DAY 2
CHALLENGE
“The Christian idea of an omnipotent God is logically contradictory. Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it? If he can then there is something he can’t do (lift the stone), but if he can’t, then there’s also something he can’t do (make the stone).”
DEFENSE
To accuse others of a logical contradiction, first you must understand their idea correctly. Otherwise you commit the straw man fallacy. This objection misunderstands omnipotence.
The term “omnipotent” means “all-powerful” (Latin, omnis, “all,” and potens, “powerful”). This is often said to mean that God can “do anything,” but this statement is ambiguous, and the ambiguity leads to the objection above.
What does it mean to say God can do anything? If “anything” means anything that you can say, then the idea would involve logical contradictions. You could, for example, say that God could make four-sided triangles, square circles, married bachelors, two-horned unicorns, and other entities whose definitions involve logical contradictions.
This is not what Christian theologians mean by omnipotence. Instead, they mean that God can do anything that is logically possible—that is, anything that does not involve a logical contradiction. This causes the objection to vanish, because if omnipotence excludes logical contradictions, then, by definition, it does not involve them.
It thus resolves the question of whether God can make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it. By virtue of omnipotence, God has infinite, or unlimited, lifting power. There is no upper limit to what God can lift. Thus a stone too heavy for God to lift would have to have more than infinite weight, and the idea of “more than infinite” weight involves a logical contradiction.
Stones too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift fall in the same category as four-sided triangles and married bachelors. They contain logical contradictions and thus represent jibberish rather than logically possible entities.
TIP
For more, see St. Thomas Aquinas, ST I:25:3–4.