Can you not see that what to us looks like "predetermined" is entirely OUR viewpoint? God spoke his Creation into existence, and it was done --a finished product. What he has made is (was) immediately complete in Heaven. Yet WE have to see it as time-defined. God's doings are not in the same category as our definitions for them.
I understand that doesn't help our logical accounting here, but maybe it can give some measure of perspective. Predetermined does not have to mean the cause-and-effect sequence we see during this temporal existence is not real. We DO make choices --it is ludicrous to claim otherwise-- but those choices are always within bounds, constraints, influences, and the nature of the chooser.
If you wish to call that robot-ism, so be it. If you wish, like some on here, to call such a God evil, do so and face the consequences of your recklessness. But to claim that a choice is not real unless it is hands-off by God is logically pretentious. The whole nature of God-With-Us is that only by Him is anything we do of any substance.
Remember the parable of the talents: The master gives three servants a sum of money each, and two do well investing theirs, but the third buries his. When the master returns he asks each to account for what they have done. He commends the first two, but the third says, "I knew you are a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed." Compare that with Jonah's witness to the goodness of God; even in his anger he said, "I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity." Which is your view? Don't claim that the God who created for a purpose that he will complete is a robot maker.
