Refuting Atheism: The Stone Paradox

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 Can God create a rock he cannot lift?

(Omnipotence; Stone Paradox)



Short Answer:

God doesn't contradict His nature. Logical absurdities go against His nature.

Moreover, being all powerful means being able to create everything that can exist, but that which cannot exist cannot exist regardless.

Long Answer:

The premises of the paradox of the stone can be summarized as follows:

P1: There exists an omnipotent being.

P2: An omnipotent being has the power to do anything.

P3: The challenge is posed to the omnipotent being to create a stone that they cannot lift.

P4: If the omnipotent being can create a stone that they cannot lift, then there exists something that they cannot do (lift the stone).

P5: If the omnipotent being cannot create a stone that they cannot lift, then there exists something that they cannot do (create the unliftable stone).

P6: Either way, the omnipotent being is not truly omnipotent.

P7: This creates a logical contradiction, as an omnipotent being is traditionally defined as able to do anything.

P8: Therefore, the concept of an omnipotent being becomes paradoxical when faced with the challenge of creating a stone they cannot lift.

 

Toward the end of Mackie’s discussion of the problem of evil, he gives a further argument against the existence of a God with the traditional attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence:

.

We can state the paradox he has in mind using the traditional example of a stone so large that God cannot lift it.

First, what is omnipotence?

A first thought is that omnipotence is the ability to do anything: it is the ability to bring about any state of affairs. Then consider the following two states of affairs:

(1) There is a stone with a size — call it X — that God cannot move it.

(2) A stone of size X moves.

Can God bring about state of affairs (1)?

If not, then there is a state of affairs that God cannot bring about. So let’s assume that God can bring about state of affairs (1).

Then there is still a state of affairs God cannot bring about, namely (2), and God is still not omnipotent.

How should the defender of divine omnipotence respond?

Here is what Aquinas says about the problem:

d

DOUGLAS WALTON makes some objections to this:

The idea of a totally unflinching actual article is coherently ambiguous. Here, the contention would be that to be an actual item is to be the kind of thing subject to actual powers and that being so would mean there's some measure of mass or hardness or other component that the item has. By definition, whatever might surpass that could move or modify the item.

Thus, the idea of an item that is unliftable would be self-incongruous (See SEP "Omnipotence") (This is by all accounts the perspective on Thomas Aquinas).

For omnipotence, one example of such a philosopher is John Locke. In 1689, he writes that:

It is Infinity, which joined to our ideas of Existence, Power Knowledge, & c. makes that complex Idea, whereby we represent to ourselves the best we can, the Supreme Being. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 23, ¶ 35.)

George I. Mavrodes argues that God not being able to create a stone too powerful for him to lift means he's weak is false because the task of an omnipotent being creating a stone which he cannot lift is self-contradictory, and the inability to perform the self-contradictory does not limit the agent.








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