Omniscience
Omniscience (/ɒmˈnɪʃəns/)[1] is the capacity to know everything. In Hinduism, Sikhism and the Abrahamic religions, this is an attribute of God. In Jainism, omniscience is an attribute that any individual can eventually attain. In Buddhism, there are differing beliefs about omniscience among different schools.
For the album by Swans, see Omniscience (album).In religion[edit]
Buddhism[edit]
The topic of omniscience has been much debated in various Indian traditions, but no more so than by the Buddhists. After Dharmakirti's excursions into the subject of what constitutes a valid cognition, Śāntarakṣita and his student Kamalaśīla thoroughly investigated the subject in the Tattvasamgraha and its commentary the Panjika. The arguments in the text can be broadly grouped into four sections:
Omniscience and the privacy of conscious experience[edit]
Some philosophers, such as Patrick Grim, Linda Zagzebski, Stephan Torre, and William Mander have discussed the issue of whether the apparent exclusively first-person nature of conscious experience is compatible with God's omniscience. There is a strong sense in which conscious experience is private, meaning that no outside observer can gain knowledge of what it is like to be me as me. If a subject cannot know what it is like to be another subject in an objective manner, the question is whether that limitation applies to God as well. If it does, then God cannot be said to be omniscient since there is then a form of knowledge that God lacks access to.
The philosopher Patrick Grim[13] most notably raised this issue. Linda Zagzebski[14] argued against this by introducing the notion of perfect empathy, a proposed relation that God can have to subjects that would allow God to have perfect knowledge of their conscious experience. William Mander[15] argued that God can only have such knowledge if our experiences are part of God's broader experience. Stephan Torre[16] claimed that God can have such knowledge if self-knowledge involves the ascription of properties, either to oneself or to others.