If God knows everything for a few days then there still isn’t LFW logically.

If there are universals that are knowable then I think that resolves a lot.

The problem of knowing all things is interesting if one demands a materialistic view of knowledge where a separate sign/token is necessary for every element known. One can quickly show that more tokens for knowledge are necessary than exist in a finite system. Once you have an infinite system then things change considerably.

As to knowing he’s the smartest in the room, I don’t see why that would be hard to know. He might know what maximal knowledge is and whether he has it.

However, as Clark points out, LDS belief is that God is only partially responsible for our creation. Could God actually have a form of compatibilism, based upon his foreknowledge of many (if not all) things, yet due to our being formed from intelligence (not ex nihilo), it would allow for a form of free will? Being that we are part formed of God and part other, perhaps we are part free will and part determinism?

Another question: I believe that if God does not have complete foreknowledge, he at least should be capable of completely determining what will happen in the short term. If, say, his perfect determinism goes out to a few days only, how does that impact libertarian free will? Is LFW still reduced to nothing if God has partial foreknowledge, versus complete foreknowledge? And if God can foresee nothing at all, then how can I have confidence in him? What happens to all the prophecies, etc? Does it mean that God has to manually tweak and fix things to fit his prophecies, and if so, how does that damage LFW?

It’s all very analogous to the world we know.

Or am I missing something?

(The next obvious question: given the foregoing, how do we even know that God is the smartest guy in the room?)

Yes, the way I took the question is slightly different from you.

As I said I think LFW can be falsified but I’m not sure a fixed future can. (I prefer that term to determinism since I don’t believe in determinism but am quite open to a block universe)

I think this applies to most forms of LFW. The exception might be a more extreme variant on Geoff’s position that I’d speculated on way back on my old blog. The idea that perhaps when a new universe is formed there is a moment of freedom that might be similar to LFW. (Although the requirement of both reasoning and openness at the same time would probably preclude true LFW)

My thinking though is that if we reject creation ex nihilo that it would appear that many of these metaphysical positions are essentially unknowable by God. Given that, aren’t we led to a position of “as if” revisionist free will?

The point that I made in this recent thread was, I’ve come to realize, slightly different than how I put it in earlier discussions. What I said before had more to do with pre-destination and having a closed future. To be more specific, I said that since nobody, not even God, can know the future exactly, what difference does it make whether it is closed or not? From there I went on to suggest that whether there is LFW or not doesn’t seem to make any difference at all, even for God, so why should we hold out for it? So you can kind of see the direction I was heading with it.

Now as for you post, I’m not sure which kind of LFW you are talking about. Are we talking about Blake’s emergentism or Geoff’s “mostly-determined-but-not-quite” type?