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From: unbent@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.religion
Subject: Re: Re: Omnipotence
Message-ID: <3212@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Sep-84 09:05:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.3212
Posted: Fri Sep  7 09:05:28 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Sep-84 06:47:27 EDT
Lines: 45

From:  <1804@ucbvax.ARPA>

>	However, the very idea of an omnipotent being is incoherent in the
>	first place, because of paradoxes like "Can God create a rock too
>	heavy for Him to lift?" It's not enough to say "He wouldn't be stupid
>	enough to try to do it" or something like that, and I doubt that
>	anybody would be willing to grant that God can violate the laws of
>	logic in addition to our (percieved) physical laws...
>
>					Wayne


	Not that old thing again!
	An omnipotent being can do anything *logically possible*.  I.e., for
any logically consistent task-description 'T', X is omnipotent iff X can do
T.  The restriction to *logically consistent* task-descriptions is
pleonastic.  If 'T' is logically inconsistent, 'T' doesn't describe a *task*
at all.  That is, there aren't two *kinds* of tasks -- logically consistent
ones and logically inconsistent ones -- although there are two kinds of
*expressions purporting to describe tasks*.  Thus 'X is omnipotent' is
simply equivalent to 'X can do any task'.
	OK.  'Lifting a rock' is a (consistent) task description.  Hence,
from 'God is omnipotent' it follows that God can lift a rock.  You pick the
rock.  In fact, 'lifting every rock' is a consistent task description.
Thus, from 'God is omnipotent' it follows that God can lift every rock.
It therefore follows that 'a rock to heavy for God to lift' is NOT logically
consistent but self-contradictory.  Hence, in turn, 'creating a rock too
heavy for God to lift' is NOT a consistent task-description.  So the phrase
fails to impose a limitation on God's omnipotence by specifying a *task*
which an omnipotent being could not perform.
	Moral:  No paradox, but only a pseudo-paradox.  Like the classical
case of the ostensible barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave
themselves.  The proper conclusion there:  There can't be any such barber.
(It's logically impossible.)  Analogously:  There can't be any such rock
(given the hypothesis that God is omnipotent).
	This sort of stuff has been sorted out in the philosophical
literature for years.  [Not that the notion of omnipotence is entirely
without its problems, to be sure.  It's just that the putative "paradox"
isn't one of them.]


Yours for clearer concepts,       --Jay Rosenberg
				    Dept. of Philosophy
...mcnc!ecsvax!unbent		    Univ. of North Carolina
				    Chapel Hill, NC  27514