The Omnipotence Paradox

Averroes was the first philosopher to address the omnipotence paradox in the 12th century.

By Keith Tidman

People of faith, in defining their god, credit god with some extraordinary characteristsics: omnipotence  omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, and omnisapience (being ‘all wise’). However, the first of these properties, omnipotence, for centuries has bumped up against a particularly curious paradox, with consequences for theists seeking to reason logically about their god.

 

The paradox has been posed in multiple ways. Here’s the version, inspired by the 12th-century polymath Averroes (Ibn Rushd), that people are perhaps most familiar with: 

 

Could a god create a boulder so heavy that even he could not lift it? 

 

Because if god cannot create such a boulder, then he’s not all powerful; and if he cannot lift the boulder he created, he’s likewise not all powerful. It’s a lose-lose scenario. Here’s another: Could an omnipotent god build a safe so impenetrable that even he cannot break into it? There are innumerable similar cases, another being this one, which has implications for whether or not we have free will: Can an omnipotent god create a person he could not control? And, as philosopher E.J. Mackie additionally asked, can a god ‘make rules which bind himself?’

 

The crux of such paradoxes is that a god, if all powerful, should be able to do things simultaneously possible and impossible. So, for instance, contrary to Euclidean axioms, an all-powerful being should be capable of creating a situation where things equal to the same thing can be unequal to one another. Another thought experiment involves an all-powerful god who’s the universe’s best player at the complicated Oriental game of Go (a bit like draughts/checkers or chess, but played with many more white and black counters), while also creating an opponent able to beat him. One other example includes arranging for an irresistible force to successfully overpower an immovable object. 

 

To the point of such paradoxes, it’s rational and fair to define the word ‘omnipotence’ as a god possessing limitless abilities. That is, his being a maximally powerful god unconstrained by seeming illogic or by arbitrarily redefining the word for our convenience. What we might call strong omnipotence. There should not be exceptions made to the meaning of omnipotence that compromise the word. We might call such a redefinition weak omnipotence.

 

Supposed degrees of power, rather than an all-powerful being, further complicate the picture. One reason is that the phrase ‘degrees of power’ leads to the claim that omnipotence is reduceable to mere semantics — that is, the meaning we assign to words, subject to interpretation and change. After all, we know that language is highly bendable. Depending on the effects of context upon natural language, such meanings can prove vague, subjective, and contentious.

 

By extension, unmodified power — where the word omnipotence has not been self-servingly tinkered with — can accommodate what we might regard as two mutually exclusive situations. That is to say, strong omnipotence likely eclipses the (known) laws of logic, where we regard those recognized laws as still both incomplete and imperfect.

 

So, in terms of the usefulness of the literal definition of the word omnipotence, all outcomes — including potentially contradictory ones — are possible, despite gaps in our understanding. But we cannot, based on such gaps alone, perfunctorily dismiss the paradox. Over time, these holes in our comprehension will be filled, and the paradoxes duly resolved. 

This, despite literary scholar C.S. Lewis’s attempt to narrow the definition of omnipotence, saying the following: ‘Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible.’ The term again being subjected to dilution — to something much less than literal omnipotence, despite Lewis trying to make up for it by contending counterintuitively that ‘this is no limit to [god’s] power.’

 

Meantime, unconditional (strong) omnipotence implies a god ought to be morally impeccable. Yet, the study of theodicy — why and how there’s natural and behavioral evil in the world, despite a supposedly all-powerful and all-kind divinity — challenges this notion of moral perfection. The incongruity stems from the expectation that an all-powerful god has the ability to proscribe all evil, if so willing.

 

So, there’s either a divine being gifted with all-capable power or there’s not; it’s binary. If there’s not, we should discard the term omnipotence on grounds it’s inherently meaningless. Among other things, there cannot be random situations where absolute omnipotence applies and other situations where it doesn’t. We shouldn’t, then, opportunistically conspire to match up definitions and applications of all-inclusive omnipotence to accommodate our comfort levels.

 

Even theists who subscribe to a transcendental being’s all-embracing power face the same conundrums. Some theists allow, as an example, that according to the so-called ‘ontological argument’ for a god’s existence, even an all-knowing being cannot create something greater than himself, as the argument provided by St. Anselm in the 11th century defines god as that which nothing greater can be conceived (meaning imagined or thought). That is, a ‘necessary being.’

 

This line strikes me as unsupportable, however. In part that’s because the argument depends exclusively on semantics, absent the empirical validation or refutation that’s provided, for example, by the argument of design offered by the complexities and intricacies of the material world. It’s also unsupportable in part because the ontological argument capriciously limits god’s power, even though something greater is indeed imaginable and thinkable.

 

The omnipotence paradox manacles the term with redefinitions that bring us to what we have called weak omnipotence (degrees of power short of absolute), and suggests that power unencumbered by checks cannot and does not exist. Because of the paradox, the unqualified version of the term ‘omnipotence’ may have interesting applications in mythology and lore — but flounders in reality.