I’m not entirely sure if this is related to what you’re speaking of, but this was part 1 of a paper I wrote awhile back - I’ve been posting it on threads that deal with the subject, so I hope it gives some additional insight on the concept.
Wow, now I feel stupid… Here’s the article, lol.
I go out to a river. Then I craft a boat, which will be piloted by a young child, and then I sail him down the river. The river carries him downstream - in one basic direction. Is the child predestined to sail down the river? Yes. Is he predestined to dock in a specific place down the river? Not exactly.
God made us and our surroundings, and He knows everything about us - past, present, and future. Yet He does not force us to do anything - rather He allows us to go down a general path. Think of the above-mentioned child in his boat. He is going down a path with limited options, but if he knows how to steer the boat he can choose where exactly he goes down that path - that’s the function of free will. We might be set on a course of sorts (limited via our physicality, language, location, family, and all other circumstances in our lives), but ultimately we are in control of where we will arrive within that course, within our given circumstances.
I believe God has us on a similar path, and we have the ability to alter our course - to accept or reject Him is simply to steer to the left or to the right, and whatever streamlet we end up in at the end of our earthly time is where we enter into eternity (heaven or hell). The only difference between you watching the child, and God watching you, is that you don’t know where exactly the child will land. God knows where we will land though, and even though He does have that knowledge He respects our free wills enough to refrain from directly altering our courses. I contend that He simply plans ahead to account for all that we will do because He exists outside of time.
For us, time is something that continually moves forward - it cannot be moved backwards or sideways, deflected, or stopped, and all of us are entrapped by it. From the perspective of the child in the raft there is only one direction that the river flows in and, like us, he is being carried along with it - only capable of seeing what’s over the horizon. However, from the perspective of the other person (let us say he is hovering above in a helicopter) the river can be viewed in much greater detail.
There’s where it starts at the base of a mountain, then there is the main body with its many twists and turns, and then there are the two lakes that it can end in.
Like the person in the helicopter, God can see what we call “time” from the beginning to its end but He can see the paths we will take within time just as clearly. He can see the beginning and the end because time is something He can look over from an objective point of view - He exists outside of it, hence the reason He had no beginning and will have no end. In this way, God’s plans can and will be fulfilled regardless of the choices made by us. He is more than capable of accounting for all the choices we will make, without forcing us to make any of them. More or less, He builds His plan so as to work in harmony with the decisions He already knows we will make, and these particular aspects of His plan may be considered “predestined” for that fact, though they do not actually affect our free will.
Now, one may object: “because God knows our future decisions and He created us, He’s still responsible for our actions.” However, there is no real connection to be made with this hypothesis. God is not necessarily any more responsible for the decisions we make than one would be for the decisions that his or her own child makes. The fact that God is the highest “entity,” “sentience,” or whatever one may consider Him, does not require that He be controlling all of it from a literal perspective. He put us on the river, and He even made the river itself, but we’re the captains of our given vessels.
