The various conflicts within and with the concept of omniscience shouldn’t surprise us. Philosophers and theologians did not start with an empirical observation that God was omniscient and then proceed to come to terms with how omniscience should be understood in relation to God’s other attributes. Such a context, if it existed, would perhaps allow us to be more sympathetic to the shifting sand under their feet.
In reality they began with the religious dogma that God is omniscient and then proceeded to redefine and redefine and then redefine it once again (although these are usually described as “refinements,” not redefinitions). This is an effort to harmonize one religious dogma with a series of other religious dogmas which are also redefined until somewhere, someone hopefully arrives at a set of definitions that don’t contradict either each other or anything we know about the world, yet are still meaningful. No one has quite succeeded yet, but that’s not for want of trying.
Arguably, the original conception of omniscience wasn’t very coherent anyway — but as more and more of it is removed in order to make it safe for logic and for God’s other alleged attributes, we arrive at a position where there seems little point in continuing to use the term at all. Is God all-knowing or just very knowing? The eventual definition of all-knowing seems to barely distinguishable from very knowing. The term all-knowing cannot be abandoned for religious reasons, but the concept has been all but abandoned in the details.
Is the notion of God as omniscient coherent and meaningful? Perhaps, but because there is no single or obvious way to understand what “omniscience” means there are very good reasons to think that whatever definition is given, it will either contradict with other characteristics or it will be reduced to meaninglessness. Omniscience should be regarded with a very skeptical eye because there is every chance that it could be the undoing of many alleged gods.
