Wrong. God knew us before he created us and knew our future acts as well and our eternal destiny.
There may be different senses of “know” involved here. How is God’s knowledge of something changed when that thing comes into or goes out of existence? There has to be a difference.
Also, I am not clear that God exists in a temporally sequential “
before.” Time appears to be a dimension of space and not of immaterial or eternal reality. Our actions as they impact the material world take place in time, but it is not necessarily the case that as spiritual beings we are “in time” in the same way.
We do not participate in God’s creative act of ourselves or of anything else. God creates and is the primary moving/changing, sustaining, directing, ordering, final cause of all things. Men and other created beings are seconday causes. We can produce things from prior existing matter, we can move prior existing matter to certain ends but we are not the primary causes of anything.
I am not clear how this argues against what I wrote. God may allow or provide all the requirements to bring about what a human free agent chooses so that the actual “primary moving/changing, sustaining, directing, ordering, final cause of all things” remains God but the causal resources are allowed by God to be altered by the human agent by “acts of will” as part of what it means to have free will. The causal resources are placed under the disposition of the free agent to actualize free will. This could occur precisely to give the free agent full responsibility for their choices which are not predetermined by anything except the will of the agent, who “creates” their “self” by their choices over time.
To reiterate, it could very well be that a “person” is not the kind of thing that God does create “all at once.” The creative action of God may be in providing the free agent with the causal resources to freely “create” themselves. The nature of personhood could be an “open” kind of existence that depends upon its “finalization” on the action of the free agent “independent” of God. An “independence” that is made possible in actual fact by the cooperation of God, who lends the resources to the agent to allow autonomous self-determination. So God would not know with infallible certainty the fate of the created person until “after” this kind of creation (involving the (name removed by moderator)ut of the free agent ) was actualized, i.e., when the agent self-authenticates what kind of being they are.
Note: This “after” need not be a temporal sort of “after,” but, instead, a logical one. In other words, for God. this might occur from an eternal perspective even though for the free agent it happens “in time.” Either way, the nature of free agency would entail a logical dependency on the actual (name removed by moderator)ut of the agent in order to determine their “fate.” This would logically preclude God making a unilateral determination without (name removed by moderator)ut from the free agent as to the kind of person they “create” themselves to be, given that their choices are “underwritten” by God but not determined by him.
