I was thinking about this the other day and I had a nagging feeling that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually inclusive.
Clearly, this is a tricky question but I figure someone must’ve asked it before. What is the consensus on this?
I would say that they can exist without each other, it is entirely possible that you could know something was going to happen and be powerless to do anything about it.
On the other hand all the power in the universe isn’t going to help if you don’t know what is coming.
I would say that to a limited degree omniscience leads to omnipotence as you would know how to solve the world’s problems, but you still wouldn’t necessarily have the resources to do it. Maybe it has to do with the amount of time elapsed since omniscience (OS) was achieved, early on resouces might be scarce, but as the OS won various lottos and gained power the more likely that they could achieve omnipotence too. Plus they would know how to live forever so could live long enough to make it happen.
Well, neither can actually exist. But omniscience doesn’t imply much power to actually directly do much. Well, you could probably destroy anything you liked just by looking at it hard enough; screwing with quantum uncertainty like that isn’t going to be good for the stability of substances that depend on it to exist in their present form.
Omnipotence on the other hand directly leads to at least the potential for omniscience - the omnipotent can just wish for it. But they can just as easily choose not to be omniscient; in fact if they can’t not be omniscient, then they aren’t omnipotent in the first place.
…and so all subsequent dialogue is silliness. All arguments will rapidly circle back to this beginning.
Well we don’t know that…unless one of us is omniscient 
I also disagree that you can be omnipotent without being omniscient. You need to know what’s going on if you want the power to affect it: for instance, if you are not aware of the existence of something, you cannot destroy it!
People are dissing omniscience too much: If you are omniscient, doesn’t it imply you know how things work, how to influence them? Thus gaining omniscience?
How can a being be fairly described as omniscient if that being doesn’t know how to accomplish any goal, making it omnipotent?
How can a being be fairly described as omnipotent if that being doesn’t have the power to acquire any and all knowledge?
Because if a being is omniscient, the answer to “How do I accomplish ‘X’ ?” may just be “you can’t”. Their omniscience would just mean that they knew that they couldn’t accomplish whatever-it-is for a fact.
Because it has chosen not to do so. Maybe it likes to read mystery novels and doesn’t want to spoil the ending.
It’d probably depend on what you mean by omniscience. To know everything.
If you mean, you’d also know how to achieve anything, like you’d know how to instantly explode alpha-century using a piece of lint, then yes you’d probably be omnipotent too, since you’d know how to do absolutely anything. Anything you’d want to do, you could do, because you’d have the knowledge of how to achieve it. That way omniscience would mean you would be omnipotent.
But if certain things are completely 100% impossible, then you might know there is no possible way to do something, like blowing up alpha-century using a piece of lint, for example.
If it’s the case that it is impossible to blow up a star using lint, then there’s a limit to your omniscience, since you won’t know how to achieve certain things. If there’s a limit to your omniscience, then you won’t be omniscient, since it means knowing everything.
I guess it does mean that one does mean the other.
That’s not what omnipotence means. For an omnipotent being, the path to accomplish any goal is always of zero length, and consists solely of wishing for reality to bend to your whims. A merely omniscient being must still resort to mundane paths and as Der Trihs says, there are outcomes that those mundane paths cannot reach.
I’ll take the radical view that being omniscient requires that you are totally impotent. Being omnicient means that you also know the future, but if you have free will and some degree of power, than you can change the future and so make your omniscient views false. If you have power and no free will, than I would say that you are impotent as you can’t really act on your own.
I see no problem with an omniscient observer who can do absolutely nothing but observe.
That’s easily gotten around by seeing all possible futures; you are choosing which becomes the real present, or you are simply aware that all possible futures happen; which depends on which version of quantum mechanics is correct.
Ah, but observing in itself affects things.
Throw a rock up in the air. Having a complete omniscience of how gravity works won’t stop that rock from falling back to the ground.
As others mention, it isn’t terribly difficult to construct a description of a being that is omniscient but not omnipotent. Someone who has all the powers needed to observe everything but is unable to interact with it is clearly not omnipotent. He’s not directly omniscient, but if he wants to know something, he can find it out. However, if you also allow him to be a non-temporal being, then he is, for all intents and purposes, omniscient because anything he’d want to know he not only has the ability to know, but has to ability to already know it.
It’s the other way around that I would say is inseperable because the set of powers above is a proper subset of omniscience.
@ Der Thris
Couldn’t one also postulate that an omniscient observer who is able to observe but not interact could potentially also have the power to observe without affecting quantum states and, thus, not have the observation affect? We are, after all, dealing with a super natural being here who isn’t necessarily bound by the laws of physics.
Not if you are omnipotent. If you are omnipotent you have the power to leave no trace of your quantum peeping. Which is better than being omniscient, because then all you know is that it is in superposition.
That depends on which interpretation of quantum physics is true. If the state of a particle is genuinely undefined then no, an omniscient couldn’t do that because without collapsing the wave function the “true state” is simply not there to be observed.
That wouldn’t necessarily work, for the reason mentioned above. Presuming that it really is in such a state, then preventing any trace of your peeping means that there isn’t anything there to peep at.
Look, either violation of the laws of physics is a power of the omnipotent, or it is not. If I can travel faster than the speed of light, I should be able to view without disturbing or leaving a trace. Don’t fight the hypothetical.
It’s about logic, not just physics. Even an omniscient can’t see something that isn’t there; if the state of a particle is undefined until the wave function collapses, then if an omniscient/omnipotent can look without collapsing the wave function, the particle in question has no “true state” to observe.
Yes, but he/she/it knows the current superposition and can predict exactly when and how it will collapse. With respect to every particle in the universe and all universes, imagined or otherwise.
Not if that information simply doesn’t exist.
I’d have thought it was the other way around. Omniscience is like being aware of certain/all circumstances, but being unable to actually affect them, whereas omnipotence provides the ability to do anything, including be aware of all possible outcomes.