Comparing God's Omnipotence And The Paradox Of The Stone

For centuries, there have been philosophers, theists, and theologians alike claiming that God is all-powerful. This is the divine attribute of God typically referred to as omnipotence. This attribute needs to be fleshed out, but, essentially, what this is saying is that God can do anything; however, is this true? There is an infamous paradox about God’s omnipotence that runs like this: If God is all-powerful, can he create a rock too heavy for him to lift? In either case, God cannot do something. Either God cannot create the rock or God can create the rock, but then cannot lift it. This puts the theist in a paradox. How can God do anything, yet not be able to do something?

The paradox of the stone, as this is famously dubbed, is far from novel.

Take, for example, the sentence “God can make a square circle.” We know this sentence is grammatically correct because it follows all the rules of grammar, but, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that does not mean that this sentence makes any sense! To elucidate this, notice that the word “God” refers to some being, “can make” refers to a capacity that being has, but what on earth does “square-circle” refer to? This is pivotal: if a word fails to refer to something, then it doesn’t have any meaning (A. W. Sparks 1-2). The sentence “I saw a gruth” doesn’t have any meaning because “gruth” doesn’t refer to anything. Furthermore, we know that “square-circle” does not have a referent because the descriptions given for both “square” and “circle” are, according to the rules of logic, mutually exclusive (this could be mathematically defended, but I think that would be entirely unnecessary- people know a square can’t be a circle at the same time and in the same way). The action of making a square-circle is considered meaningless because the phrase “square-circle” tries to refer to something we know cannot exist. Consequently, God’s inability to create a square-circle is not because he is unable to do some act, but because creating a square-circle fails to refer to an actual action- it doesn’t have any

Some being S limits his own power if and only if S restricts the range of actions he can do (Sarot 7) (I will refer to this as “Definition L”).

For example, I can limit my own range of actions, like moving my arms around, by putting on handcuffs. In this case, I went from being able to freely moving my arms around to now having a much narrower variety of movement. This works for me, but I am not Omnipotent! What does it mean for an omnipotent being to decrease the range of actions he can do? Self-limitation, when applied to an omnipotent being, renders two unlikely possibilities. Recall that Definition O says that God can do anything logically possible, thus, his range of actions is everything logically possible. According to Definition L, God must reduce his plethora of actions in order to limit himself, but how is it that God can decrease the range of what is logically possible? To my knowledge, there are only two ways. Either at least one logically possible action has to become logically impossible, or at least one logically possible action remains logically possible, but becomes something God cannot do. The former is absurd. The laws of logic are not defined temporally, that is, they are unaffected by time. Something does not become logically impossible over time. Drawing a circle isn’t logically possible one day and then logically impossible the next. Conversely, drawing a square-circle is not impossible today, but possible tomorrow. So the first option is ridiculous,