Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?

[SteveII]

According to Molinism, there are two ways in which God can make things happen: 1) Strong actualization, God brings about some effect directly by his action (direct cause-effect). 2) Weak actualization, where God places someone in a set of circumstances with the knowledge (middle knowledge from the Wiki article a couple of posts ago) that the person would freely decide to bring about the desired effect. 

If God weakly actualizing the circumstances to have Judas freely betray Jesus, that is not the same as God causing someone to do evil. While the effect was willed by God, the mechanism (Judas) still had free will. If God knew Judas was not greedy and selfish enough, then someone else would have been put in those circumstances.

I don't see how any of this solves the problem.  If Judas has/had libertarian free will, there is no counterfactual which would cover the situation as there is no knowledge of an event with more than one possible outcome given the context.  Saying that Judas' choice was weakly actualized depends upon his choices being determined by the combination of his character and his circumstance.  That's not libertarian free will no matter how you slice it.

Molinists say the logical ordering of events for creation would be as follows:

1. God's natural knowledge of necessary truths.
2. God's middle knowledge, (including counterfactuals).
---Creation of the World---
3. God's free knowledge (the actual ontology of the world).

So, at step 2, the counterfactual "if Judas was in circumstance C, he would freely do A", can be true or false only if that statement is determinate in the sense that C is fully specified. Being fully specified is not the same as being causally determined. Because of the ordering of God's knowledge (1-3), at step 2 there will be an unimaginable number of counterfactuals that will have truth value that will never be actualized.

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Or, he could achieve exactly the same result, without it being terrible for you.

Unless God has strange restrictions which means he has to just "do his best"?

And preserve free will? How would that work? It is far from clear that that is even possible.