@slimboyfat
Classical Christian theism does not posit the crude “dodgy-referee” caricature you reject, nor does it elevate a selectively ignorant deity to “greater” status. Rather, it holds that God’s intellect is the very act by which every possible creaturely reality—actual or merely possible—receives intelligibility. Consequently, the contrast you propose between a “predestinarian God” who sees only one future and “Jehovah” who surveys a field of options is a false dilemma; in fact, both fall short of what reason and revelation jointly require.
Because God is pure act, His knowledge is identical with His being. He sees all possibles in the single, timeless intuition of His own essence. Within that eternal “now” He knows unerringly which possibilities He freely wills to actualize and which He leaves in mere potency. From the creature’s temporal vantage, the future remains open until a free choice is made; from God’s atemporal vantage, that very choice—including the liberty with which it is made—stands luminously present. Thus, divine omniscience embraces every counterfactual permutation you imagine while simultaneously grasping, with infallible certitude, the one history that creatures will in fact enact. To know both the entire modal order of “might-be” and the single line of “will-be” is a perfection, not a deficiency.
Your claim that a God who foreknows only the actual future is “less” than one who knows an encyclopedia of hypothetical futures confuses the metaphysics of knowledge with the drama of suspense. Human cognition gains more by adding new data; the divine intellect does not. For God, to know Himself is already to comprehend, in causa, every determinate and indeterminate feature of any possible creation. That is why Aquinas can say that God knows future contingents “not because they are, but because He is” (ST I, q. 14, a. 13). A being that peeks selectively into the fog of tomorrow, learning as events unfold, would be ontologically smaller, not larger—subject to something outside itself that first determines what there is to be learned.
Nor does foreknowledge entail “fixing the match.” Knowledge is not causation. If I watch a recorded game, my perfect certainty about each pass does not impose necessity on the original players. The Divine vision is analogous: it transcends time altogether, embracing in one act what we experience successively. Human and angelic freedom unfold within the order of secondary causes; God’s predetermining concursus elevates and sustains their very ability to choose without coercing the choice. If this sounds paradoxical, it is only because we are trying to map an eternal mode of knowing onto temporal categories. But there is no logical contradiction: necessity in the order of knowing (for God) is compatible with contingency in the order of being (for creatures). Deny that, and you must also deny every biblical prophecy whose fulfilment remains genuinely free—yet Scripture never treats prophecy as a threat to freedom.
Finally, the alleged superiority of a deity who “lets reality surprise Him” collapses when we confront evil and suffering. A God “surprised” by Auschwitz or a child’s leukemia is either impotent or careless. The classical doctrine of providence, by contrast, allows us to say both that God sovereignly wills only good as first cause and that rational creatures tragically introduce evil as deficient causes. Because He foreknows every sin, He already holds within His universal decree the redemptive wisdom by which He can draw a greater good from it—above all, the Cross. The open-theist alternative, which the Watchtower echoes, leaves us with a deity scrambling in real time to improvise remedies to horrors He did not see coming.
In sum, the Thomistic God is not a game-fixer who rigs outcomes, nor a limited referee who merely prognosticates. He is ipsum esse subsistens: the subsistent Act-of-to-be whose single, all-embracing glance grounds both the realm of genuine possibilities and the concrete history that free agents enact. Such a God is maximally perfect, truly omniscient, and unfailingly provident—precisely the God whom both reason and the Catholic faith confess.