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What do we mean when we say that God is omnipotent? Can an omnipotent being exist?

Some time ago, an atheist friend (who subsequently became a Christian) presented me with a paradox that purportedly disproved God’s existence: “Could God create a stone so heavy that He could not lift it?” If God could, it seems that He would not be omnipotent; if God could not, it seems that He would also be omnipotent.

Some Christians attempt to resolve this paradox by arguing that God can do the impossible: construct square triangles, allow something to exist and not to exist at the same time, and create stones so heavy He Himself cannot lift them. God, in other words, is not bound by logic.

Why believe that God is not bound by logic? Perhaps Matthew 19:26 (cf. Mark 10:27), in which Jesus says, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” God is not bound by logic because God is not bound by anything.

Ignoring the fact that this picture of God is (quite literally) irrational – ignoring the fact, that is, that it is a picture of God operating beyond the realm of (human) reason – the idea that God is not bound by anything itself goes against the Bible. The Bible says that God “cannot disown Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13) and “cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13). According to the Bible, God cannot sin. God is bound by something – in this case, by morality or His own nature. This is not a bad thing; I do not want a God Who can sin.

When we see that God’s omnipotence, as understood in the Bible, does have limitations, our main reason for believing that God can violate logic disappears. In fact, as I argued in my response to my friend concerning the paradox of the stone, “[T]here is no reason to believe that the idea of omnipotence as espoused in scripture connotes the ability to violate logic.” Instead, omnipotence in the Bible concerns God’s dominion and sovereignty over creation.

In a way, that is all that there is to say on the matter. But I think the fact that so many Christians are willing to attribute irrationality to God is problematic, and I would like to reflect on that briefly now:

1. A moment’s reflection would let us see that a “no-holds-barred” omnipotence is dangerous. Can God make Himself cease to exist – or both exist and not exist at the same time? Can God create other omnipotent gods? Of course not – nor would we want Him to.

2. God cannot sin because God’s nature is fundamentally good. We understand this. What we don’t always understand is that God’s nature is fundamentally rational. Jesus after all, is the Λόγος (Logos) – God’s rational and creative principle. To say that God cannot construct square triangles, therefore, is not to limit God’s power, but to comprehend God’s nature.

3. In practice – in any other circumstance than when we are specifically asked about God’s omnipotence – we assume that God cannot violate the laws of logic. We argue, for example, that the Bible cannot contradict itself; in fact, Christian apologists spend a great deal of effort attempting to explain apparent biblical contradictions. We would never ascribe irrationality to God in concrete cases; we would never say, for instance, that God could send someone to Heaven while also sending that person to Hell. It is only in abstract cases involving square triangles that we even consider the possibility that God could violate logic. This, to me, indicates that belief that God could violate logic is not something that we apply consistently in our Christianity, but only a quick (and rather shoddy) response to questions about God’s omnipotence.

4. It is true that God’s ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). But the fact remains that God is a God Who has sought out a relationship with mankind – Who has sought to be known by mankind. Indeed, “this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3; emphasis added). In contrast, the God of Irrationality, unconstrained by logic, is fundamentally unknowable. Thus, he cannot be the Christian God.

I conclude with C.S. Lewis’ words in The Problem of Pain:

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can.’ […] It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

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5 Responses

  1. Nathan Shepard

    If God operates within realms of logic, and if “nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God,” then God is not so different from us. Without the separation only a fundamental difference of existential nature can bring, how could God make miracles, defined as events operating outside realms of logic and rationality? The Christian God must be fundamentally unknowable; this is what makes miracles possible. The entire point of the resurrection is that God made what is impossible possible: life from non-life. This is just as much of an impossibility as a square triangle, if infinitely more complex.
    The same applies to the Creation itself. Creating life from non-life is impossible; yet God accomplishes this miracle. If God is bound by rationality, He is not capable of miracles. How can he then be the Christian God?

  2. Jordan Monge

    Nathan, there is a categorical difference between things which are logically impossible and things which are scientifically “impossible.” Most scientists do not appreciate this distinction, and because most people take many science classes but no philosophy classes, the general population doesn’t either.

    Actions which are logically impossible are such by definition. For example, a triangle is defined by the fact that it has three sides. Giving it four sides to make it a square guarantees that it no longer has three sides to be a triangle. Or, for the more religious example. God cannot sin and still be God. Part of the definition of God is that He is all good. If He sins, He can no longer be called God. Note that this isn’t saying that “God can’t sin” in the sense of it is impossible for Him to do commit such an action. I am not sure if God could choose to sin or not. All I know is that if He does sin, then He will no longer be God by definition. This example illuminates the principle of non-contradiction, which is what makes things logically impossible.

    Actions which are scientifically “impossible” -such as miracles- are not impossible in this same sense. Science is founded on inductive reasoning, that is, we see events occur over and over again according to the same pattern. We use that pattern to formulate a scientific “law” and miracles are events that break those “laws.” Yet there’s nothing that tells us that it’s impossible* that some events fall outside the pattern. It’s just that they very rarely do. All of the observed miracles we know of – the resurrection, turning water into wine, the creation of the universe – violate the scientific laws that we have discovered inductively, but nothing makes them impossible deductively.

    Saying that God operates within the realm of logic doesn’t reduce God to our level. Saying that God operates within the realm of logic doesn’t preclude the possibility for miracles. It merely points out something fundamental about the way the universe and God function. As Joseph does a good job explaining, even the Bible concedes that some things are outside of God’s power, for God “cannot disown Himself.” This indicates that we mean something slightly different when we say God is omnipotent: God can do anything that can be done. I don’t think that understanding this difference is important for being Christians, but I do think it is important for being logical and rational.

  4. Daniel

    In what does it really consist to say that an omnipotent agent cannot do such-and-such?

    If we identify an agent (which I shall call ‘Faith’) which proceeds to successfully make something that’s more powerful than that agent, such as a block of concrete that’s heavier than that agent can directly lift, then we shall have identified a non-omnipotent agent. We cannot call that agent omnipotent, for the very reason that it is possible for that agent’s powers to be empirically exceeded. And, the reason its powers can be empirically exceeded is because: 1) its empirical powers are not infinite, and 2) there exist, or may exist, things which empirically exceed its power.

    If we somehow could observe that another agent’s powers (an agent which I’ll call ‘Truth’) is infinite in terms of empirical things, then we shall have to conclude that that other agent is omnipotent, since its powers cannot, by definition, be exceeded. But, when we try to say that Truth is described as finite in power, then this must mean we are saying that its power is not infinite. But, if we have observed that its power is infinite, then we shall be wrong to call it finite.

    Now, again, in regard to the agent that I’m calling Faith, we cannot call its power infinite. But, watch what happens: imagine we want to call Truth’s power finite. We cannot accurately so call it. And, such a limitation is not a limitation on Truth, but a limitation on what we can identify Truth to be. Truth is not everything, much less is Truth error.

    Given the complexity of the Cosmos, and of the contingent observer, it is axiomatic that the obverse of the law of identity includes a complex reverse: a thing not only is only what it is, it also is not all those things which it is not. But, given the possible combinations of knowledge and ignorance regarding a given topic, any number of various conflations of the two sides of this axiom is possible regarding that topic. Further, given the extent of ignorance possible regarding a topic, the extent of this conflation can be so deep that a person may have a virtually unlimited body of ‘logic’ upon which to seem to confirm the sense that a favored position is sound.

    Now, this line of reasoning so far may not be convincing to many people. But, in that case, this is because there are many more facets of reasoning than this one that can seem to impugn the concept of omnipotence. But, then, too, there are as many more lines of reasoning involved in the concept, and which individually and together show that the concept of omnipotence naturally, and for every sound reason, obtains to our minds as immediately coherent.

    In fact, it is the immediate coherence of the concept of omnipotence that provides us with the sense that omnipotence is paradoxical: its immediate coherence is felt to pose an external, or otherwise genuine, constraint on the power of an omnipotent agent to change the very epistemological definitions of things. But, such a ‘constraint’ allows us to conceive of omnipotence in the first place, because the possibility of definitions is the possibility of knowledge. The issue, therefore, is as to what all are the things that cause us to feel that the possibility of knowledge poses a genuine constraint on the power of an omnipotent agent.

    The logic of limited agents is not in the merest fact/idea that they are limited, but in the causes of their limitations. These causes are contingence, synthesis, and mutually dependence. That is, a limited agent is made of other, limited agents; the mutual bonds of which are not immutable; and the organized whole of which, as its own distinct kind of limited agent, depends for its functional maintenance on a specific relationship to an environment comprised of a host of other agents each of which is in some ways more powerful that it. This is how limited agents can multiply themselves, and can artifice other agents which are in some ways more powerful than themselves.

    So, unless pure, cognitively lax imagination is the standard of the logical conception of power, the concept of omnipotence must entail certain things while precluding others. And, what do you know, one of the things it precludes is for it to be exceeded in its power.

    But, if an omnipotent agent already is more powerful than itself so as to create a rock out of…nothing that’s too heavy even for it to lift, then it already is just that powerful. Which means that its power to create a stone that’s too heavy for it to lift is identical to its power to lift that very stone. While this doesn’t quite make complete sense, I wish to stress its implicit point most strongly: that even within the process of proving that the concept of omnipotence is immediately incoherent, one concludes that it is immediately coherent, and that the only difference is that this process is forced to this conclusion by a perfectly irrational route to its own unwilling end, with a perfectly unwelcome set of things included in that end.

    The trouble is when a person who holds to this most logically extreme conception of omnipotence fails, even then, to recognize the defeat. Again, this would be like failing to recognize that, when taking the statement , ‘I am a liar’ as purely self-referentially, the statement is reduced to an actual failure to lie (or to tell the truth, in that there is no possible world in which the only epistemological content is the mere _idea_ of lying, or the mere _idea_ of telling the truth). Such failure of recognition is a failure to distinguish between the essential mechanics of thought and the acquired habits, or induced response behaviors, of thinking. This is like, in having decided to stop off at the store on your way home, you are so intent merely on the thought of being at the store that your driving habits remain on ‘automatic’ and you drive straight home. The difference is that, unlike the relative invisibility and mutability of your inner world of abstract ‘logic’, you very easily soon recognize that you are not, in fact, stopping off at the store.

    The conception of power as the most abstracted sense of ‘something bringing something about’, or ‘simple agency’ is logically indifferent. So, this conception of power can seem to us to be logically all-purpose. But, in fact, it is logically no-purpose, because it is perfectly epistemologically passive. As the epistemologically passive conception of power, simple agency is the root of the paradoxical intuition about omnipotence: simple agency is that by which omnipotence is proved to be irrational. But, such ‘proof’ actually is nothing but a description—however un-complete-able―of this irrational re-conception of omnipotence.

    In keeping with the term, ‘simple agency’, its resultant conception of omnipotence may be termed pure agency: an agent in regard to which not only its own agency has no essential agency in face of its own agency, but everything else, too, including the identity of mathematical sums, has no essential identity in face of this pure agency. In other words, simple agency constrains our notion of omnipotence to be formulated as an agent which must be anti-identifiable except in terms of simple agency. But, this means that, for the anti-identifiable conception of omnipotence to be valid on its own terms, the very idea of ‘all identities’ must include even the negation of given positive identities, else it is allowed that such negations are proper states of affairs that are ontologically and epistemologically independent of their respective positive identities.

  5. Daniel

    In being infinite in degree of empirical power, Truth’s power is not a limitation on its power, but a mere fact that it is not limited in its degree of power. The creature is us, and the Creator is Truth; the distinction between the two consists in the fact that we are not it, not in the fact that it is not us. We are the limitation.