The Omnipotence Paradox
I place this question before you: Can an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it?
Although there are many ways one can phrase this particular paradox, for the purposes of this article I shall adhere mostly to this one. It may seem a simple question at first glance, but when looked upon harder it seems to show a grand weakness in the plausibility of omnipotence.
To make this argument plausible, first one must find a pure definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is the command of infinite knowledge and power. An omnipotent being knows everything past, present and future. It has control over creation and destruction and everything subsiding within its own universe and beyond. An omnipotent being is a perfect being. The Christian God is considered by all in the religion to be perfect, and therefore unable to make a mistake. There is, in other words, nothing it cannot do.
But now we run the paradox through a Belief Vehicle, and see the outcome...
1) If the being can create a stone which it cannot lift, then it admits it cannot do something and therefore is not omnipotent.
2) If the being cannot create a stone which it cannot lift, then it admits it cannot do something and therefore is not omnipotent.
We see that, no matter how it is looked upon, the being must admit lack of power and therefore lack of omnipotence.
A response to this had been that the being could create a stone which it could not lift at that moment, and could only later reduce the weight of the stone so that it is able to be lifted. However, this is not legitimate omnipotence, because it forces the being to do something at a later time, therefore removing the beings free will...ergo, he is still not omnipotent.
Now, one could go into spasms of physics on how, according to Aristotelian physics, the rock is always being lifted in relation to its movement around the sun. That’s nonsense and completely semantics, which means it does nothing to disprove the apparent paradox. For instance, I could just as easily ask if God could create an atom which He Himself could not split.
The best response I’ve heard to this is that God is not essentially omnipotent, which means He cannot do the logically impossible. Instead, they say God can do the logically impossible. So, He would make a stone he couldn’t lift, then He would simply lift it. In that case, He could also make 2 + 2 = 5 or make a square circle...but that gets into semantics as well, and also renders all logic futile, useless and without meaning or purpose, destroying the need for an omnipotent creator in the first place.
In the end, this could just as well be another confusion humans have over their own creator, but it does lend the question...are their constraints to perfection?
