will". Unfortunately for us, the future and past do not actually exist. Perhaps they exist for a God, but whatever it means for that God to "know" the future, is something that we probably can't even come close to either understanding, or communicating. That leaves us in a very strange position; we can either wash our hands of it (in which case it is no longer philosophy at all) or we can somehow attempt to pretend that a hypothetical God "knows" in a way that is close to the way in which we "know" things.
To me, knowledge implies some sort of certainty of the future so that it could not be different from what was expected, because knowledge of things is knowledge of true things in such a way that we are certain of some sort of expectation we have upon examining them. Unfortunately, that prevents anything at all from being knowledge in that sense, because all real reasoning about the world is probabilistic. Quite obviously if knowledge was to be had of the future by anything, much less God, then our free will kinda vanishes. Maybe if you want to talk about knowledge in a weaker sense, where you only have to be pretty damn sure about what is going to happen, and you have say, a probability of the occurance somewhere around 95%, then that would be fine, but it wouldn't be the kind of thing that I think of when I hear the word "omniscience." I might even go so far as to say that if there were certain knowledge of anything, then the future as some sort of construct of time could not exist, because a future implies something that is not known.
Lets talk about modern compatibilism in say, philosophy of mind; there are these dudes that define "free will" as something like "endorsing and agreeing with the actions that you do." The example that was given to me was something like... Pretend that you have been kidnapped in the dead of night, and taken to a room, where, upon awakening, you see your best friend from high-school, a pot of coffee, and many cookies. The only action available to you is to partake in those cookies and coffee and talk to this old friend for several hours. Fortunately for you, that is exactly what you were planning to do in the first place. A compatibilist will call the resulting action a "free" one, so long as it's what you wanted to do, regardless of whether or not you could have changed it. I want more out of my free will. I want some sort of power that can change causal chains of events that would not have happened otherwise, were I not to have interacted with them.
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Also (as if I really needed to pontificate anymore...)
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You can, but even without reading your post I can tell you philosophy is not what a man does when he's a man of action. Just because it's old emo, doesn't make it less emo.
I think that actions as such would be impossible without philosophy, provided that you have some sort of moral code, and don't like the idea of everyone going about, subjugating everyone else to their own particular brand of "action," unless of course you happen to like the idea of some barely cognizant Neanderthal using his/her own capricious preferences as a justification for well, everything. Although, there are philosophies that advocate just that kind of life.
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I even think it should be compulsory in school from a young age.
If only... god if only
Edited, Sep 25th 2007 4:11pm by Pensive
"Jeez", than a 
"Jeez". 
