This is probably going to turn into a mess of a thread...or not. Is it predetermined to be so? Is it that the future is written out, encoded into reality, and we have but yet to live it, experience it? Or is it that there is a tapestry of intents, interwoven with threads of determinism and indeterminacy? To what extent is God culpable, supposing he exists?
Many of faith, specifically of the familiar monotheistic God of Judaism and Christianity and Islam (and their various sects), tout God's "Plan". This "Plan" is on the scale of "immaculate order" -- perfect, complete, and unchanging. It accounts for all possibilities, making no mistakes and allowing for no error, having been put in place upon the onset of Creation. All perception for uncertainties, unfairness, etc., is merely a disfunction brought upon by the finite nature of the one holding that perspective. It is also part of the Plan.
This view would have to deal with the paradox of the espousal that humanity possesses free will and that these choices and actions matter, while essentially being "preprogrammed" into future history. An individual's impact and efficacy is washed out by ultimately not having any responsibility for the consequences. Any weight of punitive action, divine or otherwise, seems but a pantomime, like some child getting angry at toys they made and direct, just errant meat robots. Such a thing would be merely sad, if it weren't that the toys were us and it also seems we have our own feelings and experience of this, so, for some reason, it matters to us.
But why bother? Is it for the entertainment of some cosmic being? Is this the divine equivalent to reality television?
Possibly, and this may not be far off from the Hindu's "atman", God, as the source and perspective of all consciousness, "lives" our lives. Or, more accurately, "rides" or "experiences" lives. The illusion of free will is accompanied with a "forgetting" of self, so that the programmed experience feels authentic and engaging. All the while, though, it's a series of performances, merely to appease a bored deity that just wants to "feel something". (Even Alan Watts proposed something of a similar nature with the "push button place" and the button labeled "surprise".)
Can there be free will with the "Plan", like this? Probably not without the provisions considered above: selective amnesia and compartmentalization. Effectively, God-With-Dissociative-Identity-Disorder, or something.
And, one has to wonder, if anyone figuring this out, or similar things like "enlightenment" where people wake up to this illusion, are part of this planned experience...what does that mean? If enough consciousness does this, does it reset? Is the game or experience over? Perhaps if the opposite occurs -- consciousness never wakes up, gets darker and ends up trying to extinguish itself on a cosmic scale -- that is also another reset situation. (One supposes that the source of reality itself has no choice but to remain real, thus indestructible even to its own devices of self-destruction. But that's probably a whole other discussion.)
It's probably unnecessary to point out how such things as love, honor, or worship would be in a system of predestination. Hollow and pointless. Would God really find pleasure in this?
Let's set aside predestination. Like many philosophers and others suggest, let there really only be The Now. There is potential, there is possibility, but all that is actual is only Now. The past is done, the future is not "here" yet. All that Is can be wrapped up in the given state of reality as it is on the only experiencable moment that has efficacy to reality: Now. Every moment, reality is making itself. Creation is a current (and ongoing) event.
How do we consider God's omniscience here? God would have a continuously updating awareness of Now, across all Creation. The "past" would be embedded in the "present" by a sort of historical log of "state regression". One could map causitive events which lead to the present. Knowledge of the future could be computed from the extrapolation of history and the acute, perfect awareness of each and every state transition at the very moment it would happen.
Another mitigating factor is that God, as the source and movement of all Being, also is time. God, being atemporal by nature, has "all the time in the world" between state transitions to account for the consequences. In a material sense, this is God-As-Physics, providing the most mechanistic-yet-fair system of consequence (among many other things). An illustrative limit is met here, since it isn't a proper analogy to use the imagery where God is sitting back thoughtfully between every moment. Since this is literally "outside of time", it is "metatemporal"; it doesn't "take any time" and would seem instantaneous to any perspective limited to a temporal frame.
The key factor here is that this leaves room for free will and a God able to meet the needs for consistency in an ongoing experience. Choices and actions matter, there is room for consequential and appropriate moral decision-making, and real responsibility can be laid upon the individual. The absence of predestination is the only sane view to have, if one is to consider our lives to have meaning and for God's remonstrations or Will to be important in them.
TL;DR -- Predestination doesn't make sense and is pointless, unless you consider God lobotomized himself and it's all just a masturbatory illusion. The alternative, the Eternal Now, offers more room for free will and meaning, without excluding anything that really makes God himself. It's stupid and unevolved to think otherwise.
