Omnipotence Paradoxes: Can God create a rock too big for Him to lift?

An older question that is always worth returning to is God's omnipotence and the paradoxes this creates.  Can God do logically absurd things like create a square circle?  But doesn't being a circle mean that it isn't a square?

This is a theology debate from the 1200's. William of Occam and the Antinominalists said yes, God can do the logically absurd. Thomas Aquinas and the Nominalists said no. The issue is whether God's will takes precedence or does God's intellect take precedence?  Can God will things only in accordance with God's intellect?  Or does God's intellect conform to whatever God happens to will?

Can God create a rock too big for Him to lift?Can God do logically absurd things like create a square circle?  But doesn't being a circle mean that it isn't a square?




This classic theological debate is sometimes hijacked by atheists to argue that God cannot exist.  They say things like this to theists.  In my personal experience this means they say it to Christians.



A: God can do everything right?
C: Yes.

A: Can God create a rock too big for God to lift?
C: Yes!

A: Then God can't lift the rock and isn't all powerful!
C: I mean God can't create it!

A: Then God can't create the rock and isn't all powerful!  Therefore God is logically impossible and can't exist!



So whap bam zingo!  God cannot possibly exist right?  It's a bit strange though because this is a debate among Christian theologians from the late middle ages.  It's not much of a great insight from atheists.  And that's the real problem.



Let's say you take the Aquinas position.  Let's say God cannot create the rock.  Therefore does this mean that God isn't all powerful?  No.  God would still be all powerful.  This is a trick question that would have bored Aquinas and Occam.  The trick is in the wording.  The question focuses on a rock to keep you from seeing what's really going on.  The real question is this.  Does God have the power of not having a power?



So do you see the problem?  Why should not having a power be on the list of powers?  Isn't not having a power not really a power?  Therefore if God doesn't have this power, then God could still be all powerful.






You may think this completely refutes the atheists. But it actually gets worse for them. Let's take Occam's position just for fun. Let's say that God can do logically absurd things. Therefore God could create a rock too big for Him to lift. But since God can do the logically absurd, then He can also LIFT the rock that's too big for Him to lift. Either way, this is in no way a problem for belief in God.



A benefit of Aquinas' view is science. To Aquinas, everything accords with God's intellect. Therefore we can assume that the world functions according to a rational plan. If you car turned into an elephant randomly for no reason, then it might make going to the store a bit complicated. For humans to be able to act and do in the world, then the world must function according to a plan and pattern that humans can understand. Since Genesis tells us that mankind is to take dominion over all the world and subdue it, then man must be able to form rational plans and act on them in the world. Therefore the world must have patterns for how it works that humans can understand. Fire burns. Wood that is dry enough, hot enough, and has air will burn. A baseball thrown at a window with sufficient speed will break the window. It has a certain level of hardness and the window has limited elasticity.



Thus the project of science really took up speed in Europe whereas it stalled out in both China and the Muslim world. The Muslims rejected theological debate. Such debates in the Muslim world led to violence between the two sides just as the early Trinity debates did for Christians. But a powerful Muslim ruler settled the whole thing by saying that his view was right, and there is no explanation why. This set the pattern for Muslims against all careful reasoning about God. They decided there is no explanation. The Muslims took the view that laws of nature are limits on God's ability to will what He wants.



The Chinese had a different problem. The people overall continued to believe in many Gods and spirits they worshiped at temples and at home. But the wealthy elite who ruled the country and were more educated embraced mostly the atheistic religion of Taoism. Confucius took the idea of the Tao and created a moral order of good and evil based on it. The Tao is explicitly not a personal God but rather an impersonal essence or force behind everything. To the elite of China, the crazy idea that mere human words or ideas could explain how the world functions was a joke. So they never pursued science either.



Both China and Islam had brilliant people who made breakthroughs. The scientific method was probably created by a Muslim. But his culture rejected the idea of law in nature. It was the Christians who began to actually use the scientific method. A great man in China invented better sailing ships and brought exotic animals back from Africa. He probably would have sailed around Africa a little before the Europeans did. But the Chinese rejected the very notion of progress. The nobility ordered all of the animals he brought back killed. They destroyed all of his ships as well as the plans for them. They ordered that only the older crude ships (junks) which can only sail along coastlines be built. Think of this. The Chinese invented gunpowder, but they never invented guns. The Europeans were making canons within ten years of the introduction of gunpowder.



Let's get back to theology. This question has application in other areas. When I was 13, a friend asked me why God doesn't stop all bad things from happening. I told him that God allows us the free will to choose good or evil. He said that God could give us free will and also keep us from doing anything evil. But that's logically impossible. That would mean that we weren't really free to choose in the first place.



But let's imagine Occam's position. What if God could do the logically impossible? Then God could give us the freedom to choose to be evil or good. And if we choose to be evil, it could also be good.



I'm reminded of a young man who once objected to a proof of God's existence I gave him. The proof was based on logic. He objected and said that we can't trust logic because it is just a man made idea. I told him that I am willing to defend that logic isn't man made. I was going to prove everything he said wrong. But I asked him one question first. Does he prefer that I prove him wrong logically or illogically? If he says illogically, then Mary has a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. This statement of mine therefore proves that everything he ever says is wrong and everything I ever say is right.



A different question might be whether two all powerful Gods could exist. Or perhaps could God make us humans all powerful like Him? The issue here is that two all powerful beings cannot oppose one another. If one of them wins, then the loser wasn't really all powerful. Therefore if two such beings existed, then their will and desires would have to be in such alignment that it's hard to spell out exactly how they aren't just the same being.



But this is where things get interesting. Philosophers speak of logically possible worlds. This isn't the same as scientifically possible worlds. There is no known scientific way a man could fly around like superman. But it isn't logically impossible. It's only scientifically impossible. Here's an example of something of a logically impossible world. It would be logically impossible for there to be world where a law bans intolerance, since that law is itself intolerant and would have to ban itself.



So is there a (logically) possible world where God exists? Here we mean that God would be a being of maximal greatness. It's clear that there must be at least one world where such a being exists. But if this being is truly maximally great, then that being must exist in all possible worlds. The reason is that if such a being existed in only some worlds, then we could easily imagine a greater being that must exist in more worlds. Therefore a maximally great being must exist in all possible worlds. Since such a being must exist in some worlds, then it must exist in all of them. Since the real world must be a logically possible world, then a maximally great being must exist in our world. Therefore God must exist.



Therefore the existence of God is proved not by evidence or by observation. Rather it's like 3+4=7. This basic mathematical equation is true. It is not true because we observe that when we put three rocks with four that we get seven. Rather it's true by its' very nature. There is no possible world where the answer is anything but seven. This means that the answer is seven due to the very nature of the thing itself. This is what is called necessarily true. It cannot fail to be true. It isn't true because of anything but itself.



And God's existence is proved here in the same way. God must exist by way of the very definition of the idea of God. Therefore God exists necessarily and cannot fail to exist. This would mean that God's attributes like love, forgiveness, knowledge and power are not due to anything outside of God. Even if God existed alone without anyone else, God would still have these attributes. God just is what God is. It's exactly the same as how 3+4=7. It just is true by way of it's own definition. The answer would be seven even if the universe never existed or anyone ever existed to think about it. It just cannot be anything but seven. So God is great not because of comparison to anything else. It's the same as how the answer is seven not because of comparison to anything else. The answer is seven just because of the very nature of the simple calculation itself. It would be seven even if the universe never existed. It would be seven even if no human existed to think about it. God's greatness is exactly the same.



God is great because of God and God alone. There's an old argument that I think was popular in the 1800's. I know I heard it in the Book of Mormon (not the play), the South Park movie, and the 80's fantasy movie Legend. The idea is that God cannot exist without Satan. They argue that good cannot exist without evil to give it reality. They argue that good is defined as the opposite of evil, therefore evil must exist for good to exist. This argument is fundamentally flawed. Hopefully we can see this clearly at this point. But it gets worse for this argument. What about the very statement that good needs evil to exist for its' own definition? How is that statement itself true? Does it need its' opposite to exist to be true? Not at all! Rather, some things are true just because of their very nature. Welcome to theology, it's a Christian thing.



This argument for God from 900 AD is called the Ontological Argument, since it deals with God's very nature. In modern philosophy, the only objection to this argument is that God cannot exist in any possible worlds. Atheists who debate this agree that if God exists in some possible worlds then God must exist in all of them. They simply argue that God is undefinable and therefore exists in no possible worlds. They argue that the very concept of God is logically absurd. But they mostly defend this by saying that we humans cannot possibly fully define God. They are correct in this assertion because to do so would make humans God. If we humans were God, then there would be no point in the debate in the first place.



But the atheists' objection missed the mark. You don't have to know everything about something to know something about something. To fully define something I must know all of it's properties. But just because I don't know all of them doesn't mean that I don't know some of them. I know that fire burns and that magnets attract or repel. But the exact nature of what matter is is still being debated by quantum physicists, and we still don't fully know. That doesn't mean we don't know anything about magnets or fire. And the same can be said about God. Humans have the idea of God without fully comprehending God.



As Genesis says, Humans are created in God's image. Therefore we have some representation of who God is in ourselves. Since we cannot fail to have some understanding of ourselves, then we must know something of God. But to understand the image of God is not the same as fully comprehending God. An image of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. But it isn't totally different from the thing it represents either. We are made in God's image by God Himself. Aquinas' idea was that clearly the ability to reason separates man from the other creatures of creation. They can act and move. They even express emotions. So it was realized over a thousand years before Aquinas that God blessed man with the gift of a rational soul. This led to the conclusion that God must be the most rational being that can possibly exist.