Christian Beliefs Sunday School

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Can God make a rock so heavy He cannot lift it?

Classic answers to this "omnipotence paradox" include:

1) This is a nonsense question, equivalent to "Can God draw a square circle?"

2) God could not do anything or create any situation that would in effect make God not God. This was Augustine's position: “For He is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills, not on account of His suffering what He wills not; for if that should befall Him, He would by no means be omnipotent. Wherefore, He cannot do some things for the very reason that He is omnipotent.”

3) God transcends logic. While this may seem a cop-out, we have come to understand that logic has limits. For the mathematically inclined reader, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem asserts that in any formal logic system, there will be true statements that cannot be proven. While the application of this to God is clearly outside of scope of the theorem, to me the philosophical implications are clear: not everything that is true can be proven; there are limits to logic.

The omnipotence paradox can be applied to omniscience to get "Can God ask a question to which He does not know the answer?"

The omnipotence paradox is directly equivalent to the "parliamentary sovereignty paradox" in the legal realm. A parliament is "omnipotent" in the area of legislation. Can a parliament write a law that restricts its own omnipotence? This is not merely a hypothetical question. Canada's constitution was repatriated by an act of British parliament. Can the British parliament revoke that and supercede the Canadian constitution? A good case can be made for either answer; hence the paradox. To bring this back to the Bible, irrevocable laws play heavily in Daniel's and Esther's stories. So in the final analysis, God is the maker of heavy rocks and the rest is our issue.

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