Question: Can God create a rock so big, that even he cannot lift it?
Premise: If God is omnipotent, that means he can do anything.
Answer 1) God can't create a rock that is so big that He can't lift it.
Implication 1a) Then God can't "do" everything.
Answer 2) God can create a rock so big that He can't lift it.
Implication 2a) Then He's not omnipotent
Conclusion: God's omnipotence is self-contradictory, thus making God's existence impossible. Therefore, God does not exist.
Initially this might sound impressive, but it is actually a house of cards. Let's set aside the Clark/Van Til controversy, on whether or not God is bound by the laws of logic, as that discussion isn't even necessary here. Supposedly, the unbeliever here has found incoherence in the attributes of God, namely, in the very definition of "omnipotence." However, what has happened here is that they have simply stacked the deck by redefining omnipotence in their premise. If you look back at the premise, omnipotence is being vaguely defined as the belief that "God can do anything." However, is that really what the definition of omnipotence is?
The answer is no. Omni, literally means "all" or "universal," whereas potent means "power," "influence," or "effect." Remember in science class when we learned about "potential energy?" Similar concept. So omnipotence literally means that God has all, or unlimited power, or force. So by definition, if God is omnipotent, than no object could ever be beyond His power. This is logically consistent, and perfectly understandable. However, by redefining "omnipotence" as the ability to "do anything," and not as referring specifically to force/power, the unbeliever gives himself wiggle room for a bait-and-switch. What do I mean? Well lets look back at the question, with a clearer definition of omnipotence.
Premise: If God has unlimited power, then nothing he creates can be beyond his power.
Answer: God could never create a rock beyond his power.
Conclusion: Uhm, what's the point again?
See, the skeptic is trying to claim that God's omnipotence leads to a contradiction. But all they have done is a bait-and-switch by including a contradiction in the demands of omnipotence, and then they cover it up with a pliable definition ("he can do anything"). In other words, they are demanding that God show he has unlimited power, by having limited power (being able to to create a rock so big, etc...). This makes no sense, and is definitely not a standard set by the divine attribute of omnipotence. So instead of setting forth the incoherent premise "if God has unlimited power, he must have limited power," they instead frame it as "if God has unlimited power, he must be able to do anything." That latter phrase, "he must be able to do anything," is left undefined and can pertain to all sorts of things beyond power/potency. In this case, it's a cover for them demanding He be able do something which contradicts the very concept of having unlimited power! It makes no sense. God's attributes do not lead to contradictions, but to clarity. The unbeliever includes a hidden contradiction in their premise, in order to make the conclusions appear contradictory.
If unbelievers really want to be wowed by what God is able to do, they should examine the two natures of Christ. That doctrine certainly transcends our created understanding of logic without contradicting it. We would expect that if the eternal, transcendent God of Scripture has condescended to man, he would introduce concepts that would stretch our finite apprehensions. The doctrine of the incarnation does just that. The second person of the Trinity took a human nature onto his divine nature, and united the two, "inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved," as the Chalcedonian Creed tells us. Find the largest rock that man is able to lift, and Jesus in His human nature could go no further. In fact, not only was Jesus limited in His human nature, but He Himself was also crushed by a much heavier weight. The weight of God's wrath. And He did it to redeem cosmic rebels, who make up silly syllogisms in order to escape their responsibility and guilt.
"Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief: when you shall make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days, and the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand." (Is 53:10)
If one maintains the ‘initial’ position that the necessary conception of omnipotence includes the 'power' to compromise both itself and all other identity, and if one concludes from this position that omnipotence is incoherent and thus impossible, then one implicitly is asserting that one's own ‘initial’ position is incoherent.
ReplyDeleteGiven 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.
Moreover, given the demands and rewards of the practical epistemological algorithms in which we continually are engaged, much of the a priori knowledge on which such algorithms are based is obscured: they do their job so well and so automatically that we seem rarely to need expend effort to maintain them.
Abraham Lincoln said if you want to test a person’s character, you can’t do so simply by making him suffer, but by giving him power. Logic is a power to know or prove things; but, what a person is in the habit of most valuing informs all his logic.
The classic question on omnipotence about the rock is not a question explicitly of what omnipotence is, but of what omnipotence can do. But, in fact, the rock question presupposes the raw possibility of what omnipotence already is.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, many persons get the sense that the question asks if that very presupposition allows logical explosion. So, in the minds of those persons, the rock question asks if the initially coherent state of omnipotence, and of logic, makes omnipotence incoherent: does the very ability to identify the initial state of omnipotence impose a genuine limit on the power of omnipotence?
But, the mere fact that the human brain has the power to reduce logical explosion to its own sensible category of thought does not mean that logical explosion is a rational concept contra omnipotence. So, the classic rock question on omnipotence is not of whether omnipotence is Classic Rock. Rather, the question is of what MAKES omnipotence epistemologically distinct from Classic Rock.
For, just like for the classic question of whether you have stopped beating your wife, to answer in the negative a question of ‘whether omnipotence can x’ can seem to imply a lack of genuine power for omnipotence, and, in that case, seeming to force the conclusion that the answer must be in the affirmative. The downward spiral, once allowed, just continues to degrade thought:
Within the constraint of the seeming implication that omnipotence lacks power, one is given the impression that something exists, often called ‘logic’, which, potentially, is more ‘powerful’ than omnipotence. Again, the only escape which the classic rock question explicitly offers from this impression is to answer the question in the affirmative.
But, among other problems, the classic question on omnipotence-and-the-rock does not explicate the fact that there is a normal distinction, on the one hand, between the use of ‘can’ as a raw or physical possibility and, on the other hand, the use of ‘can’ as a genuine case of the extent of an object’s power. In being asked if a person can be injured from sprinting through a field full of mole holes, or from falling out of an airplane twenty thousand feet directly over the ocean, one does not normally expect invocation of the latter sense of ‘can’. Even more, one does not expect that omniscience rationally can be held to be logically explosive about knowledge, much less that omni-benevolence rationally can be held to be logically explosive about love.
Yet, some persons are sure that omnipotence rationally can be held to be logically explosive about power: to possess a ‘logically all’ power. The question to ask of such persons is what even gives them the impression that omnipotence already is a contradiction of terms? What is the thing being contradicted, and are they not the one’s actually doing the contradicting? What is power, and is it nothing more sensible than an empty abstraction by which unwittingly to confuse one’s own thinking about power? Are these persons not the one’s invoking a self-contradictory sense of ‘logical all-ness’: a ‘logically extreme’ definition of ‘all’? If they are not, in fact, invoking a sense of their own ‘omnipotence of thought’, then what actually are they doing?
In other words, can omnipotence rationally be framed as self-contradictory by the very fact that it already is being allowed to be initially coherent (prior to ‘doing’ whatever ‘rationally’ it is supposed able to ‘do’)?
In short, is omnipotence nothing more than a human brain stoned on weed while ‘feeling the power’ of Classic Rock?
Daniel-Omni-Lingua,
DeleteYou're kinda nutty. I'm not even sure where to begin with you.