Psalm 139:16: 'Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, and in Thy book they were all written, even the days that were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them' — cited as proof of exhaustive predestination of an individual's entire life. (The sheet also includes, without comment, the parallel Qur'anic verse Surah 53:32: God 'was most knowing of you...when you were fetuses in the wombs of your mothers.')

Genre matters first: Psalm 139 is a hymn of praise/wonder (note the inclusio at vv.1-6, 'such knowledge is too wonderful for me... I cannot attain it'), not a systematic metaphysical treatise. The Hebrew of v.16 uses golmi ('my unformed substance/embryo' — from the root behind golem, its only OT occurrence) and says the days yutzaru ('were formed/fashioned') — devotional language for God's intimate foreknowledge of a whole life, not technical causal-determinist vocabulary. The load-bearing philosophical move is distinguishing EXHAUSTIVE DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE from CAUSAL DETERMINATION. Even granting full libertarian free will, God's timeless knowledge of what a person will freely do is not the same metaphysical relation as God's causing them to do it — foreknowledge tracks the free event, it does not produce it. This is the classical answer to the 'foreknowledge implies no freedom' objection, developed with real rigor by Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy, Bk. V): God's eternity is not everlastingness through time but a single indivisible 'eternal now' (tota simul) in which all of temporal history — including free creaturely choices — is simultaneously present to God's one act of knowing, as an observer on a hilltop sees an entire road's travelers at once without causing their movement. Aquinas systematizes this (ST I, q.14, a.13): God knows future free acts not as future to himself but as they are present in eternity, and the certainty of divine knowledge imposes no necessity on the thing known (necessity of the consequence, not of the consequent). On the Surah 53:32 parallel: this is genuinely the same devotional 'God knows me from the womb' trope, and it is worth being honest that this motif is common theistic language, not a unique embarrassment for the Bible — if it refutes Christian free will it equally 'refutes' Islamic free will, and Islamic kalam theology (especially Ash'ari vs. Mu'tazilite schools) has run its own extensive determinism/qadar debate parallel to the Calvinist-Arminian one internal to Christianity.

The Psalm's own emotional register — worship, intimacy, personal address ('I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,' v.14) — only makes sense if the psalmist takes himself to be a real personal agent in genuine relationship with a God who knows and loves him individually, not an inert object being narrated. Exhaustive divine knowledge of a person is presented as a source of comfort and dignity, not erasure.